Conclusions: French Exceptionalism vs. Commodification
The strengths and weaknesses of French football are very
specific to its cultural and structural differences from its European
neighbours, to its situation as an exception that it often finds itself
defending in the face of increasing globalisation, standardisation and
neo-liberalism (as the French call the ideology of the global free-market).
Traditionally the French have believed in regulation, public service values and
the importance of the State in intervening to guarantee the common good. An
obvious strength is the State-backed youth coaching system that produces
excellent young players. It is precisely this system that is in danger from the
neo-liberalism of EU law, which has allowed the brawn drain of French
internationals out of the domestic league.
This concluding chapter attempts to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of French football and to tie them in to what is specific to the French approach to its football culture, and more widely to French culture and values in general. But first it presents the latest twist in the saga of the French national team and the fall-out from a 2002 World Cup performance that was variously described as a ‘debacle’ and a ‘fiasco’. What went wrong in Korea? The bare facts are that France, in its World Cup group stage, lost its opening match to Senegal, drew the second match with Uruguay, and lost the final game to Denmark, thus becoming the first World Cup holder to be eliminated at such an early stage of the finals. France had scored not a single goal, despite having the top goalscorers of the English, Italian and French leagues in the squad.
Inquests offered explanations that went from criticising players’ hubris and complacency, to saying it was just something that happens in sport. France had played no competitive matches for too long having qualified automatically as cup holders. The players, representing top foreign clubs in European competitions, were tired from too much football, especially as the World Cup began earlier than usual to avoid the monsoon season. The players had been poorly prepared at the INF where the Federation had spent too much time involving them in sponsorship deals.
France’s tactical system was now too well known and depended on the ball always going through Zidane, and Zidane missed two of the matches through an injury sustained in what some called an unnecessary friendly match against Korea. The right replacements for Zidane were not available: Pires was missing through injury; Carrière had been left at home. The squad had been insufficiently renewed since 1998: the defenders were all over 30. There was no communication between coach Lemerre and the team. There was no ‘patron’ on the field, a vital role previously filled by Deschamps. Captain Desailly did not have the temperament of a leader, and had spent too much time on his own business affairs. Henry was played out of position and his frustration got him sent off. Trezeguet hit the underside of the bar and there was no Russian linesman . . .
Back at home, defeat was taken calmly, there were no outbreaks of hooliganism or riots in the streets. Italian reactions to elimination, blaming unfair refereeing, were much less reserved. Jean-Michel Normand (2002) saw the collective Gallic shrug of the shoulders as evidence of a detachment that meant that football had not taken mature root in the French national psyche. ‘We get ourselves worked up if we win, but in defeat we think about other things because life goes on.’ Perhaps he got it right by saying French football culture is still that of the occasional supporter (‘supporteur de circonstance’) rather than of a nation truly passionate about sport.
A key effect of France’s early elimination from the 2002 World Cup was on the debate about the future direction of French professional football, since it completed a swing in the balance of power between the big professional clubs and the FFF, in two ways. Firstly, the national team’s poor performance weakened the influence of the DTN vis-à-vis the professional clubs, as evidenced by the DTN candidate for new national team coach being overlooked.
Secondly, in its attempts to hold sway against the professional game, the FFF had hitherto been supported by the amateur league and its values. However, officials of the amateur game had become increasingly frustrated about the lack of income coming their way from the FFF whose income had been increasing rapidly, for example from sponsorship rights for the national team. Unfortunately the FFF’s expenditure had increased as fast as its income. An official 2001 Cour des comptes report had criticised the lack of transparency of the FFF’s financial management and its poor management in general. FFF chairman Simonet’s position was also weakened since he could no longer counter criticisms by holding up the national team’s success as the ultimate justification that all was well in French football.
This concluding chapter attempts to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of French football and to tie them in to what is specific to the French approach to its football culture, and more widely to French culture and values in general. But first it presents the latest twist in the saga of the French national team and the fall-out from a 2002 World Cup performance that was variously described as a ‘debacle’ and a ‘fiasco’. What went wrong in Korea? The bare facts are that France, in its World Cup group stage, lost its opening match to Senegal, drew the second match with Uruguay, and lost the final game to Denmark, thus becoming the first World Cup holder to be eliminated at such an early stage of the finals. France had scored not a single goal, despite having the top goalscorers of the English, Italian and French leagues in the squad.
Inquests offered explanations that went from criticising players’ hubris and complacency, to saying it was just something that happens in sport. France had played no competitive matches for too long having qualified automatically as cup holders. The players, representing top foreign clubs in European competitions, were tired from too much football, especially as the World Cup began earlier than usual to avoid the monsoon season. The players had been poorly prepared at the INF where the Federation had spent too much time involving them in sponsorship deals.
France’s tactical system was now too well known and depended on the ball always going through Zidane, and Zidane missed two of the matches through an injury sustained in what some called an unnecessary friendly match against Korea. The right replacements for Zidane were not available: Pires was missing through injury; Carrière had been left at home. The squad had been insufficiently renewed since 1998: the defenders were all over 30. There was no communication between coach Lemerre and the team. There was no ‘patron’ on the field, a vital role previously filled by Deschamps. Captain Desailly did not have the temperament of a leader, and had spent too much time on his own business affairs. Henry was played out of position and his frustration got him sent off. Trezeguet hit the underside of the bar and there was no Russian linesman . . .
Back at home, defeat was taken calmly, there were no outbreaks of hooliganism or riots in the streets. Italian reactions to elimination, blaming unfair refereeing, were much less reserved. Jean-Michel Normand (2002) saw the collective Gallic shrug of the shoulders as evidence of a detachment that meant that football had not taken mature root in the French national psyche. ‘We get ourselves worked up if we win, but in defeat we think about other things because life goes on.’ Perhaps he got it right by saying French football culture is still that of the occasional supporter (‘supporteur de circonstance’) rather than of a nation truly passionate about sport.
A key effect of France’s early elimination from the 2002 World Cup was on the debate about the future direction of French professional football, since it completed a swing in the balance of power between the big professional clubs and the FFF, in two ways. Firstly, the national team’s poor performance weakened the influence of the DTN vis-à-vis the professional clubs, as evidenced by the DTN candidate for new national team coach being overlooked.
Secondly, in its attempts to hold sway against the professional game, the FFF had hitherto been supported by the amateur league and its values. However, officials of the amateur game had become increasingly frustrated about the lack of income coming their way from the FFF whose income had been increasing rapidly, for example from sponsorship rights for the national team. Unfortunately the FFF’s expenditure had increased as fast as its income. An official 2001 Cour des comptes report had criticised the lack of transparency of the FFF’s financial management and its poor management in general. FFF chairman Simonet’s position was also weakened since he could no longer counter criticisms by holding up the national team’s success as the ultimate justification that all was well in French football.
In Simonet’s personal case bad publicity was generated by
news of his ‘celebrating’ France’s defeat against Senegal in an expenses-paid
meal in the Seoul Sheraton by indulging his taste for hugely expensive French
wine – a bottle of Romanée-Conti costing 4,800 euros (£3,200) (Le Monde, 9 July
2002). This embarrassing faux-pas apart, he had earlier made the mistake of
renewing Roger Lemerre’s contract as national team coach before the start of
the World Cup finals, prematurely, thus making it harder and more expensive to
sack him afterwards.
