PSG's Mbappe, Dembele and Kolo Muani look set to prosper for France

With a rugby World Cup taking centre stage in France, Paris has temporarily relocated its true national game. But the country’s best men’s footballers, runners-up in their last World Cup, champions in the previous edition, should not mind too much that Thursday's Euro 2024 qualifier against Ireland has been shifted from the Stade de France, which is readying itself for seven weeks prioritising the 15-man sport, to the Parc des Princes.

The Parc is, after all, home to an ever more dominant band of Bleus, the Paris Saint-Germain cadre, from which the entire French forward line may well be drawn by the time Didier Deschamps, the national head coach, begins next summer’s bid to win the European championship. Qualification is on course, with four wins from four so far, and the depth of talent available to Deschamps means, fitness permitting, France must start among the favourites.

PSG spent €350m on new signings during the summer, a sum exceeded only by Premier League side Chelsea and Al Hilal of Riyadh, and a high proportion of that, unusually for PSG, was spent on Frenchmen. Lucas Hernandez, a stalwart of Deschamps’s defence, joined from Bayern Munich for €45m, winger Ousmane Dembele came in for €50m from Barcelona. And, after an attritional tug-of-war with Eintracht Frankfurt, striker Randall Kolo Muani was prised from the German club for €95m close to the deadline for completing deals.

They were first welcomed to their new club by resident superstar, Kylian Mbappe, around whose future PSG remained nervously uncertain for much of the window. On Monday, they were welcomed again to Mbappe’s other kingdom - Clairefontaine, France’s practice headquarters just south of the capital.

Mbappe, six months into assuming the captaincy