The Spanish government issued a formal apology to France on Tuesday after former conservative prime minister Mariano Rajoy wrote a newspaper column asserting that the French national football team plays “without Frenchmen,” a remark widely interpreted as a reference to the African and Afro-Caribbean heritage of several players. Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares told his French counterpart that the comments were “intolerable” and carried “the poison of racism and xenophobia,” while Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, attending Bastille Day celebrations in Paris, was overheard telling French officials he felt “great shame.” The diplomatic incident unfolded hours before the two nations were due to meet in a World Cup semifinal in the United States.

In Madrid, government spokesperson Elma Saiz described Rajoy’s words as “racist, irresponsible and unbecoming of a former president” and expressed surprise that he had not yet apologised. The French embassy in the Spanish capital issued a factual rebuttal, noting that all 26 players in the French squad are French citizens, 23 of them born in France. The condemnation in Paris was unusually broad: Interior Minister Laurent Núñez called the remarks “absolutely unacceptable,” Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said “France has no skin colour,” and even the far-right National Rally’s spokesman Julien Odoul labelled Rajoy “a racist.” A spokesperson for Rajoy’s People’s Party said the column was intended as sarcasm and carried no ill intent; Rajoy himself has not publicly responded.

The row drew in players from both sides. At a pre-match press conference, Spanish forward Lamine Yamal, a 19-year-old born in Catalonia to a Moroccan father and Equatorial Guinean mother, stated that “if football serves for something, it serves to integrate” and that “there are no better examples than France and us.” Teammates Borja Iglesias and Pau Cubarsí similarly rejected linking national identity to skin colour or origin. The Spanish squad itself reflects a multicultural reality: alongside Yamal, winger Nico Williams is the son of Ghanaian parents, and defender Aymeric Laporte was born in France before naturalising. The episode thus exposed a tension between the conservative nationalism of Rajoy’s generation and a younger, more diverse Spain.

The incident follows a separate racist attack earlier in the tournament, when Paraguayan senator Celeste Amarilla called France captain Kylian Mbappé a “colonised Cameroonian” trying to pass as French. Mbappé responded by defending his teammates and describing Amarilla as unworthy of her office; the French Football Federation filed a criminal complaint, and the Paraguayan government disavowed the remarks. FIFA has reported a sharp rise in racist online abuse during the 2026 World Cup, with 89,000 abusive posts detected in the group stage—thirteen times the figure for 2022—and has deployed a new protocol that has already led to player expulsions for covering mouths to conceal evidence. As the semifinal kicked off, the Spanish government had distanced itself from Rajoy, but the former prime minister had yet to retract or apologise for his column.