...in Football Manager, that is.
First of all, you need to know that one of the odder things about the way that I play Football Manager is that I almost always play as more than one manager at a time. This is because it's a very different game depending on which team you manage. So managing a rich Champions League team is very different to managing a cash-strapped lower league team. And managing an international team is different again. Some of these managers I name after real football people. (Currently Glenn Hoddle and Eric Cantona.) Some of them are entirely fictional. (Currently I have 'Wim Kuiper', a laid-back Dutch manager who has just got the Arsenal job and Manchester United and Spain manager 'Gabriel Perez Cruz' who was a physical United centre-forward in a much older game of Football Manager.) And one of them is me. (I manage Wrexham, and have just got them promoted to the Championship, the second tier of English football.)
Glenn Hoddle had started off as England manager, but was sacked after a disappointing World Cup campaign in 2018, when England failed to get out of the group stage. He then took over the South Korean national side and won the Asian Cup with them, before taking the France job. France qualified for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
Eric Cantona had started off as Manchester United manager, but was sacked after only one (unsuccessful) season. He then took over newly-relegated Aston Villa and got them back into the Premier League before leaving for Inter Milan. He lasted a couple of seasons there before being sacked. Then he briefly took charge of Croatia, then France where he was sacked after a disappointing 2020 European Championship. Then he took the vacant Holland job but frankly made a bit of a mess of it and Holland failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup. He saved a poor Everton side from relegation, but resigned after the Board failed to back him with any transfer funds to rebuild the squad (profit of £100million, transfer budget of £3million.).
That was the situation shortly before the 2022 World Cup.
Then Manchester City manager Marcelo Bielsa retired. Hoddle and Cantona both applied for the job and Hoddle was offered it - on condition that he leave the France job. Which he did - seven days before France's opening World Cup game against Gabriel Perez Cruz's Spain. In something of a panic, the French FA desperately looked around for a manager able to manage France at very short notice, and appointed Cantona.
And this is where it gets interesting...
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