Establishing Football in the French National Consciousness/Sports

Establishing Football in the French National Consciousness

In France the vocabulary of ‘le football’ (or ‘le foot’ for short) is still partly English, revealing the sport’s origins. Whereas ‘le goal’ (goalkeeper) is now more commonly called ‘le gardien’, the French quite happily cry: ‘Penalty!’ or ‘Corner!’, and talk of ‘un match’, ‘un club’, ‘la Ligue’ (League), ‘le coach’, ‘un short’ (shorts), ‘le transfert’, ‘les fans’, ‘un tacle’, ‘un dribble’, ‘shooter’ (to shoot). It was from Britain, where Association Football as a sport was already established with firm organisational and regulatory foundations, that football and other modern team sports were imported into France in the late nineteenth century. The first English clubs had been founded in the 1850s, a national regulatory body, the Football Association, in 1863, and by 1885 there was already a national professional championship in England. The first ‘French championship’ (amateur still) did not exist until 1894, and even then only six clubs entered and it was national only in the sense that the Paris press is called national, since all were based in the capital. It took until 1932 for a national professional league to get off the ground. In the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, class and religious divides that split the nation played their part in the slow establishment of football as a national professional sport, as well as the aristocratic values of the French sporting ethos promoted by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Movement. However, French football enthusiasts played a determining role in the early internationalisation of the game, and have continued to do so in more recent times. International regulation, the establishment of the international governing body FIFA (note the combination of French and English in the name, Fédération internationale de football association), the World Cup competition, UEFA, European Club competitions, the European Nations Championship, all owe much to celebrated French administrators of the game. A French tradition of central State regulation was also influential in the above developments. It has certainly played a role in the establishment of a particular set of values associated with French football that have only recently come under serious threat: these are values that take for granted the necessary intervention of the State and publicly accountable authorities in order to establish democratic principles and ensure the public good in the organisation of the sport, from grass roots to the elite clubs. The Adoption of Football and French Ideological Divisions Sport became part of a national mission after the military invasion and defeat of France in 1870/71 by Bismarck’s new Germany and its annexation of Alsace and almost half of Lorraine. The new and fragile Republican regime promoted physical fitness among the nation’s youth in order to counter the idea of French national decline and to prepare the nation’s youth for a war of revenge. Gymnastics, shooting and semi-military activities became popular with the more nationalistic practitioners. For individual participants, however, enjoyment and the social aspects outweighed the militaristic and moral values the organisers put forward (Holt 1981: 58). Competitive team sports as an alternative form of physical exercise and leisure activity were imported initially by British expatriates. The first French football club was founded in Le Havre as ‘Le Havre Athletic Club’ in 1872 by Oxford and Cambridge University men working in shipping and transit companies (Holt 1981: 65). Today the professional Le Havre team still plays in light-blue and dark-blue halves. However, just as multisports clubs were in vogue in France, the club was not devoted exclusively to association football – rugby football and a combination ball game were also played. Other English expatriates founded the short-lived Paris Association Football Club in 1887 as the first exclusively soccer playing club. In about 1889 some of its members transferred allegiance to the new Standard Athletic Club. In 1891 two significant soccer clubs were founded: White-Rovers (by English workers) and Gordon FC (by Scots). The first truly French association football club seems to have been Le Club français (1892), whose title implies the existence of other British or at least British-inspired clubs. One or two other of the Parisian multi-sports clubs established association football sections, including the Racing Club de France and Le Stade français, founded by pupils and old-boys from exclusive Parisian lycées (Holt 1981: 65–66). By 1893/94 football had a significant enough presence that clubs were allowed membership of the USFSA, a multisports