Croatia is a rather small country and your players are mostly croatians while France is one of the biggest country of Europe and selects players with foreign roots.
We select players with foreign roots as well. Good exmples are Rakitic who has been raised in Switzerland or Eduardo who is Brazilian and got Croatian nationality since he lived here long time. Then we always have a couple of Bosnian guys in the team but that almost counts as our own
Let me extend this a little bit with the French media hypocrisy since I remember them every time this talk took place. The Francafrican national team is playing and a player with an african origin scores, media: yeee the french "name of the guy here" scored. Now the poor guy missed an easy goal, oh the "original African country here" guy missed what a shame!.
If they won a title, the French national team won it. If they were eliminated, a picture of African origin players in the first page and let's start the critics...
Dunno but I am sure this thing happens all over the world with maybe questions about how 1 or 2 players are loyal to their team/country but what happens in some media in France is beyond logic
That's indeed what's happening almost everywhere and no matter what sports we are talking about. Prime example from Greece - unbelievable but true: Giannis Antetokounmpo (of Nigerian origin), who spent his whole life in Greece, extremely poor, selling bags and sun-glasses on the streets of Athens, wasn't given a Greek Passport/ID before he became famous - when that happened, he "became Greek" in record time, nation's idol, Greek ambassador, bla bla bla - Hypocrisy at it's best - not to speak about Greeks who (not all of them but many) never considered people like him Greek but when he became a superstar, he was suddenly the best of all Greeks!
Oh and that's always changing of course, when Hellas National Team sucked at last tournament, you can imagine how people thought of Ante!