Thirteen years on, the scars of South Africa 2010 remain raw for French football. A new Netflix documentary, 'Watch the Bus: A French Football Mutiny', drags the entire disgrace back into the light, with unprecedented access to the key figures—manager Raymond Domenech, captain Patrice Evra, defender William Gallas, and others—who walk viewers through the implosion that turned Les Bleus into a global laughingstock. From bizarre astrology-based team selection to a venomous bus protest witnessed by stunned journalists, the film confirms long-whispered details and adds brutal new ones, painting a portrait of a squad at war with itself.
The France squad that landed in South Africa brimmed with talent: Nicolas Anelka, Franck Ribéry, Yoann Gourcuff (then dubbed 'the new Zidane'), Thierry Henry, and Gallas. Domenech, however, had already lost the dressing room long before kickoff. He had a notorious hostility toward the media, borne of the 2008 European Championship failure and the infamous Thierry Henry handball against Ireland that secured qualification. The manager’s decision to sever all press contact turned the camp into a pressure cooker. Inside it, Domenech leaned on astrology; in his own words, he systematically reduced the number of Scorpios in the squad, convinced their cosmic energy was disruptive. That eccentricity might have been harmless had results been good. They weren’t.
The opening 0-0 draw with Uruguay already exposed cracks. Domenech, by Evra’s account, vanished after the match, leaving players bewildered. The first real flashpoint came before the second group game against Mexico, when the manager informed Evra that Gourcuff would be dropped. The squad erupted. Against Mexico, the team labored; at halftime, Domenech hooked Anelka—a substitution that felt less tactical than personal. Gignac replaced him, but Mexico scored twice in the second half, leaving France needing a miracle against hosts South Africa. The real explosion, however, happened in the dressing room immediately after that defeat.
Domenech, steaming with fury, declared Anelka “a pain in the arse” and refused to address the team for 15 minutes, Evra recalls in the documentary. The manager’s fury centered on a phrase that L’Équipe splashed across its front page the next morning: “Go f*** yourself, you son of a bitch!” — allegedly Anelka’s words to his coach. Evra swears Anelka never uttered that specific insult, but the damage was done. The French Football Federation, led by president Jean-Pierre Escalettes, moved swiftly to expel Anelka from the tournament, a decision that lit the fuse on full-scale mutiny.
That expulsion triggered an extraordinary press conference, now immortalised in the documentary. With Escalettes at his side, captain Evra faced the cameras and delivered a line that shocked France: “The problem in the squad is not Anelka. It’s the traitor among us. We have to remove him from the group.” The inference was clear: someone inside the camp had leaked the fiery exchange to the media, and Evra held that mole responsible for the spiralling crisis. The next day, the players—acting collectively—informed Domenech they would boycott training in solidarity with Anelka. A statement read: “The France team, without exception, declares its opposition to the Federation’s decision to exclude Anelka. For this reason, they have decided not to take part in today’s training session.”
The images that followed became iconic for all the wrong reasons. The squad pulled up at the training field in the team bus, curtains drawn, refusing to disembark. A flummoxed Domenech had to physically confront the players on the bus, while the world’s media captured the surreal scene. The training session was abandoned, and the federation’s authority lay in tatters. One Domenech diary entry, excerpted in the film, captures his despair: “I can’t do this anymore. I want to cry, I want to disappear.”
When the final group game against South Africa arrived, the dressing room was a circus. Evra, the captain who had fronted the rebellion, was ruthlessly dropped from the starting XI. France lost 2-1 and exited the tournament in humiliating fashion, bottom of Group A with one point and one goal scored. The postmortem was swift and severe. Anelka received an 18-match international suspension—the heaviest punishment ever handed to a French player—effectively ending his national team career. Evra was banned for five matches and told he would never captain France again. Gourcuff’s mysterious benchings throughout the tournament were never satisfactorily explained, but the documentary implies Domenech simply lost faith in the playmaker because of the astrological data he so revered.
The ‘Watch the Bus’ documentary does more than recount events; it forces a reckoning with French football’s darkest hour. Evra, now older and reflective, acknowledges the lasting damage to his legacy. Domenech, unrepentant in many ways, still blames players’ egos and media intrusion. For French football, the fallout prompted a gradual cultural overhaul, culminating in the 2018 World Cup triumph under Didier Deschamps—a team built on collective spirit rather than superstar grandstanding. The film makes clear that the 2010 mutiny, though shameful, served as a necessary purification ritual, exorcising the demons that had plagued the national setup for years.
Ultimately, the documentary is a visceral time capsule of a sporting catastrophe that holds lessons for any high-stakes team environment. It reveals how a toxic mix of poor leadership, media paranoia, and fractured player relations can fell even the most talented collective. More than a decade later, French football has moved on, but the wounds have never fully healed. The Netflix film ensures they won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
Based on reporting from Tuttosport.