Before the 1984 European Championship, the French manager Michel Hidalgo had a problem. He had four virtuosic playmakers, but not a centre forward. An idea was born, he made a midfield square with his gifted playmakers, helmed by the impeccable Michel Platini. It came to be known as magic square, or the Le Carre Magique, and they inspired their maiden championship triumph of note.
Decades later, Hidalgo’s distant successor Didier Deschamps – whose France beat Norway 4-1 to top World Cup Group I – had a problem, too. He had a superfluity of riches that he couldn’t configure the perfect deception code. Both, Kylian Mbappe and Ousmane Dembele, were wingmen repositioned to the centre by their clubs with staggering success. But he could slot only one. He could drop Mbappe or shunt him to the left for Dembele; he could not bench Dembele, the reigning footballer of the year, either.
The confusion did not end there. He had two exceptionally versatile playmakers, Michael Olise and Desire Doue. Both could play behind the centre forward as well as on the wings. He had difficult choices to make, the pieces of the puzzles muddying his mind. He could drop none—for the clubs, Mbappé, Dembélé, Michael Olise and Désiré Doué scored 97 goals between them last season and, including assists, were involved in 157 goals—yet couldn’t fit in all in their preferred spots.
A pragmatic manager, he chose the well-worn structure of his. A centre forward (Mbappe), two men on the flanks (Olise and Dembele), and one playmaker just behind them (Doue in the Antoine Griezmann role). The first half was a miasma of broken notes. Echoes of their horrid opening game in the 2002 edition against the same opposition whirled. France had too much talent for their own liking, and they crashed out in the first round without scoring a single goal.
During the break, though, Deschamps found his magic square. He shifted Olise to the centre, in the No 10 role, so that he could keep the inert Mbappe busy. He had thrived in the role in Bayern Munich, even though at Crystal Palace he was a winger. Doue was the auxiliary playmaker, thus a playmaking double pivot. Consequently, Dembele was thus furnished the liberty and space to drive through the inside right channel, rather than being stretched to the right side, so that he wouldn’t trespass Mbappe’s space.