When the press was expecting Lemerre to resign gracefully, Simonet appeared indecisive and was unable to persuade him to go quietly. In July the amateur league representatives defeated Simonet’s budget proposals at the annual general meeting of the FFF. He declined to resign. He was forced to look for support on the FFF executive from the big professional clubs. It was no surprise when in late July, once Lemerre had gone back to the DTN, Simonet awarded the position of national team coach not to Raymond Domenech of the DTN, the Under-21 national team coach, but to a candidate from the professional game, the championship winning Lyon coach Jacques Santini. Santini was paradoxically strongly backed by his club chairman, J.-M. Aulas, who had not really got on with his championship-winning coach. A disagreement on policy had already led Santini to relinquish the post of coach for that of technical director at Lyon.
The League began to use its greater freedom of manoeuvre. Its official magazine signalled the antipathy between the League and the FFF by pointing out that the strengths of French football lay in the League and not the national team since 19 out of 23 Bleus played abroad, whereas 19 out of 23 Senegalese played in the French D1, most of whom had emerged from French club academies, and that two Brazilian World Cup winners played for PSG and Lyon (LNF Infos, 45 (June 2002): 10–11). During the summer, as if to cock another snook at the FFF and the Ministry, the League announced a change of image, with strong symbolic value. Firstly, the LNF was to change its name to incorporate the word ‘professional’ and become known as Ligue de football professionnel (LFP). The second innovation was attaching the name of a sponsor to the official title of the two professional divisions: now known as Ligue 1 Orange and Ligue 2 Orange.
Given the public service nature of sport and its governing bodies, whose power to run the sport is delegated to them by the State, this association of commerce with the name of a football competition for the first time was significant, and, symbolically, has moved French football a step nearer the situation of professional tennis for example, which is run quite separately from the national federation. Jean-Michel Aulas had a lot to be pleased about by the end of the summer. His club were champions and had qualified directly for the lucrative Champions League, he had influenced the appointment of the new national team selectorcoach and taken his salary off his club’s budget, and had struck a blow for the growing independence of the League.
The new sports minister had also declared he would consider reforms in the ownership of club registrations and logos and of television rights, even if he was in no hurry to change the law about quotation of professional clubs on the Stock Exchange. There remained the issues of clubs’ use of ‘their’ stadiums, and the lowering of social costs on players’ salaries – which the League intended to raise at the earliest opportunity. Another effect that may yet have repercussions on French football income is that TF1, the television channel that bought exclusive rights to the 2002 and 2006 World Cups for 168 million euros (£112 million), saw its share price fall by 3.3 per cent after France’s draw with Uruguay and is estimated to have lost up to £20 million or 2 per cent of annual advertising income. Its calculations of break-even point had been a semi-final place for France. Time will tell how much this will affect the FFF’s future TV income for the national team.
Domestic Fragility in the Global Football Economy In seasons 2000/01 and 2001/02 no French club reached the quarter-finals of a major European competition. This had not happened since 1989. In the UEFA standings French clubs had still been second to Italy in 1996. In 2002, with Spain ahead of Italy and England and Germany fourth, France was a lonely fifth in the hierarchy of European club football (Vierne 2002). The club ranking affects the number of clubs invited from the different countries into the Champions League – which, given the lucrative rewards coming from participation, is likely to consolidate existing inequalities. One of the obvious explanations of the relative weakness of French domestic football and its achievements in European tournaments is the exodus of players, which had risen to over a hundred potential first-team players by the season 2001/02. Since the 1990s, as national sporting protectionism has been broken down by the Europeanisation and liberalisation of more and more domains of social life, France has been brought face to face with its semi-peripheral position within the global economy of professional football as it has seen its best players poached by core European footballing nations.
Player Costs and the Post-Bosman Exodus The exodus began in earnest at the start of the 1996 season following the European Court of Justice’s so-called Bosman ruling of December 1995. This confirmed that the law on free movement of workers within the Single European Market applied to football, thus destroying clubs’ protectionist contracts and the retain-and-transfer system. Thereafter players could leave a club without a transfer fee once their contract had expired. Initially, individual national football authorities could still impose a transfer fee for movement between clubs within the same national Football Association, so in effect the ruling encouraged movement between European nations and encouraged the import and export of players (Miège 1996: 75–79). The end of the 1996 season, following the shop window for international players provided by the European Nations Championship in England, saw a large number of top players moving club.
Either they were out of contract and were able to offer their services free of transfer fee, and therefore negotiate far higher wages from a new club, or clubs were more inclined to sell contracted players and claim a transfer fee before the contract was up. French clubs were in a weak position in terms of offering competitive wages compared to European neighbours, for structural reasons. In addition to their low attendances, and lower income in all respects, France imposes high employment costs and corporate taxes on all employers, including professional football clubs. High French labour overheads (what the French call social costs) relative to other European economies is a general constraint for French companies. The whole of the French national health and social security system, plus the retirement pension system, is financed, not from the central state budget (except where there is a deficit) but from contributions from employers and workers as a percentage of salary. The French health service is good and is heavily used, so it is costly, and pensions have gone up in line with wages rather than, as in Britain since the 1980s, only in line with prices. National insurance contributions are therefore very high in France, for both workers and employers.
The NI contributions of employer and worker add to the total labour cost. Studies comparing the tax and NI overheads for players and clubs in the five major European football countries show France is the odd one out, and suffers a net handicap vis-à-vis other European clubs, which explains the difficulty of retaining French players or indeed attracting top European players. French income tax is lower for married players with two or more children, but not for single men or married ones with one or no children. It should be borne in mind, therefore, that the examples quoted in Tables 9.1 and 9.2 of unmarried childless players were chosen by the players’ union and the LNF clubs to show the disparity with the rest of Europe at its greatest.
The figures in Table 9.1 show how high social costs penalise French employer clubs compared to those in its major competitors. They show that, in 1996, a net monthly salary of about 50,000 francs received by a player cost a French club over three times as much due to tax and social costs. A similar net salary cost German and Spanish clubs just over twice the amount received by the player, and British and Italian clubs just under twice. This means that in order to ensure an equivalent salary to Marco Simone (the one major star to be attracted to the French league in 1997/98), PSG had to find half as much again as his previous Italian employer to cover the extra social costs and taxes.
French clubs have in the meantime increased their income from spectators and from television rights in absolute terms, but more recent figures show that they have not caught up in comparative terms. They are still at a serious structural disadvantage in their ability to finance top players’ salaries. The Deloitte and Touche study (Table 9.2), commissioned in 2001 by the LNF, showed first of all that the gap had considerably widened for the big clubs in terms of turnover. The top five English and top seven Italian teams had turnover approaching twice that of the top five French clubs, and the top five Spanish and German clubs had turnovers of one-third more than the French.
Secondly, the effect of social and tax costs on employment had not improved. Taking these into account for player costs in 2001, a French club had to pay 100 euros for every 58 euros paid by an English or Italian club to ensure the same net take-home pay for players. To employ international players, the gap between French and other European clubs has therefore widened since 1996. French clubs are falling behind in their ability to attract or retain top stars.
