When the Pitch Meets the Personal: Doku, Deschamps, and the Law of Family Absence in Elite Football

The incidents

Belgium winger Jérémy Doku drew criticism from parts of the European sporting press after announcing, mid-tournament, that he intended to leave Belgium’s World Cup base camp when his wife was due to give birth. The due date fell in early July — a window that could coincide with the round of 32 or the round of 16, should Belgium advance.

In the event, Doku left the camp. The Belgian FA issued a statement confirming the departure had been approved and that a team doctor accompanied him. He travelled to London, was present at the birth of his son — named Praise — and returned to the squad the following evening in Seattle ahead of Belgium’s final group game against New Zealand.

The second incident was quieter in tone but no less significant in consequence. France head coach Didier Deschamps — in what will be his final World Cup after fourteen years in charge — learned on a Tuesday morning that his mother had died. He left the camp, returned to France, and was absent from the touchline for France’s group-stage fixture against Norway. The French Football Federation confirmed that assistant coach Guy Stéphan would deputise.

The FFF’s statement was measured: he would return to France to attend the funeral, and the federation expressed its support to the Deschamps family. No controversy attended the decision. The football world was unanimous. Two cases. Two very different family events. One shared legal question: who governs a professional’s right to be elsewhere when a tournament is underway?

The contractual architecture — Deschamps: French employment law and the right to grieve

Deschamps’ relationship with the French Football Federation (FFF) is governed by a fixed-term managerial contract subject to French law. His seniority places him within the cadre dirigeant classification — senior executive — a designation that exempts certain working-time protections but does not extinguish core entitlements, including the right to bereavement leave.

Under Article L. 3142-1 of the French Code du travail, employees are entitled to leave following the death of an ascendant — a parent. The statutory floor is three days. Collective bargaining agreements and internal federation rules commonly extend this. The FFF is bound by French labour law, and the right to attend a parent’s funeral is not a benefit it may choose to extend or withhold.

There is accordingly no legal controversy in the Deschamps case. The FFF discharged its obligation correctly and promptly. The more interesting question is counterfactual: had the FFF attempted to require Deschamps to remain at the camp, it would have exposed itself not merely to a statutory claim under Article L. 3142-1, but potentially to a broader claim for manquement à l’obligation de sécurité — breach of the employer’s duty of care. To require a bereaved man to manage a World Cup squad without respite is not merely inhumane; it is a foreseeable risk to his welfare and, derivatively, to the integrity of France’s preparation.

Doku: a three-party problem

Doku’s situation is legally more interesting and less neatly resolved. His position involves three distinct legal actors: Manchester City (his employer), the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA), and FIFA’s regulatory framework governing the release and use of players during international windows.

Doku’s primary employment contract is with Manchester City. As an employee of an English club, he is entitled under the Paternity and Adoption Leave Regulations 2002 to up to two weeks of statutory paternity leave on the birth of a child. Beyond the statutory floor, his personal contract almost certainly contains enhanced provision — elite player contracts at clubs of Manchester City’s scale routinely address parental events. He is also protected under the Employment Rights Act 1996 in its broader sense: the right to reasonable time off for family emergencies.

The complication is this: when Doku travels to Belgium’s World Cup camp, he is a released employee. The FIFA Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP), Annex 1, Article 1, requires clubs to release players during designated international windows. For the duration of that release, the player is under the governance of the national federation, not the club.

The RSTP is silent on paternity or compassionate absence during international windows. FIFA’s instrument addresses release and availability; it creates no individual rights framework for a player who needs to attend a personal event during a tournament. The result is a governance vacuum: the player’s entitlements under English employment law exist at club level, but during a World Cup, the governing body is the national federation, operating on rules that make no provision for the matter.

In practice, the RBFA filled that vacuum sensibly — it authorised the departure, provided medical accompaniment, and confirmed a return date. But the critical point is this: Doku left because the RBFA permitted it. He did not leave because he had an enforceable right against the RBFA. Had the federation refused, he would have been in a position where his English employment entitlement was inaccessible during the period of release, and FIFA’s framework provided him no remedy. That distinction — between discretion and entitlement — is the fault line FIFA has not addressed.

