Sixteen From Sixteen: Why France Wins Every European Senior Title

Sixteen European Senior Championships between 1992 and 2011. France won all of them.

They also won all six women’s championships on record, five of eight under-16 titles, and the first World Cup. In a sport with six podium nations, one of them has never lost a senior final. That is not a competitive imbalance, it is a different category of thing, and the reason is structural rather than sporting.

The head start is fifty years long

Horseball was not a sport France happened to be good at. It was a French federal programme. In 1970 the Fédération Française d’Équitation decided to develop equestrian games specifically to change how riding was taught, and everything downstream of that flows through French institutions.

Look at who the early figures were. Pascal Marry became technical adviser to the ministry for Youth and Sports. Jean-Claude Gast became National Technical Director of the French federation. Paul Lanchais, who refereed the first championship in 1979, was then National Technical Assistant Director. The November 1978 seminar that brought in Jean-Paul Depons and Philippe Thiebaut was held at the National Equestrian School at Saumur, for regional technical advisers.

That is not a group of enthusiasts. That is a national teaching apparatus adopting a sport, and by the time the first European Cup was held in 1992 France had thirteen years of national championships behind it while most opponents had teams that were four years old.

What the other countries got instead

France demonstrated the game abroad from 1988, and other nations built from that. So every other programme in the sport started as an export of the French one, roughly a decade later, without the riding-school integration that produced the players in the first place.

Portugal and Belgium responded fastest and hold the most silver and bronze. Spain arrived later and became the strongest challenger by the late 2000s, taking silver in the senior championship in 2009 and 2011. Whether Spain would have won 2013 is one of those questions the record cannot answer, since it stops in April 2012.

Where it breaks, and why that matters more

Two places. The under-16 championship, where Spain took 2008, 2009 and 2011 outright. And the Champions League, where clubs rather than countries compete: Cardedeu of Spain won 2009 and 2011, Blanzac of France 2010, and the Belgian club Caramel reached four podiums in five editions without winning.

Put those together and something odd appears. Belgium never won a senior European title, yet a Belgian club was consistently among the best three in Europe. Spain beat France at junior level three times while losing every senior final to them. A country can produce excellent clubs and excellent juniors and still lose every senior international, which points at selection, funding and preparation for national squads rather than at the depth of players available.

I would put the sixteen-nil record down to that gap rather than to French riders being better. The juniors were not, three times.

The clubs disagree with the national record

Set the two side by side and the sixteen-nil looks less like superiority. Belgium never won a senior European title, its ceiling being bronze, yet the Belgian club Caramel reached four of the first five Champions League podiums. Spain lost senior final after senior final to France while beating them three times at Under-16 level.

If French players were simply better, Caramel would not have been there and Spain’s juniors would not have won. What that points at is selection, funding and squad preparation rather than the depth of players available, and it is the one conclusion the results actually support.

The number that does not fit

Sixteen from sixteen is the headline. Spain beating France three times at Under-16 level in four years is the number that does not fit alongside it, and it is the more informative of the two.