When the press was expecting Lemerre to resign gracefully, Simonet appeared indecisive and was unable to persuade him to go quietly. In July the amateur league representatives defeated Simonet’s budget proposals at the annual general meeting of the FFF. He declined to resign. He was forced to look for support on the FFF executive from the big professional clubs. It was no surprise when in late July, once Lemerre had gone back to the DTN, Simonet awarded the position of national team coach not to Raymond Domenech of the DTN, the Under-21 national team coach, but to a candidate from the professional game, the championship winning Lyon coach Jacques Santini. Santini was paradoxically strongly backed by his club chairman, J.-M. Aulas, who had not really got on with his championship-winning coach. A disagreement on policy had already led Santini to relinquish the post of coach for that of technical director at Lyon.
The League began to use its greater freedom of manoeuvre. Its official magazine signalled the antipathy between the League and the FFF by pointing out that the strengths of French football lay in the League and not the national team since 19 out of 23 Bleus played abroad, whereas 19 out of 23 Senegalese played in the French D1, most of whom had emerged from French club academies, and that two Brazilian World Cup winners played for PSG and Lyon (LNF Infos, 45 (June 2002): 10–11). During the summer, as if to cock another snook at the FFF and the Ministry, the League announced a change of image, with strong symbolic value. Firstly, the LNF was to change its name to incorporate the word ‘professional’ and become known as Ligue de football professionnel (LFP). The second innovation was attaching the name of a sponsor to the official title of the two professional divisions: now known as Ligue 1 Orange and Ligue 2 Orange.
Given the public service nature of sport and its governing bodies, whose power to run the sport is delegated to them by the State, this association of commerce with the name of a football competition for the first time was significant, and, symbolically, has moved French football a step nearer the situation of professional tennis for example, which is run quite separately from the national federation. Jean-Michel Aulas had a lot to be pleased about by the end of the summer. His club were champions and had qualified directly for the lucrative Champions League, he had influenced the appointment of the new national team selectorcoach and taken his salary off his club’s budget, and had struck a blow for the growing independence of the League.
The new sports minister had also declared he would consider reforms in the ownership of club registrations and logos and of television rights, even if he was in no hurry to change the law about quotation of professional clubs on the Stock Exchange. There remained the issues of clubs’ use of ‘their’ stadiums, and the lowering of social costs on players’ salaries – which the League intended to raise at the earliest opportunity. Another effect that may yet have repercussions on French football income is that TF1, the television channel that bought exclusive rights to the 2002 and 2006 World Cups for 168 million euros (£112 million), saw its share price fall by 3.3 per cent after France’s draw with Uruguay and is estimated to have lost up to £20 million or 2 per cent of annual advertising income. Its calculations of break-even point had been a semi-final place for France. Time will tell how much this will affect the FFF’s future TV income for the national team.
Domestic Fragility in the Global Football Economy In seasons 2000/01 and 2001/02 no French club reached the quarter-finals of a major European competition. This had not happened since 1989. In the UEFA standings French clubs had still been second to Italy in 1996. In 2002, with Spain ahead of Italy and England and Germany fourth, France was a lonely fifth in the hierarchy of European club football (Vierne 2002). The club ranking affects the number of clubs invited from the different countries into the Champions League – which, given the lucrative rewards coming from participation, is likely to consolidate existing inequalities. One of the obvious explanations of the relative weakness of French domestic football and its achievements in European tournaments is the exodus of players, which had risen to over a hundred potential first-team players by the season 2001/02. Since the 1990s, as national sporting protectionism has been broken down by the Europeanisation and liberalisation of more and more domains of social life, France has been brought face to face with its semi-peripheral position within the global economy of professional football as it has seen its best players poached by core European footballing nations.
Player Costs and the Post-Bosman Exodus The exodus began in earnest at the start of the 1996 season following the European Court of Justice’s so-called Bosman ruling of December 1995. This confirmed that the law on free movement of workers within the Single European Market applied to football, thus destroying clubs’ protectionist contracts and the retain-and-transfer system. Thereafter players could leave a club without a transfer fee once their contract had expired. Initially, individual national football authorities could still impose a transfer fee for movement between clubs within the same national Football Association, so in effect the ruling encouraged movement between European nations and encouraged the import and export of players (Miège 1996: 75–79). The end of the 1996 season, following the shop window for international players provided by the European Nations Championship in England, saw a large number of top players moving club.
Either they were out of contract and were able to offer their services free of transfer fee, and therefore negotiate far higher wages from a new club, or clubs were more inclined to sell contracted players and claim a transfer fee before the contract was up. French clubs were in a weak position in terms of offering competitive wages compared to European neighbours, for structural reasons. In addition to their low attendances, and lower income in all respects, France imposes high employment costs and corporate taxes on all employers, including professional football clubs. High French labour overheads (what the French call social costs) relative to other European economies is a general constraint for French companies. The whole of the French national health and social security system, plus the retirement pension system, is financed, not from the central state budget (except where there is a deficit) but from contributions from employers and workers as a percentage of salary. The French health service is good and is heavily used, so it is costly, and pensions have gone up in line with wages rather than, as in Britain since the 1980s, only in line with prices. National insurance contributions are therefore very high in France, for both workers and employers.
The NI contributions of employer and worker add to the total labour cost. Studies comparing the tax and NI overheads for players and clubs in the five major European football countries show France is the odd one out, and suffers a net handicap vis-à-vis other European clubs, which explains the difficulty of retaining French players or indeed attracting top European players. French income tax is lower for married players with two or more children, but not for single men or married ones with one or no children. It should be borne in mind, therefore, that the examples quoted in Tables 9.1 and 9.2 of unmarried childless players were chosen by the players’ union and the LNF clubs to show the disparity with the rest of Europe at its greatest.
The figures in Table 9.1 show how high social costs penalise French employer clubs compared to those in its major competitors. They show that, in 1996, a net monthly salary of about 50,000 francs received by a player cost a French club over three times as much due to tax and social costs. A similar net salary cost German and Spanish clubs just over twice the amount received by the player, and British and Italian clubs just under twice. This means that in order to ensure an equivalent salary to Marco Simone (the one major star to be attracted to the French league in 1997/98), PSG had to find half as much again as his previous Italian employer to cover the extra social costs and taxes.
French clubs have in the meantime increased their income from spectators and from television rights in absolute terms, but more recent figures show that they have not caught up in comparative terms. They are still at a serious structural disadvantage in their ability to finance top players’ salaries. The Deloitte and Touche study (Table 9.2), commissioned in 2001 by the LNF, showed first of all that the gap had considerably widened for the big clubs in terms of turnover. The top five English and top seven Italian teams had turnover approaching twice that of the top five French clubs, and the top five Spanish and German clubs had turnovers of one-third more than the French.
Secondly, the effect of social and tax costs on employment had not improved. Taking these into account for player costs in 2001, a French club had to pay 100 euros for every 58 euros paid by an English or Italian club to ensure the same net take-home pay for players. To employ international players, the gap between French and other European clubs has therefore widened since 1996. French clubs are falling behind in their ability to attract or retain top stars.
In view of the unequal bargaining and remunerating power of
French clubs, as seen in Table 9.2, it is not surprising that many top French
players left for Italy, England, Spain and Germany. Estimates of players
contracts in 1997 showed, with salaries, bonuses and advertising contracts
included of the 19 top French earners, only five were playing in France: four
at PSG and one at Monaco (Perrot 1997: 46).
