The take was so bad it got its author suspended, and I still cannot stop thinking about it, because the suspension is almost beside the point. France Pierron, a presenter on L’Équipe TV, went on air and said the quiet part in neon lights: a 24-year-old man who wants to briefly leave Belgium’s World Cup 2026 camp to witness the birth of his first child is making an error in professional judgment. That is the argument. Sit with it.
Jeremy Doku, Belgium’s electric Manchester City winger, told reporters he planned to step away from camp when his wife Shireen delivers their baby, likely in the second week of July. He was measured about it. “No one wants to miss a birth,” Doku said, “it is my first child. But I also know that there is a lot involved in football.” That is not a man choosing family over the game. That is a man trying to do both. The Belgian FA expressed sympathy and confirmed they’d work with him. Institutions that normally exist to extract maximum labor from athletes landed, on this occasion, on the human side of the ledger. And then Pierron opened her mouth.
https://x.com/TheAthleticFC/status/2068356118053585247
“I’m sorry, the father serves no purpose. He is an extra. He just holds your hand and takes a photo.” That was the opening. It got worse: “When you are lucky enough to appear at a World Cup, there are hundreds of footballers who would kill to be in your place.” And the absolute masterwork: “The baby will always be there.”
I want to dwell on that last one, because it is doing a lot of work. The baby will always be there. The implication is that the specific irreversible event of your child entering the world is interchangeable with any subsequent Tuesday. That you can schedule awe. That presence at a birth is a preference, not a moment that exists exactly once. This is not a hot sports take. This is a philosophical position about what fathers are for — and the position is: not much. The father is an extra. He holds a hand. He takes a photo.
What Pierron was actually defending, dressed up in competitive-merit language, is the old arrangement where athletes are assets and their bodies and calendars belong to the institution for the duration of the contract. Every political science undergrad who spent a semester on labor theory has seen this argument before — the worker’s obligations to capital outweigh any claim to personhood outside the job. The “hundreds of footballers who would kill to be in your place” line is the clincher: it converts Doku’s humanity into ingratitude. Be grateful for your slot. Do not have a child. Or if you do, make sure the timing doesn’t inconvenience the bracket.
Pierron later apologized on X, writing that she understood her comments “may have shocked, offended, or hurt some of you.” L’Équipe issued a statement saying her remarks “did not represent its values” and suspended her. Ollie Watkins was asked about the criticism and weighed in on Doku’s side.
https://x.com/BBCSport/status/2068788661148115420
The apology changes nothing about what the take revealed. She said what she actually thinks. The correction was institutional, the right PR response, but not a genuine reversal of the worldview on display. And that worldview has been mainstream in sports media for decades: the athlete signed up, the athlete knew the terms, therefore the athlete owes everything to the schedule. This is what fuels the athlete-as-product debate in every sport, every season. Soccer just made it explicit this week.
Belgium drew 1-1 with Egypt in their World Cup opener at Seattle Stadium. Doku is part of the reason anyone is paying attention to our World Cup 2026 coverage of this Belgian side. He is 24. He is about to become a father. He said he knows what’s involved in football, which means he’s already doing the calculus Pierron demanded he do — publicly, graciously, and without any assistance from an L’Équipe presenter.
The baby, it turns out, will not always be there at the exact moment it is born. France Pierron was wrong about that. She was wrong about a lot of things. The suspension doesn’t erase the fact that someone sat across from a microphone, thought through this position, and said it out loud. That’s the whole damn story.