federation presided over by Baron Pierre de Coubertin. The USFSA created the first (amateur) ‘national’ competition between six Parisian clubs in 1894. It was called le championnat de France, but unlike today’s championship, it took the form of a knock-out competition. In these early days, before the First World War, football was played by an urban social elite in imitation of its elitist amateur British roots (à la Corinthian Casuals) with an estimated 2,000 players in France by the turn of the century (Bourg 1986). A fascination for all things British – Britain was seen as the home of modernity, free trade, and sportsmanship (le fair-play) – encouraged the adoption of football by some of the aspiring middle classes as a way of distinguishing themselves from the working class (Lanfranchi and Wahl 1998). Football was perceived as less nationalistic than gymnastics (as seen in the club names). While Paris and the Channel ports were the first to feel the English influence, football also spread to Mediterranean ports like Marseille and Sète. British workers played amongst themselves, then the French joined in. French students who studied in Britain also helped import enthusiasm for the game, especially to Paris. The existence of a similar traditional game, la soule, in Brittany and Normandy helped the game spread in the north-west of France. During this period football had difficulty getting public recognition, papers tending to favour other sports. The widely read sports paper L ’Auto generally devoted its front page to rugby. This despite the fact that by the turn of the century association football had 350 registered teams and rugby only 141. Growth was such during the belle époque that by 1911 about 2,000 football clubs flourished (Thomas et al. 1991: 108–112; Wahl 1990a: 126–129). Football was inevitably affected by political and social events in its early history. Following the establishment of the Republican regime as Napoleon III’s Empire collapsed in the debacle of the 1870 war, football could not remain immune from the major ideological divide in French society between the secularising Republican left and the Catholic traditionalist right. The Republican leader of the 1870s, Gambetta, had pointed the finger at Clericalism as the real enemy of the Republican conception of France, and the Republicans first recovered secular influence over education in the 1880s, before separating Church and State in 1905. Parallel development of football and other sports clubs on each side of the ideological divide took place, and is sometimes still visible, as for example in the market town of Auxerre in Burgundy, where alongside the D1 club A J Auxerroise is Le Stade Auxerrois, still in the regional leagues that its neighbour emerged from in the 1960s. Le Stade was founded as a secular sports club whereas A J (Association de la jeunesse or youth club) was the Church sports club. Some older supporters of Le Stade reportedly still refuse to set foot in the Division 1 stadium across the way (Sowden 1997: 10–11). Four major national sports federations (governing bodies) had grown up, divided ideologically (lay or Catholic), and also distinct in that two were omnisport federations, and two solely devoted to football: Union des sociétés françaises sportives et athlétiques (USFSA), Fédération gymnastique et sportive des patronages de France (FGSPF), Ligue de football association (LFA), and Fédération cycliste et amateur de France (FCAF) (Thibert and Rethacker 1996: 34). Henri Delaunay, after a playing career with L ’Etoile des Deux Lacs, became Secretary-General of the FGSPF, founded by the Catholic Church as a proselytising tool. The French Catholic clergy, seeing themselves deprived of influence over French youth by the secular educational reforms of the Republican governments of the 1880s and the organisation of a universal free State educational system from which religious teaching was banned, reacted by creating through local ‘patronages de quartier’ new places for young people’s out-ofschool or post-school activities, under the FGSPF as the national co-ordinating body. Influenced by association football’s popularity with the Parisian middle classes, the patronages chose to concentrate on soccer rather than rugby in promoting a team sport, and they helped spread the game to other parts of the country (Augustin 1990: 101). Army service also helped spread the game. In the period from the 1880s to the First World War, compulsory national service brought most young men into the army, where football became a common recreation, with inter-regimental and inter-regional games. However, in the course of the interminable Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906) attitudes to the role of the army were sharply divided both inside and outside the ranks. The