Estimations of monthly salary in the 2001/02 season showed Desailly at Chelsea and Vieira at Arsenal both earning 2 million francs (£200,000) net, Barthez at Manchester United earning 1.6 million francs net, and Zidane at Real Madrid earning between 3.3 and 4 million francs net per month.
The top earner at PSG, the Nigerian Okocha, earned a salary of 1.1 million francs. The top French player’s monthly salary at PSG was 0.7 million francs (Ambrosiano 2002a: 34–35).
Estimations of monthly salary in the 2001/02 season showed Desailly at Chelsea and Vieira at Arsenal both earning 2 million francs (£200,000) net, Barthez at Manchester United earning 1.6 million francs net, and Zidane at Real Madrid earning between 3.3 and 4 million francs net per month.
The top earner at PSG, the Nigerian Okocha, earned a salary of 1.1 million francs. The top French player’s monthly salary at PSG was 0.7 million francs (Ambrosiano 2002a: 34–35).
The Youth Exodus The deskilling of French football has been
even more keenly felt by the loss of the most talented products of its youth
academies.
The issue that worries French clubs more than anything is how to retain young players in France until the end of their training period, which is considered to be beyond the age of majority.
The cost to a club of youth training is considerable, and yet there have been a number of cases of young players leaving their academies to join foreign clubs for little or no compensation to the club that has invested in them.
The new club Charter and the Buffet laws have attempted to oblige young players to sign a three-year contract with the club that has trained them, but the postBosman laws make it difficult legally to prevent a young player going abroad, even before their eighteenth birthday provided the parents accompany them.
Nicolas Anelka was one of the first to be poached when still a stagiaire (apprentice) aged seventeen – from PSG by Arsène Wenger for Arsenal for half a million pounds. As part of the Paris apprentice system he was earning 3,800 francs per month (approx. £5,000 per year) at the time. PSG tried to keep him by offering to put him on a bit more than the standard starting salary according to the Professional Footballers Charter. He bid them up, but the salary overheads of French clubs and social costs meant that Arsenal could beat their offer. Anelka’s move set a worrying precedent. He is a product of the National Football Institute at Clairefontaine, where he trained from age 12 to 15, before entering the PSG Centre de Formation.
His departure is against the French Federation’s Professional Footballers Charter agreed between the Players Union and French clubs. But the Charter is only valid between French clubs (Ramsay 1997). What was most galling to the French club was that Arsenal sold Anelka on two and a half years later to Real Madrid for £22 million. The fact that PSG bought back Anelka from Spain in 2000 for about the same price was ironic, but suggested at least that the top French clubs were doing their best to catch up with their neighbours. To add insult to this irony, Anelka then had to be sold to Manchester City in 2002 for little more than half that fee.
A further example that was called ‘shameful’ by the president of the LNF again involved Wenger. Jérémie Aliadière, not quite sixteen, left his préformation at Clairefontaine to go to London with his parents and sign a seven-year contract with Arsenal in 1999 (Butterlin 1999). There is a fear that France’s semiperipheral position within the global football market is transforming it into a nursery country, feeding the major footballing nations, in a new form of colonisation. There have already been agreements between clubs that officialise this kind of relationship. Arsenal entered into a five-year agreement with SaintEtienne in 1998 to exchange trainees (see Eastham 1999: 72–73). As part of an agreement with Le Havre, in 2001, Liverpool signed the two top scorers from the French World Cup winning under-17 side, Anthony Le Tallec and Florent Sinama-Pongolle, with a view to their joining Liverpool in 2003 (Labrunie 2001c).
Summer 2002, a slack year for transfers throughout Europe because of financial uncertainties, none the less saw 17 more players leaving the French League for English clubs, including a number of Senegalese who had impressed in the World Cup, such as El-Hadji Diouf from Lens to Liverpool. Lille lost key players Cygan to Arsenal and Bruno Cheyrou to Liverpool, and cash-strapped PSG sold Distin, Anelka, E. Cissé, B. Mendy and Okocha (France Football, 6 August 2002). Strengths and Weaknesses of French Football The major weaknesses of French football have been related to its late and incomplete professionalisation, its small number of modern metropolises and the lack of interest in football in the capital city until recent years, its lack of an ingrained supporter tradition and the financial weakness of its major clubs that some chairmen have been tempted to overcome by sharp practice and corruption. Its recent strengths have come from its long-term interest in football as an international phenomenon, its State-backed coaching systems that have produced many technically gifted young players and influential coaches, and recent support from domestic media companies and the bigger French private companies.
Football entered the French national consciousness late compared to other European nations. It was imported by Anglophile French elites and by English and Scots exiles in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, and remained an amateur game until the 1930s. Since it remained amateur it was not dropped by the middle classes and remained less class defined than in Britain. Its popularity between the wars in small industrial towns also meant that it was adopted for their factory teams by industrialists, whose pressure led the football authorities to accept professionalism. The model of the professional club therefore tended to reflect the paternalistic structures and family values of the small factory. The strength of the professional game long reflected the socio-economic geography of France’s first (partial) industrialisation as football was adopted as a way of promoting local and regional identity in small industrial towns dotted across the country.
The Second World War and Occupation was a set back for its development, to the extent that the professional game had to begin again after the Liberation. This is part of the explanation for the term ‘incomplete professionalisation’ that has been coined to describe the organisation of football in France. Another factor was the availability of middle-class players who wished to play part-time in the pre- and post-war periods. Dominant British social values could happily allow the growth of football to depend on individual initiative, and its organisation and regulation could be left to autonomous bodies operating independently of the State and local government as businesses. In post-1944 France, on the other hand, football’s governing structures and clubs have been shaped by the French State’s concept of the public service and voluntary community service (le bénévolat), and by Republican interventionism, as opposed to laissez-faire individualism.
From the 1990s onwards this has been a bone of contention between the professional League and the French governing body, the FFF, whose authority has had official State backing, since the State delegates its authority to the federations to organise sports in its name. The State and local authorities have taken the notion of public service seriously by regulating and financing sports facilities and sports clubs, including professional football clubs, to a greater extent than in the rest of Europe, thus reflecting the dominant view that amateur and professional sport are essentially part of the same ‘movement’ or the same ‘family’ and should remain so.
This continuity between grass-roots and elite sport is another factor in football’s incomplete professionalisation. Whereas small or medium-sized towns still make themselves felt in the top two divisions, none the less, in the contemporary era of multinational companies, sports sponsorship, and global commercialism, French football is dominated by the big city clubs. The interests of the local authorities, with their executive mayors, coincide with those of the more ambitious city clubs, who share a desire to count on a European or even global level as the context of the nation-state loses its primacy. The French clubs with the biggest budgets are now from the major conurbations of Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, and the north of France, where Lens’s supremacy is being challenged by Lille, in a battle between the old industrial club and the modern city club.
