The players, the teams, the goals, the games, the scandals, the gloom, the glory: the story of French football's chequered coming of age over the last 40 years, written by highly respected football journalist Tom Williams.bpbrFrench football is an enigma. A puzzling jumble of brilliance and farce, flair and frailty, stunning success and abject failure, its domestic league is mocked on social media as an uncompetitive 'Farmers League', its clubs derided for underachieving in European competition. But France have reached four of the past seven men's World Cup finals, French players star week in, week out for the world's grandest clubs and the very best of French football ' the roar of the V'lodrome, the glamour of the Parc des Princes, the shimmering brilliance of Zin'dine Zidane, 'ric Cantona and Kylian Mbapp' ' stands comparison with anything the sport has to offer.pWhen it comes to scandal, meanwhile, the French are the best in the business, be it sensational match-fixing affairs, squabbles over sex tapes or meltdowns within the national squad.In this fascinating and exhaustively researched book, Tom Williams brings to life French football's chequered coming of age over the last 40 years, detailing how the starry-eyed romanticism that characterised the national team in the early 1980s gave way to an Italian-style pragmatism that would lead Les Bleus to the summit of the international game in the late 1990s and examining how a succession of star-studded club sides grappled with the thorny (and distinctly un-French) notion of how to win.pFrom Michel Hidalgo's swaggering European champions of 1984 to Didier Deschamps's gritty World Cup winners of 2018, via Bernard Tapie's scandal-scarred Marseille team of the early 1990s, the all-conquering Lyon men's and women's sides of the 2000s and 2010s and modern-day moneybags Paris Saint-Germain, he delves into French football's rich history and explains the myriad ways ' tactical, technical and cultural ' in which France has shaped the game's evolution around the world.pFeaturing exclusive interviews with great figures of the French game such as Michel Platini, Alain Giresse, Jean-Pierre Papin, manuel Petit, Robert Pir's, Jean-Michel Aulas and Blaise Matuidi ' plus modern stars like Allan Saint-Maximin, Wendie Renard and Mathys Tel ' and with a cast of characters that also includes Thierry Henry, Ars'ne Wenger, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Karim Benza, Chris Waddle, David Beckham, Neymar Jr and Lionel Messi, it's a book no football fan will want to miss.p