army itself was torn between the traditionalist, Catholic ideology of its officer class and its Republican duties to the State. A simple incident is illustrative of the effect on soccer of these various rifts cutting through society as a whole, and reflected in disputes between the different federations vying with each other over regulating and organising football. These disputes had led to the resignation from FIFA of the lay multi-sports federation USFSA, which happened to be the only federation recognised by the French army. In February 1912, the French international team selected to meet Switzerland included a certain Triboulet, a left-winger, doing his national service in Cholet. He asked for a 36-hour pass to enable him to play. However, while the army gave him leave, they forbade him to play, since the French national team were playing under the banner of FIFA. Triboulet caught the train to SaintOuen in the northern Paris suburbs with the firm idea of sitting in the stand to watch the game, but no replacement had been arranged, leaving France with only ten players. Under pressure from fellow players and spectators, he was persuaded to take the field, and turned out to be the star of the match. He scored the second goal and made two others in France’s 4–1 victory (a rare enough occurrence in those days). The next day a proud comrade sent a newspaper cutting to Triboulet’s commanding officer, and the national hero found himself serving a week in an army gaol for disobeying orders (Thibert and Rethacker 1991: 32–33). In the face of these divisions, in a ‘climate of sectarianism’ (Holt 1981: 201), Henri Delaunay of the FGSPF was instrumental in founding an umbrella body (Comité français interfédéral – CFI) bringing together the federations that were in competition with each other for running. Delaunay (a known Anglophile as his nickname of ‘Sir Henri’ showed) had attended the English Cup Final at Crystal Palace in 1902 and was inspired to set up something similar in France, partly for its own sake, but also to unify the warring federations. However, it took until the end of the First World War to organise a national knock-out competition open to all clubs irrespective of their governing body. The success of the French Cup (‘la Coupe de France’) increased football’s popularity and unity at the top. By overcoming ideological divergence, internal politics, and personal rivalries, it also led to the transformation of the CFI into a single French Football Federation in 1919 (Thibert and Rethacker 1991: 40). While the ‘Union sacrée’ (Sacred Union) had helped the nation put aside its differences to face the First World War, these social and ideological conflicts were to continue to structure political and social relations up to and beyond the Second World War, as they became complicated by and gradually overshadowed by class and political conflicts opposing capital and labour. The resolution of differences within football’s governing bodies as early as 1919, then, is a tribute to the unifying power of the sport, which was becoming the nation’s mass sport with its own specialist press such as the magazine Football founded 1910, and France Football in 1923 (Wahl 1989: 352). Football, Social Class and ‘Incomplete Professionalisation’ It was between the wars that football really spread to the French industrial working class, and also to the countryside, since large numbers of ordinary soldiers had come across football in the trenches (Wahl 1989: 137–139). The press carried reports of heroic footballers at the front and tributes to football’s martyrs. Indeed, the French Cup was named after Charles Simon, founderpresident of the CFI, killed in action in 1915 (Wahl 1989: 132–133; Pickup 1999: 30). There were press campaigns to raise money to send footballs to the troops (Wahl 1989: 134). Those who were fortunate enough to escape the carnage found that, back home, paternalistic employers started actively to encourage football as a way of structuring the lives of their workforce, while at the same time bringing physical and moral education to them. As a team sport, football seemed to fit the needs of a big factory better than individualistic activities such as gymnastics, which had lost popularity. Alsace and Lorraine had been recaptured, the War of Revenge had been won, and at such a terrible price in human lives that the belligerence of neo-military sports could be put aside with a clear conscience. The values inherent in football were thought to foster teamwork, leadership, as well as local pride – indeed pride in the factory through its team (Fridenson 1989). The history of the industrial worker tells us much about football players and spectators in France, but with certain differences from England, as will be seen in more detail in following chapters.