Small town clubs are not generally attractive to major sponsors. European regional capitals on the other hand are part of a much bigger network of interests. France’s weakness in this sense is that it has fewer big conurbations than England or Germany. Paris of course is on an altogether bigger scale than the provincial cities, and another weakness for football has been that Paris was a post-war football desert until the late 1970s when PSG was implanted and, with serious political and commercial support, became the biggest French club of the 1990s. French clubs have only recently attracted numbers of spectators that remotely compare with other major European footballing countries. This followed remarkable growth in the popularity of the game in the 1990s as television coverage heightened the sport’s profile and French club teams and, more especially, the national team made their mark in international competitions.
The issue that worries French clubs more than anything is how to retain young players in France until the end of their training period, which is considered to be beyond the age of majority.
The cost to a club of youth training is considerable, and yet there have been a number of cases of young players leaving their academies to join foreign clubs for little or no compensation to the club that has invested in them.
The new club Charter and the Buffet laws have attempted to oblige young players to sign a three-year contract with the club that has trained them, but the postBosman laws make it difficult legally to prevent a young player going abroad, even before their eighteenth birthday provided the parents accompany them.
Nicolas Anelka was one of the first to be poached when still a stagiaire (apprentice) aged seventeen – from PSG by Arsène Wenger for Arsenal for half a million pounds. As part of the Paris apprentice system he was earning 3,800 francs per month (approx. £5,000 per year) at the time. PSG tried to keep him by offering to put him on a bit more than the standard starting salary according to the Professional Footballers Charter. He bid them up, but the salary overheads of French clubs and social costs meant that Arsenal could beat their offer. Anelka’s move set a worrying precedent. He is a product of the National Football Institute at Clairefontaine, where he trained from age 12 to 15, before entering the PSG Centre de Formation.
His departure is against the French Federation’s Professional Footballers Charter agreed between the Players Union and French clubs. But the Charter is only valid between French clubs (Ramsay 1997). What was most galling to the French club was that Arsenal sold Anelka on two and a half years later to Real Madrid for £22 million. The fact that PSG bought back Anelka from Spain in 2000 for about the same price was ironic, but suggested at least that the top French clubs were doing their best to catch up with their neighbours. To add insult to this irony, Anelka then had to be sold to Manchester City in 2002 for little more than half that fee.
A further example that was called ‘shameful’ by the president of the LNF again involved Wenger. Jérémie Aliadière, not quite sixteen, left his préformation at Clairefontaine to go to London with his parents and sign a seven-year contract with Arsenal in 1999 (Butterlin 1999). There is a fear that France’s semiperipheral position within the global football market is transforming it into a nursery country, feeding the major footballing nations, in a new form of colonisation. There have already been agreements between clubs that officialise this kind of relationship. Arsenal entered into a five-year agreement with SaintEtienne in 1998 to exchange trainees (see Eastham 1999: 72–73). As part of an agreement with Le Havre, in 2001, Liverpool signed the two top scorers from the French World Cup winning under-17 side, Anthony Le Tallec and Florent Sinama-Pongolle, with a view to their joining Liverpool in 2003 (Labrunie 2001c).
Summer 2002, a slack year for transfers throughout Europe because of financial uncertainties, none the less saw 17 more players leaving the French League for English clubs, including a number of Senegalese who had impressed in the World Cup, such as El-Hadji Diouf from Lens to Liverpool. Lille lost key players Cygan to Arsenal and Bruno Cheyrou to Liverpool, and cash-strapped PSG sold Distin, Anelka, E. Cissé, B. Mendy and Okocha (France Football, 6 August 2002). Strengths and Weaknesses of French Football The major weaknesses of French football have been related to its late and incomplete professionalisation, its small number of modern metropolises and the lack of interest in football in the capital city until recent years, its lack of an ingrained supporter tradition and the financial weakness of its major clubs that some chairmen have been tempted to overcome by sharp practice and corruption. Its recent strengths have come from its long-term interest in football as an international phenomenon, its State-backed coaching systems that have produced many technically gifted young players and influential coaches, and recent support from domestic media companies and the bigger French private companies.
Football entered the French national consciousness late compared to other European nations. It was imported by Anglophile French elites and by English and Scots exiles in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, and remained an amateur game until the 1930s. Since it remained amateur it was not dropped by the middle classes and remained less class defined than in Britain. Its popularity between the wars in small industrial towns also meant that it was adopted for their factory teams by industrialists, whose pressure led the football authorities to accept professionalism. The model of the professional club therefore tended to reflect the paternalistic structures and family values of the small factory. The strength of the professional game long reflected the socio-economic geography of France’s first (partial) industrialisation as football was adopted as a way of promoting local and regional identity in small industrial towns dotted across the country.
The Second World War and Occupation was a set back for its development, to the extent that the professional game had to begin again after the Liberation. This is part of the explanation for the term ‘incomplete professionalisation’ that has been coined to describe the organisation of football in France. Another factor was the availability of middle-class players who wished to play part-time in the pre- and post-war periods. Dominant British social values could happily allow the growth of football to depend on individual initiative, and its organisation and regulation could be left to autonomous bodies operating independently of the State and local government as businesses. In post-1944 France, on the other hand, football’s governing structures and clubs have been shaped by the French State’s concept of the public service and voluntary community service (le bénévolat), and by Republican interventionism, as opposed to laissez-faire individualism.
From the 1990s onwards this has been a bone of contention between the professional League and the French governing body, the FFF, whose authority has had official State backing, since the State delegates its authority to the federations to organise sports in its name. The State and local authorities have taken the notion of public service seriously by regulating and financing sports facilities and sports clubs, including professional football clubs, to a greater extent than in the rest of Europe, thus reflecting the dominant view that amateur and professional sport are essentially part of the same ‘movement’ or the same ‘family’ and should remain so.
This continuity between grass-roots and elite sport is another factor in football’s incomplete professionalisation. Whereas small or medium-sized towns still make themselves felt in the top two divisions, none the less, in the contemporary era of multinational companies, sports sponsorship, and global commercialism, French football is dominated by the big city clubs. The interests of the local authorities, with their executive mayors, coincide with those of the more ambitious city clubs, who share a desire to count on a European or even global level as the context of the nation-state loses its primacy. The French clubs with the biggest budgets are now from the major conurbations of Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, and the north of France, where Lens’s supremacy is being challenged by Lille, in a battle between the old industrial club and the modern city club.
Small town clubs are not generally attractive to major sponsors. European regional capitals on the other hand are part of a much bigger network of interests. France’s weakness in this sense is that it has fewer big conurbations than England or Germany. Paris of course is on an altogether bigger scale than the provincial cities, and another weakness for football has been that Paris was a post-war football desert until the late 1970s when PSG was implanted and, with serious political and commercial support, became the biggest French club of the 1990s. French clubs have only recently attracted numbers of spectators that remotely compare with other major European footballing countries. This followed remarkable growth in the popularity of the game in the 1990s as television coverage heightened the sport’s profile and French club teams and, more especially, the national team made their mark in international competitions.
There are, however, great differences between the best
supported and the worst. Football support has not had a tradition to build on,
except in one or two of the old-style clubs like Saint-Etienne and Lens, or in
Marseille where its local economic and psychological particularities found
expression in support of the successes and failures of OM. Traditional lack of
passion compounded by competition from new lifestyles in the newly affluent
1960s was overcome in the 1980s by a new form of fandom as militancy, as a
search for an identity that was not an inherited one.