The public discourse and its legal illiteracy

The criticism directed at Doku by L’Équipe television presenter France Pierron warrants brief attention — not because public commentary has legal force, but because it reflects an assumption about professional obligation that is flatly inconsistent with the law.

Pierron described a father at the birth of his child as “completely useless” and suggested that leaving a World Cup campaign for that purpose was a betrayal of a professional obligation. She later apologised, but the sentiment she expressed — that attendance at the birth of one’s child is optional in the face of an employment commitment — has no grounding in any jurisdiction whose employment law takes family rights seriously.

Under English law, an employer who dismissed or penalised an employee for exercising a right to paternity leave would be exposed to automatic unfair dismissal under section 99 of the Employment Rights Act 1996. The right is not contingent on the importance of the project underway. A World Cup is not a legal justification for denying a worker his statutory entitlement.

The criticism also exposed a broader cultural assumption: that athletes, once engaged in major tournaments, are assets rather than persons. The law has moved well past this. Football’s public discourse, evidently, has some distance to travel.

The structural gap: what FIFA has not addressed

Both incidents — distinct as they are — illuminate the same structural deficiency in international football governance. Club employment relationships are relatively well-regulated: statutory entitlements, collective bargaining, personal contract provisions, and employment tribunal oversight create a reasonably complete framework. The national team environment is different.

When a player reports to a World Cup, he enters a regime governed primarily by FIFA rules and the internal policies of the national federation. There is no uniform FIFA standard on compassionate absence, paternity leave, or bereavement during international tournaments. The RSTP’s Annex 1 — the instrument that governs the entire system of player release — contains no provision addressing these situations.

This means that a player’s ability to attend the birth of a child, or a coach’s right to bury a parent, depends entirely on the institutional culture and internal policies of the relevant federation. That is a deeply arbitrary basis for a fundamental human interest. A player competing for a federation with a progressive HR culture gets to attend his child’s birth. A player competing for a federation with a different view does not. FIFA’s silence on the matter turns a matter of right into a matter of luck.

Manchester City’s position in the Doku incident is worth noting. When Doku departed the Belgian camp temporarily, he remained under contract to Manchester City throughout. His physical condition, welfare, and fitness for return to club football remain the club’s concern. Any deterioration during the period of release raises questions — incompletely addressed by the RSTP’s insurance provisions — about the allocation of risk between club and federation. The welfare of a released player during a temporary personal absence from the camp — authorised by the federation — falls into a grey area that the current rules do not cleanly resolve.

What FIFA should do

The remedy is not complicated. FIFA has codified player entitlements in other areas — rest periods, match scheduling, minimum contract standards. Extending that framework to address personal absences during international windows requires modest drafting.

A short provision in Annex 1 of the RSTP establishing minimum entitlements for: (a) paternity or partner leave on the birth of a child during an international tournament; (b) bereavement leave on the death of a close family member; and (c) emergency family leave for defined circumstances — would resolve the gap. The entitlement would be uniform across all federations, enforceable before the relevant FIFA dispute resolution body, and consistent with the player welfare commitments FIFA routinely makes in other contexts.

The standard need not be generous. Even a provision mirroring the Belgian or French statutory minimum — three to five days for bereavement, up to ten days for paternity — would represent a material improvement on the current vacuum. It would also provide national federations with a clear standard against which their own policies could be measured, rather than leaving them to exercise unreviewable discretion.

Conclusion

Both incidents resolved without legal controversy, largely because both the RBFA and the FFF acted as responsible institutions. Deschamps had a clear statutory right; the FFF honoured it. Doku had a human interest; the RBFA recognised it. The outcomes were correct. The legal framework that produced them, however, is inadequate — dependent on discretion where it should be governed by right.

The public controversy over Doku revealed something uncomfortable: large portions of the football world still regard personal and family commitments as subordinate to professional obligation in a way that no employment lawyer — and no employment statute — would endorse. The idea that a player must choose between witnessing the birth of his first child and his place in a World Cup squad is not a hard legal question. It is a failure of institutional design.

FIFA has the drafting capacity and the regulatory authority to close this gap before the next tournament. The more pertinent question is whether it has the institutional will to treat the athletes who make the World Cup possible as persons first, and assets second.