Jacques Marseille (1990) hypothesises that French football embodies the particular shape of the French industrial revolution of the twentieth century, industrialisation that was based on the small and medium-sized enterprise (rather than on big companies) and on the long-standing strength of the family firm – firms that have been closely linked to football clubs from small to middlingsized towns: Roubaix, Sedan, Sochaux, Reims, Saint-Etienne. It was this industrial link to football that led to the sport’s eventual professionalisation in 1932, although it was preceded by a period of shamateurism (‘amateurisme marron’), and followed by a period of ‘sham professionalism’. True amateurism was being eroded as regular competitive games were established. From about 1,000 clubs in 1920, the number almost quadrupled in five years, and by the later 1930s there were 6,000 (Holt 1981: 70). The number of players registered with the FFF (created in 1919) multiplied: in 1920, 30,000; 1926, 100,000; 1931, 130,000. Paying spectators increased correspondingly: 10,000 at the 1919 Cup Final, 30,000 in 1928 (Lanfranchi and Wahl 1998). As spectator interest grew, especially through the French Cup competition, certain club directors saw an opportunity for financial or social gains to be made, and a market for players (i.e. transfers) came into existence. First, some players’ transport expenses were reimbursed, and kit was provided free. Well-paid or undemanding jobs were found in the club chairman’s company. This attracted moral condemnation from those who frowned on the transformation of sport as practice into sport as entertainment or spectacle. The Federation tried to ban transfers by imposing a year’s exclusion from first XI’s for those who moved club, but then exceptions to this rule became the majority of cases. The idea of transfer fees was raised to compensate clubs losing players. Supporters of professionalism argued that it would help improve the standards of French football and presented the issue as a battle for the modernisation of the sport. By the time the FFF agreed to set up a committee to look at the issue in 1929, professional leagues existed not only in England and Scotland but also in Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary, and Italy had established a ‘non-amateur’ player status. Gabriel Hanot, and a fellow journalist named Gambardella, argued not for a fully professional league as in England but for a mix of professional and amateur players within clubs belonging to a national league. The FFF eventually found its hand forced by the wealthy automobile industrialist Jean-Pierre Peugeot, who, imitating Agnelli at Fiat, invested heavily in his local team Sochaux and merged it with AS Montbéliard, making it openly professional. In a challenge to the governing body of the sport, he invited the eight teams most in favour of change to compete in his Coupe Sochaux. The FFF, in order not to lose control of the sport, accepted professional player status, while retaining the amateur status of clubs; that is, they were still to be run as non-profit-making associations with unpaid officials. Thus the first professional championship was able to start with the FFF’s blessing in autumn 1932 with 20 clubs playing in two geographically divided groups of ten. By the 1933/34 season there were 35 professional clubs, divided into a First Division (14 clubs), a Second Division (North) and a Second Division (South) (reflecting the English system – except that in the latter it was the Third Division that was divided on regional lines). This decision did not create a proper profession overnight. Clubs kept control of players, imposing a maximum wage, powers of suspension, and a contract that was a retain-and-transfer system for the playing life of the employee (le contrat à vie). Importantly, in differentiating the French and English situations, ‘professional’ players in France could keep another paid activity, thus enabling students and other ‘semi-professionals’ (as we might now call them) to stay in the game. Professional football was not seen as an exclusively working-class profession as in England – nor did it move in that direction. Lanfranchi and Wahl (1998) give the example of the 1934 championship winning team of Sète that included players listed as: literature graduate, law student, two medical students, alongside an Algerian Arab labourer and a Parisian jeweller. All had signed professional forms but had another regular activity. Some professional soldiers also played for pro teams. In the mining town of Alès, miners tended to choose the best amateur clubs that could get them stable office jobs rather than opting for professional status. Even as late as the 1950s Raymond Kopa recalled that he had seen professional football as a way of getting himself a training as an electrician to avoid going underground in the mine, and had never contemplated being able to devote himself entirely to football. Lanfranchi and Wahl comment that the situation constitutes a French exception in a sport that had seen the English middle classes voluntarily exclude themselves from a sport they saw as the ‘people’s game’ as soon as it turned professional. However, that had been half-a-century before, and social class differences were lessening in 1930s France. There was now a less impermeable barrier between the workers and the middle class, especially in France where there were fewer (and smaller) industrial conurbations, and no equivalent to the homogeneous working-class communities of the size of Birmingham or Manchester. Already at this time foreign players were imported into French football, which has been cosmopolitan since its inception. English and Scottish imports were especially popular for their robust game, and passing and heading abilities. A centre-half, Jock McGowan (Olympique lillois, 1932), is described as ‘built like a wardrobe, broad, powerful, as strong as an ox, solid on