Supporter cultures still reflect influences from Britain and Italy. Relatively innocuous but highly visible forms of ‘hooliganism’ have been associated with PSG fans, who had to invent themselves and their Ultra fan culture from the late 1970s into the 1980s. French club football is still more fragile in its implantation and less consistently successful at European level than its neighbours. Historically France has made an important contribution to the development and organisation of football as an international and world game – beyond its importance as a world footballing power. French administrators and journalists took leading roles in the organisation of the world-governing body FIFA, the creation of a World Cup, a European Nations Cup, and a European club championship. This is reflected in the interest taken by French governments in using sport as a tool of international diplomacy, a way of expressing French grandeur and expertise.
This official attitude to sport pre-dated Gaullism and still lives on after de Gaulle, for example in the very Gaullist organisation of the 1998 World Cup, in its planning, its execution and its objectives, which went far beyond a desire for success on the pitch. The key factor in French footballing success in recent years is generally recognised to be French coaching systems, that have produced a generation of highly talented players and managers. The systems include youth training in the INF and in professional clubs, the development of national and regional youth training centres for thirteen to fifteen-year-olds in the 1990s by Gérard Houllier as National Technical Director, and the interest and support of the State in the systematic training of coaches using a highly centralised system of qualifications. Fortuitously, in the post-Bosman era, products of this highly selective elite schooling found that they could go abroad to perfect their skills and toughen their resolve while earning far more money than French clubs could pay.
Through this trend French clubs have each lost an average of five or six potential first team players who now earn their living in other European leagues. This phenomenon undoubtedly helped the French international side by honing their competitiveness and experience while playing in the top European competitions, at least until the proliferation of games got the better of some players’ fitness and sharpness.
Supporter cultures still reflect influences from Britain and Italy. Relatively innocuous but highly visible forms of ‘hooliganism’ have been associated with PSG fans, who had to invent themselves and their Ultra fan culture from the late 1970s into the 1980s. French club football is still more fragile in its implantation and less consistently successful at European level than its neighbours. Historically France has made an important contribution to the development and organisation of football as an international and world game – beyond its importance as a world footballing power. French administrators and journalists took leading roles in the organisation of the world-governing body FIFA, the creation of a World Cup, a European Nations Cup, and a European club championship. This is reflected in the interest taken by French governments in using sport as a tool of international diplomacy, a way of expressing French grandeur and expertise.
This official attitude to sport pre-dated Gaullism and still lives on after de Gaulle, for example in the very Gaullist organisation of the 1998 World Cup, in its planning, its execution and its objectives, which went far beyond a desire for success on the pitch. The key factor in French footballing success in recent years is generally recognised to be French coaching systems, that have produced a generation of highly talented players and managers. The systems include youth training in the INF and in professional clubs, the development of national and regional youth training centres for thirteen to fifteen-year-olds in the 1990s by Gérard Houllier as National Technical Director, and the interest and support of the State in the systematic training of coaches using a highly centralised system of qualifications. Fortuitously, in the post-Bosman era, products of this highly selective elite schooling found that they could go abroad to perfect their skills and toughen their resolve while earning far more money than French clubs could pay.
Through this trend French clubs have each lost an average of five or six potential first team players who now earn their living in other European leagues. This phenomenon undoubtedly helped the French international side by honing their competitiveness and experience while playing in the top European competitions, at least until the proliferation of games got the better of some players’ fitness and sharpness.
The most idolised coach in France was of course the World
Cup winner Aimé Jacquet, who along with Zinedine Zidane had to bear the burden
of becoming national icons. Around both of them in their different ways the
media built ideological constructions about the meaning of the 1998 World Cup
victory as a political fable that promoted the idea of the complementarity of
old and new values in the new ‘France qui gagne’ and the success of
French-style integration.
The World Cup victory became a means of shedding a national inferiority complex and rejoicing in a modern ethnically diverse national identity. Players had achieved hero status in France before, and always by performances for ‘les Bleus’ rather than for club sides, since football had imprinted itself on the national consciousness as a vector of national values and identity through the national side. Raymond Kopa and Michel Platini achieved heroic status in this way in their time, but their status was also enhanced by their performances in clubs in Spain and Italy, as if they were regarded as French ambassadors representing their country abroad.
While dominating their eras, their significance was of a lesser order than that of Zidane. They had helped establish in the nation’s mind the idea that playing with style was more important than winning, an idea that Jacquet’s side dispelled. Zidane was arguably no more exceptional a player than his two illustrious predecessors, but to some, as a symbol of a multicultural France at ease with itself, and to others a role model of what could be achieved in a socially fractured society, he came to represent the central social and political issues of post-colonial France. He articulated through football the trauma of Franco-Algerian relations and the hope of reconciliation.
Modern footballers have become stars through television, and the impact of the 1998 World Cup was mainly a television-led phenomenon. This was not exclusively so, since in 1998 quality newspaper coverage of the event was important in forming opinion. However, the large number of big screens in cities across France allowed a sense of the imagined national community to take on some reality as thousands gathered to experience the matches together. In a real sense television has changed the way football is experienced. It has certainly brought football to many for the first time. But, in the era of payTV, football is becoming for most people a home entertainment commodity. What was a live spectacle expressing local community identity has been transformed into a television-mediated expression of commodity and commercial values.
Football has become crucial to the commercial success of television, just as television has made itself indispensable to the economics of football. Football sells subscriptions for Canal+ and advertising for TF1, who in turn have made football clubs and players rich. Exclusive television rights are the key new revenue stream that has turned football into a huge business. Canal+ in particular has a huge stranglehold on French club football, owning PSG, dominating television rights and involving itself in many other aspects of football’s production line. The question is, since the French TV audience’s interest in football is a recent and perhaps fragile one, can Canal+’s finances, which for reasons extraneous to football were showing for the first time in 2002 signs of fragility, withstand a loss of audience interest. Equally, can French football stand a sudden loss of television income? The business side of French professional football has had its many ups and downs. The 1980s saw a new set of values enter clubs with a new generation of businessmen chairmen. They tried to buy success by using modern business methods, at the same time as using football to promote the image of their own companies, and of any other companies willing to pay to use football’s image. They felt that commercial success would inevitably follow success on the pitch.
To achieve this, OM at least was prepared to use bribery. Success of a kind was achieved, domestically and in Europe. By the 1990s French club football had certainly reached a level where it was for the first time in history more or less comparable with any in Europe as measured in European competitions. However, the most prominent chairmen, Bez and Tapie, those responsible for the success of Girondins de Bordeaux and OM, fell from their pedestals and were convicted of corruption. It may be said, as a (dangerous?) generalisation, that the new businessmen chairmen of big city clubs seem more interested in business success than in success on the field, or rather they feel that business success is a prerequisite for footballing success, which is measured by and rewarded by success in Europe. Their recipe for business success is a level playing field with their European opponents in terms of being able to operate according to the same trading rules as any other business, in other words to complete the professionalisation of French football.
