Geneviève de Fontenay has never been a big football fan, to say the least. Died at the age of 90 this Wednesday from cardiac arrest in her sleep, the former president of the Miss France committee has sometimes let her outspokenness venture into the field of football. It was rarely to sing of his love of shorts, stands and lawns. Anthology of his “best” interventions.
Geneviève de Fontenay had the art of being able to take on any subject, never in lukewarm terms. In 2012, during a two-minute column for MFM radio, Lorraine gave her opinion on the Zahia affair, this former escort-girl solicited by several players from the France team while she was a minor.
Among the players in question was Franck Ribéry, pinned by Madame de Fontenay for his physique: “This girl (Zahia), she was a minor. She says it elsewhere: “I knew that I was beautiful and that I was going to take advantage of it.” And the other one, this footballer who is ugly as a louse and besides, he can’t even afford to have his teeth fixed. He has terrible teeth, all rotten. She didn’t need that, she put a pillow over his head and that was enough.” The former OM and Bayern Munich winger is only a collateral victim of this column initially intended to criticize Zahia’s reconversion into the world of fashion, and more specifically lingerie.
2012, always. Geneviève de Fontenay is a guest of the Foot Pouf blog. The opportunity for the queen of beauty contests to give an opinion on the world of football in general, and the astronomical sums at stake. “I am happy not to have had a companion who only thinks of football , because it is the opium of the people, she says. Frankly when we see their stupidity, their way of behaving, their vulgarity and everything, I don’t understand how we can give them so much money, oh no, I’m not about to become a football fan. Geneviève Mulmann, by her maiden name, has never betrayed herself.
If the president of Miss France did not appreciate football, that did not prevent her from having some flashes of lucidity. Just before the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, she had hoped for a defeat of the France team, “in the quarter-finals it will be very good”. A few weeks later, the Blues of Deschamps fell… in the quarter-finals, against Germany (1-0).
At the origin of this wish, a “fed up” of the overmediatization of the World Cup and the France team. “If we open a channel, it’s them, if we open another channel, it’s them again… Apart from Public Sénat, where we are almost quiet! This World Cup, I suffer it, grumbles the lady with the hats in an interview on Youtube for Jimmy Bregy. They’ve made enough money as it is!”
There was a time when Emmanuel Macron and Geneviève de Fontenay got along well. But the relationship deteriorates quickly, and the president of Miss France multiplies the inflammatory SMS to the president. In 2018, when she discovered that the Legion of Honor was going to be awarded to the players of Didier Deschamps, world champions in 2018 in Russia, she was choking. And sends an inflammatory text that she has since revealed to Jean-Marc Morandini.
“Stop the anarchic discounts of the Legion of Honor, in particular those which you intend for footballers. What an insult to the last three recipients you celebrated at the Invalides: Simone Veil, Jean d’Ormesson and Colonel Constable Arnaud Beltrame (…) Football is just a money factory between Fifa and Nike, which has had the swimsuits of these blues in Thailand by women paid FIFTY euros per MONTH! You received these highly paid soccer players at the Élysée with the Marseillaise! THAT’S ENOUGH !”.
The message is signed: “Geneviève shocked!” Decorated with the medal of French merit and devotion in 2002, Geneviève de Fontenay herself would have refused the Legion of Honor.
