Opinion World Cup 2018
French system shapes success of Les Bleus’ African talent
Sons of immigrants in national team are products of France — in ways good and bad
Simon Kuper in Moscow JULY 13, 2018 Print this page20
In daily life, I’m a football dad living in Paris. Most weekends, I get up early and trek with my children to some freezing sports complex in the banlieues, the city’s suburbs.
The venue — which might be the Stade Karl Marx, in formerly communist-voting Villejuif — is typically fringed by dreary apartment blocks. Both our team and the opposition are almost always a mix of black, white and brown kids. The coaches, “éducateurs” who have followed courses and take themselves seriously, command from the touchline, while parents are corralled behind a fence and encouraged to keep quiet. But we do get to watch some excellent children’s football.
Half the French players likely to feature in Sunday’s World Cup final against Croatia come from poor banlieues of Paris or Lyon. Kylian Mbappé and the entire starting midfield of Paul Pogba, N’Golo Kanté and Blaise Matuidi are Parisians. Samuel Umtiti and frequent substitutes Nabil Fekir and Corentin Tolisso are from the Lyon region.
There are some exceptions: keeper Hugo Lloris grew up in Nice, the son of a Catalan banker dad and a lawyer mum who wanted him to play tennis. But mostly, this World Cup confirms that Greater Paris in particular is global football’s best talent pool.
That applies beyond Les Bleus. Of 15 Paris-born players at the World Cup, only seven are in France’s squad, notes sports sociologist Darko Dukic. The others played for Senegal, Morocco, Tunisia and Portugal, home countries of their immigrant parents.
Dukic notes that the past five World Cups have featured 60 Paris-born participants; Buenos Aires, in second place, had 50. Then there are Parisians who weren’t even at this year’s tournament: Algeria’s Riyad Mahrez, from the banlieue Sarcelles, just joined Manchester City from Leicester for £60m.
N'Golo Kanté, Kylian Mbappé and Paul Pogba: all were raised by immigrant parents in the banlieus of Paris © Reuters
Some say these players aren’t French but African. The assertion is made both by some Africans, eager to claim these talents for their continent, and by French ethno-nationalists such as Jean-Marie Le Pen.
When Le Pen once complained about black players, France’s black longtime full-back Lilian Thuram retorted: “Personally, I don’t know what he’s talking about. I’m not black, I’m French.”
Yet French sons of African immigrants are better footballers than any raised in Africa. That is because they are products of France — in ways good and bad.
There is only football. Whether at school or in the neighbourhood, everyone will play football. And that helps people to not stay in the quartier doing nothing, or doing stupid things
Most French banlieues, though not the hellholes of foreign imagination, are pretty drab. Mbappé’s hometown of Bondy, a bus ride from rich Paris, looks as if someone plonked a Soviet town on top of an ancient French village. The old church survives but Bondy is dominated by fast-food joints and fading 1960s apartment blocks (one of them adorned with a large mural of Mbappé).
Local kids generally have few choices of entertainment. In banlieues, Pogba told me, “there is only football. Whether at school or in the neighbourhood, everyone will play football. And that helps people to not stay in the quartier doing nothing, or doing stupid things.”
Their parents, seeing few other routes for advancement, dream of their sons becoming professional footballers. Pogba’s father, a Guinean immigrant, pumped up footballs as hard as rocks because he thought it would improve his sons’ shooting. All three became pros.
[The French system then refines all this talent. Every banlieue has state-subsidised sports clubs with qualified coaches. The focus is more on producing good footballers than on winning youth matches. At AS Bondy, where his father was the youth coach, Mbappé usually played with kids two years older than him, whereas if the club had kept him in his own age group they could have won more titles.
The best kids are sent to France’s central academy, Clairefontaine, and scouted by clubs from around Europe, whose representatives roam Parisian fields every weekend. (Manchester United spotted the adolescent Mbappé, but the club’s then manager Louis van Gaal refused to sign him.) The set-up is similar in Brussels, hometown of several of the Belgians beaten by Les Bleus in the semi-final.
If France win the World Cup, it will be a triumph not for Africa but for the French system.
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