Spain's former prime minister has become the latest person to question the Frenchness of France's national football team - so where does this idea come from, and is there any truth in it?
Spain's conservative ex-prime minister Mariano Rajoy, in an opinion piece for Spanish online news site El Debate, said that France's national football team had "no French players". Spain's current Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez condemned the remark as "xenophobic".
Rajoy's comments echo those of the Paraguayan Senator Celeste Amarilla, who said after Paraguay's elimination by France in the round of 16 that star player Kylian Mbappé was a "colonised Cameroonian who has really pretended to be French".
Various other far-right figures have dismissed the team as "paper Frenchmen", while the British right-wing politician and Brexit cheerleader Daniel Hannan shared a comment allegedly from his French friend, describing the France v Sénégal game as "the legal immigrants playing the illegal ones".
So is there any truth to this idea of the French team not being really French? Or is it just racism?