In this struggle they have had serious opponents: the football establishment dominated by amateur values and ministers who have been keen to protect French sport’s social role and ‘public service mission’. Neither of the latter have been able to contemplate a break between grass-roots sport and professional sport. Hence Minister Buffet, even more reluctantly than her predecessors, would only grant legal company status to professional clubs if hedged around with a number of constraints to prevent the profit motive from becoming the key factor within sport. The defenders of the traditional values of French football that survived throughout the twentieth century are resisting the next stage of the professionalisation of football. So entrenched are the positions that it may take a revolutionary change such as a breakaway from the French Federation by the big professional clubs. The sociologist Michel Crozier, in his book La Société bloquée (1970) demonstrated that in many domains of French society evolutionary reform was more difficult to achieve than explosive changes of a radical nature. If his thesis is applied to football, it may appear that such a revolutionary break is just around the corner, or may already have started.
The twelve months following the start of the 2001/02 football season saw many harbingers of change: the post-September 11 stockmarket falls, the reminder of the problems in the banlieues in the France–Algeria ‘friendly’, the shock of the French elections when the extreme-right appeared to matter again politically, the World Cup debacle in Korea, and the missed opportunities for celebrating the 1998 spirit. National optimism and selfconfidence within French football and French society in general took a knock. Does this herald retrenchment or radical change? Vive la Différence? The State, in France, has been the key guarantor of sporting values against the intrusion of market forces. It has given key support to the football establishment. FFF officials have usually been able to claim a double source of authority: one from below through elections from within the ‘football family’, the other from above by delegation from the State. Their position has been further legitimised by the voluntary and apparently altruistic nature of their involvement in a mission that is recognised by the State as a public service. Faure and Suaud describe their situation as one of structurally determined self-interest, leading to a perpetuation of the status quo.
They point to ‘the hijacking’ of public money in the way that public funds have been distributed to sport, giving football 42 per cent of the total local authority funds going to sport when football has only 17 per cent of all registered sports practitioners. Within this funding given to football, 70.7 per cent went to the elite side of the sport and only 15.5 per cent to amateur clubs in structural grants, 5.7 per cent to ‘formation’, and 3.7 per cent to events (official Ministry figures for 1992, cited in Faure and Suaud 1999: 242). This has been an incentive for the small professional clubs to remain objective supporters of the status quo. The big clubs and the small clubs were divided by the issue of youth coaching and the exodus. By supporting a more liberal and deregulated approach the big clubs will inevitably accelerate the youth exodus that the smaller clubs, the Federation and the Ministry want to stop. However, the big clubs are generally more often ‘buying clubs’ rather than ‘clubs formateurs’, so they have comparatively less interest in ‘formation’.
Whereas professional football clubs have become part of the entertainment industry, and there is an enormous gap in practice between the worlds of amateur and professional football, the governance of the sport retains the notion of a pyramid with grass roots at the bottom and the elite at the top, and an unbroken continuity between the two. At the same time, as Faure and Suaud put it (1999: 244), understandings of the notion of ‘professionalism’ within French football have not evolved as in other domains where the term connotes ‘competence’ and ‘reliability’. The FFF and the Ministry are suspicious of the business values associated with professional football; they are seen as a danger to the public service mission of sport.
The UCPF on the other hand want to be recognised as ‘professionals’ rather than feeling mistrusted and ‘de-professionalised’; they want the freedom to run their own affairs. The professional clubs have thus decided to contest the domestic French interpretation of ‘sport as an exception’. They are challenging the internal laws of the way sport is organised by having recourse to the notion that everyone is equal before the law. As the President of the UCPF, Gervais Martel (chairman of Lens) declared: ‘We do not want to be given lessons in right and wrong: amateurism is not a sufficient guarantee of good conduct, professionalism is much more professional than people imagine. In a word, we want to be considered like adults capable of being in charge of our own destiny’ (Martel 1993, quoted in Faure and Suaud 1999: 248).
France is the country that has protested most loudly against the effects of globalisation in terms of the economy and in terms of culture and language, and invented the idea of ‘l’exception culturelle’. The struggle within French football between the governing body and the Ministry on the one hand and the big professional clubs on the other may usefully be seen in these terms. It is a battle between those whose power is exercised in and is dependent on the national context and who believe in an ‘exception sportive’, and those who have to operate within the commercial realities of the world of professional football and wish to be free to operate according to the rules of the global marketplace. Since club football at the elite level now operates in a European not to say global dimension, and since professional football is now clearly subject to European competition law and to employment laws on freedom of movement within the EU (the Bosman ruling), the French approach to sport and to the dependent position of its professional football clubs finds itself in contradiction with European law which rejects the notion of the ‘sporting exception’.
The belief in the role of the Republican State as both protector of the rights of the individual and the ultimate judge of the public interest and of public good is so ingrained into French culture that it is difficult to accept that a national sports governing body or a professional football league could derive its own legitimacy from its intrinsic activities (Faure and Suaud 1999: 254–256). France is a highly centralised (‘Jacobin’) State, whereas Germany is highly decentralised. France is highly statist whereas Britain is highly libertarian. French traditional culture finds it difficult to accept that sport can essentially be dependent on individual initiative and its organisation and regulation left to autonomous bodies operating independently of the State.
The current debates within French football, then, go much deeper than issues to do with sport. They go to the heart of French society and culture, and the notion of French exceptionalism. How long will this ‘différence’ manage to live on? In his perceptive analysis of ‘The French Exception’, Andrew Jack described France as ‘a modern country trying to wrest itself from a post-war corporatist straitjacket . . . while its private sector has changed in recent years, the same cannot be said of its public sector’ (Jack 1999: 277–278). Jack might also have included the voluntary sector in his judgement on the public sector. Despite all predictions of its forthcoming demise, the French exception has none the less proved remarkably durable.
The World Cup victory became a means of shedding a national inferiority complex and rejoicing in a modern ethnically diverse national identity. Players had achieved hero status in France before, and always by performances for ‘les Bleus’ rather than for club sides, since football had imprinted itself on the national consciousness as a vector of national values and identity through the national side. Raymond Kopa and Michel Platini achieved heroic status in this way in their time, but their status was also enhanced by their performances in clubs in Spain and Italy, as if they were regarded as French ambassadors representing their country abroad.
While dominating their eras, their significance was of a lesser order than that of Zidane. They had helped establish in the nation’s mind the idea that playing with style was more important than winning, an idea that Jacquet’s side dispelled. Zidane was arguably no more exceptional a player than his two illustrious predecessors, but to some, as a symbol of a multicultural France at ease with itself, and to others a role model of what could be achieved in a socially fractured society, he came to represent the central social and political issues of post-colonial France. He articulated through football the trauma of Franco-Algerian relations and the hope of reconciliation.
Modern footballers have become stars through television, and the impact of the 1998 World Cup was mainly a television-led phenomenon. This was not exclusively so, since in 1998 quality newspaper coverage of the event was important in forming opinion. However, the large number of big screens in cities across France allowed a sense of the imagined national community to take on some reality as thousands gathered to experience the matches together. In a real sense television has changed the way football is experienced. It has certainly brought football to many for the first time. But, in the era of payTV, football is becoming for most people a home entertainment commodity. What was a live spectacle expressing local community identity has been transformed into a television-mediated expression of commodity and commercial values.
