With thanks to AT Frenchies, Alex Durand and Tom Carles.
On June 16th, before France had kicked a ball, Times Square went blue. Thousands of supporters packed the block ahead of the opener against Senegal, singing under the billboards, filming each other. France won 3-1. If you had wandered into midtown that evening knowing nothing about the tournament, you would have assumed the French had taken the city.
Two Frenchmen in Philadelphia
Alex Durand and Tom Carles grew up in Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western edge of Paris, and met when they were twelve. Their first trip to America was in 2016, together, for a soccer camp at Eastern University in Delaware County, twenty minutes outside Philadelphia. Two years later they came back properly on college soccer scholarships, Durand to Malone in Ohio, Carles to Mississippi College.
In the end, neither of them made it as a footballer. What happened instead: COVID stranded them in a Charleston Airbnb in the summer of 2020, and they started posting videos about mispronouncing English words.
That turned into a career. Over two million followers on Instagram, another 2.6 million on TikTok, more than six million across all platforms, a French club that meets on Zoom weekly with 500+ members from over sixty countries, and a book out in September.
Ten years after that first soccer camp, they were back, this time in Philadelphia itself, following the French national team for ten days.
They came away obsessed with the place. “We’ve been living in the U.S. since 2018, and no other city has made us feel this way,” Durand told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “It’s incredible how much people have impacted our lives in 10 days.” Carles put it more precisely: “In Philly, you don’t really hear French but it feels French.”
And in the thank-you note they posted to the city afterwards, this: “Every bar we walked into during the games, every person who smiled at us wearing our jersey, every random ‘allez les bleus’ from someone we’d never met, it added up to something we didn’t expect to feel this strongly.”
The part where everything goes right
France were excellent, and it happened fast.
Senegal 3-1 in New Jersey. Iraq 3-0 in Philadelphia. Norway 4-1 in Boston, two unbeaten teams meeting for the group, and Group I was theirs. Sweden 3-0 in the round of 32, Mbappe scoring twice. Paraguay 1-0 in Philadelphia, settled by a Mbappe penalty on seventy minutes after a VAR check. Morocco 2-0 in Boston, Mbappe again, then Ousmane Dembele six minutes later.
Six matches, six wins, then a semi-final in Dallas against Spain.
Dallas, where it went wrong
Spain won 2-0 on July 14th, booking their place in the final.
Mbappe, speaking to M6 afterwards, was unusually blunt. “I don’t think we played the match we wanted to play, whether tactically, technically, or in terms of our overall performance level.” And then: “We were too sloppy technically. We could not hurt them when we could have.”
But he also said: “It was a dream for us to reach the final, to give our country that chance to dream, to make history.”
France went to Miami for the third-place match and lost 6-4 to England, four goals down at half-time, Bukayo Saka taking a hat-trick off them. The next day, July 19th, Spain beat Argentina 1-0 after extra time at MetLife for their second world title.
Pardon Our French
There’s a neat accident of timing here. Pardon Our French: The Parisian Way to a Happier Life comes out on September 8th, and it is, on paper, a lifestyle book. Long lunches. Not overdoing it. Fewer friends, better ones. Penguin’s copy sums up the argument as “presence over efficiency, depth over superficiality, quality over quantity.”
The part that I think matters most: “Best friends Alex and Tom grew up in Paris chasing their soccer dreams before an unexpected twist landed them in small-town America.”
The book is the football dream, rewritten. Two boys go to America to become professionals. Instead they find places like Mississippi, where Carles arrived barely speaking English and had to whistle and point at things to be understood, and where, as he told Garden & Gun in 2023, “everyone was helping me all the time, relationships that I never felt before.” What they build out of that is an argument that the French way of living is worth exporting, and a business teaching it.
Then in June the national team turns up in the country they’ve spent eight years explaining themselves to, and they get to run the experiment in public. Durand’s line about it, delivered to the Inquirer: “In Paris, when PSG plays, everybody’s on the streets. We’re very passionate about our teams. Tom and I have traveled to almost every big city in America, and in every city people are passionate about sports, but here?”
He also thinks Wawa is “the absolute best brunch place on earth,” which I mention because a book about French taste should probably have to survive contact with a chicken wrap and a caramel iced latte at two in the morning. Theirs does.
What’s left
France finished fourth at a World Cup, which most countries would take without blinking, and produced the greatest goalscorer the tournament has known.
But the summer leaves something behind that isn’t really about football. A country sent its best team in a generation across an ocean, and the people who carried the flag for it were mostly the ones who’d already made the crossing themselves. Expatriates in Manhattan bars. A supporters’ club improvising. Two men from Boulogne-Billancourt who came over chasing a professional career that never arrived, and ended up being the most French thing in Philadelphia.
Mbappe spent the summer trying to give his country something to dream about and came up two matches short. Alex and Tom spent it discovering that a city in Pennsylvania would shout Allez les Bleus at them in the street.
It’s a strange kind of homecoming. But, it’s probably the better one.
Pardon Our French: The Parisian Way to a Happier Life is published by Penguin Life on September 8th, 2026. A book tour is planned, with at least one Philadelphia date, and Durand says he is now trying to make it more than one.Follow @thearchvfc for your daily football and archive. Visit thearchv.ca/start for more