Football has become crucial to the commercial success of television, just as television has made itself indispensable to the economics of football. Football sells subscriptions for Canal+ and advertising for TF1, who in turn have made football clubs and players rich. Exclusive television rights are the key new revenue stream that has turned football into a huge business. Canal+ in particular has a huge stranglehold on French club football, owning PSG, dominating television rights and involving itself in many other aspects of football’s production line. The question is, since the French TV audience’s interest in football is a recent and perhaps fragile one, can Canal+’s finances, which for reasons extraneous to football were showing for the first time in 2002 signs of fragility, withstand a loss of audience interest. Equally, can French football stand a sudden loss of television income? The business side of French professional football has had its many ups and downs. The 1980s saw a new set of values enter clubs with a new generation of businessmen chairmen. They tried to buy success by using modern business methods, at the same time as using football to promote the image of their own companies, and of any other companies willing to pay to use football’s image. They felt that commercial success would inevitably follow success on the pitch.
To achieve this, OM at least was prepared to use bribery. Success of a kind was achieved, domestically and in Europe. By the 1990s French club football had certainly reached a level where it was for the first time in history more or less comparable with any in Europe as measured in European competitions. However, the most prominent chairmen, Bez and Tapie, those responsible for the success of Girondins de Bordeaux and OM, fell from their pedestals and were convicted of corruption. It may be said, as a (dangerous?) generalisation, that the new businessmen chairmen of big city clubs seem more interested in business success than in success on the field, or rather they feel that business success is a prerequisite for footballing success, which is measured by and rewarded by success in Europe. Their recipe for business success is a level playing field with their European opponents in terms of being able to operate according to the same trading rules as any other business, in other words to complete the professionalisation of French football.
In this struggle they have had serious opponents: the football establishment dominated by amateur values and ministers who have been keen to protect French sport’s social role and ‘public service mission’. Neither of the latter have been able to contemplate a break between grass-roots sport and professional sport. Hence Minister Buffet, even more reluctantly than her predecessors, would only grant legal company status to professional clubs if hedged around with a number of constraints to prevent the profit motive from becoming the key factor within sport. The defenders of the traditional values of French football that survived throughout the twentieth century are resisting the next stage of the professionalisation of football. So entrenched are the positions that it may take a revolutionary change such as a breakaway from the French Federation by the big professional clubs. The sociologist Michel Crozier, in his book La Société bloquée (1970) demonstrated that in many domains of French society evolutionary reform was more difficult to achieve than explosive changes of a radical nature. If his thesis is applied to football, it may appear that such a revolutionary break is just around the corner, or may already have started.
The twelve months following the start of the 2001/02 football season saw many harbingers of change: the post-September 11 stockmarket falls, the reminder of the problems in the banlieues in the France–Algeria ‘friendly’, the shock of the French elections when the extreme-right appeared to matter again politically, the World Cup debacle in Korea, and the missed opportunities for celebrating the 1998 spirit. National optimism and selfconfidence within French football and French society in general took a knock. Does this herald retrenchment or radical change? Vive la Différence? The State, in France, has been the key guarantor of sporting values against the intrusion of market forces. It has given key support to the football establishment. FFF officials have usually been able to claim a double source of authority: one from below through elections from within the ‘football family’, the other from above by delegation from the State. Their position has been further legitimised by the voluntary and apparently altruistic nature of their involvement in a mission that is recognised by the State as a public service. Faure and Suaud describe their situation as one of structurally determined self-interest, leading to a perpetuation of the status quo.
They point to ‘the hijacking’ of public money in the way that public funds have been distributed to sport, giving football 42 per cent of the total local authority funds going to sport when football has only 17 per cent of all registered sports practitioners. Within this funding given to football, 70.7 per cent went to the elite side of the sport and only 15.5 per cent to amateur clubs in structural grants, 5.7 per cent to ‘formation’, and 3.7 per cent to events (official Ministry figures for 1992, cited in Faure and Suaud 1999: 242). This has been an incentive for the small professional clubs to remain objective supporters of the status quo. The big clubs and the small clubs were divided by the issue of youth coaching and the exodus. By supporting a more liberal and deregulated approach the big clubs will inevitably accelerate the youth exodus that the smaller clubs, the Federation and the Ministry want to stop. However, the big clubs are generally more often ‘buying clubs’ rather than ‘clubs formateurs’, so they have comparatively less interest in ‘formation’.
Whereas professional football clubs have become part of the entertainment industry, and there is an enormous gap in practice between the worlds of amateur and professional football, the governance of the sport retains the notion of a pyramid with grass roots at the bottom and the elite at the top, and an unbroken continuity between the two. At the same time, as Faure and Suaud put it (1999: 244), understandings of the notion of ‘professionalism’ within French football have not evolved as in other domains where the term connotes ‘competence’ and ‘reliability’. The FFF and the Ministry are suspicious of the business values associated with professional football; they are seen as a danger to the public service mission of sport.
The UCPF on the other hand want to be recognised as ‘professionals’ rather than feeling mistrusted and ‘de-professionalised’; they want the freedom to run their own affairs. The professional clubs have thus decided to contest the domestic French interpretation of ‘sport as an exception’. They are challenging the internal laws of the way sport is organised by having recourse to the notion that everyone is equal before the law. As the President of the UCPF, Gervais Martel (chairman of Lens) declared: ‘We do not want to be given lessons in right and wrong: amateurism is not a sufficient guarantee of good conduct, professionalism is much more professional than people imagine. In a word, we want to be considered like adults capable of being in charge of our own destiny’ (Martel 1993, quoted in Faure and Suaud 1999: 248).
France is the country that has protested most loudly against the effects of globalisation in terms of the economy and in terms of culture and language, and invented the idea of ‘l’exception culturelle’. The struggle within French football between the governing body and the Ministry on the one hand and the big professional clubs on the other may usefully be seen in these terms. It is a battle between those whose power is exercised in and is dependent on the national context and who believe in an ‘exception sportive’, and those who have to operate within the commercial realities of the world of professional football and wish to be free to operate according to the rules of the global marketplace. Since club football at the elite level now operates in a European not to say global dimension, and since professional football is now clearly subject to European competition law and to employment laws on freedom of movement within the EU (the Bosman ruling), the French approach to sport and to the dependent position of its professional football clubs finds itself in contradiction with European law which rejects the notion of the ‘sporting exception’.
The belief in the role of the Republican State as both protector of the rights of the individual and the ultimate judge of the public interest and of public good is so ingrained into French culture that it is difficult to accept that a national sports governing body or a professional football league could derive its own legitimacy from its intrinsic activities (Faure and Suaud 1999: 254–256). France is a highly centralised (‘Jacobin’) State, whereas Germany is highly decentralised. France is highly statist whereas Britain is highly libertarian. French traditional culture finds it difficult to accept that sport can essentially be dependent on individual initiative and its organisation and regulation left to autonomous bodies operating independently of the State.
The current debates within French football, then, go much deeper than issues to do with sport. They go to the heart of French society and culture, and the notion of French exceptionalism. How long will this ‘différence’ manage to live on? In his perceptive analysis of ‘The French Exception’, Andrew Jack described France as ‘a modern country trying to wrest itself from a post-war corporatist straitjacket . . . while its private sector has changed in recent years, the same cannot be said of its public sector’ (Jack 1999: 277–278). Jack might also have included the voluntary sector in his judgement on the public sector. Despite all predictions of its forthcoming demise, the French exception has none the less proved remarkably durable.
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