his bow legs and using beer à gogo as his training regime’. Those coming towards the end of their career often tried it for a year, but adapted with difficulty being unable to integrate because of problems of language and being from a different social and cultural background. A certain Jack Trees’s contract was torn-up by his club when he ‘contracted a malady that had nothing to do with football’. Hungarians and Austrians had more success. Studies by Faure and Suaud (1994b) and Lanfranchi and Wahl (1998) use the term ‘incomplete professionalisation’ to describe the situation. Clubs (chairmen and directors) and players, as well as the Federation (national administrators of the game), acted out an amateur model of football, refusing (‘obstinately’, add Lanfranchi and Wahl) to apply fully the rules of the free market to football. They use the term ‘dilettantism’ and ‘improvisation’ to describe prewar relations between the stakeholders. Football was seen as ‘pin money’ and neither players nor directors generally were fully committed to the sport. This is confirmed by the use of the term ‘professionnalisme marron’ (sham professionalism) by one player of the time. It was not uncommon for professional clubs to revert back to their amateur status after two or three years as professional. The players may have turned professional, but the clubs had stayed amateur and had been run as such. Only a small number of wealthy industrialists had committed themselves to clubs. Other club chairmen were local notables looking to improve their local celebrity and symbolic capital through sport. Only Sochaux had a full-time ‘directeur sportif’ in charge of recruitment of players. Lanfranchi and Wahl (1998) interpret the process of professionalisation in France as follows:

Whereas in England or Austria, professionalisation emerged out of the conjunction of a strong demand by urban populations for sporting entertainment and the industrialists’ plan to control the masses, in France the introduction of a professional league was a response to the desire of those who ran football to regulate the market and control players’ wages. It was not to make profits, that was anyway forbidden by the law of association [under which the clubs were run]. (Lanfranchi and Wahl 1998: 322)

All this suggests that French football professionalised around amateur values. None of its stakeholders, whether players, clubs or governing bodies, applied business logic to the sport; rather they applied family values. There emerged from the change a hybrid system significantly different from the models being set in place elsewhere in Europe. The Set-back of the Second World War: the Ideological Cul-de-sac of the Vichy Years General mobilisation in the autumn of 1939, the rapid defeat of France in the spring of 1940, occupation by German troops, the symbolic handshake between Hitler and the new Head of State Marshal Pétain that introduced the collaborationist regime, the loss – again – of Alsace-Lorraine and the division of the rest of France into Occupied Zone (northern half plus the western seaboard) and so-called Free Zone – all this was bound severely to disrupt the recently formed professional league. The ideology of Pétain’s Vichy regime was anti-Republican, authoritarian, traditionalist, corporatist, and founded on a feeling of betrayal and national decline under the preceding Republican regime and especially under the socialist-led government of the Popular Front (1936– 38). Nostalgia for a golden age of pre-urban France, where the strongest values were those derived from provincial France and ‘la terre’ (the soil), saw the national slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ replaced by ‘Travail, famille, patrie’ (Work, Family, Motherland). The regime’s determination to effect a ‘national revolution’ in all areas of French life did not bode well for the ‘business’ of professional football. The domestic competition had already been inevitably affected during the 1939/40 season, not least by loss of players and spectators following army callup. Then, under direction from the Vichy government, the national competition was divided into three (later two) zones. Travel was not easy in the Occupied Zone, but separate championships were contested annually in the zone Nord and the zone Sud. A national perspective was retained by having la Coupe (the French Cup), which, until the Liberation, reverted to its original name, the Coupe Charles Simon, contested by the winners of the two respective zones at Colombes (in the Paris region). Standards of play reputedly fell through loss of players and general disruption. Vichy attempted to reform the whole of sport. Its Commissariat général à l’éducation nationale et aux sports went back to the old idea of the need to use regimented gymnastic training to develop the physical fitness and moral fibre of the country’s youth. The Commissariat required footballers ‘to practise a trade outside football’, effectively abolishing professionalism. The tennis star Jean Borotra, new haut-commissaire aux Sports (High Commissioner for Sport), developed a rationale for the new role for sport in French society that had echoes of the elitism and purposeful idealism of Coubertin: it was based on the idea that playing sport was morally superior to watching it for the purposes of entertainment. The logical consequence of this sport-for-all policy was amateurism. Pickup (1999: 33) quotes Borotra as shunning professionalism ‘because it was associated with financial gain, whereas sport should be “chivalrous and disinterested”’. Borotra believed that shamateurism was ‘the principal cause of the moral weakness noted in recent years in some sporting circles and of the disrepute into which certain sports had fallen’. Apart from ideologically inspired policies, there were other rather gratuitous changes such as reducing playing-time to 80 minutes (it returned to 90 minutes

in 1942 after Borotra’s departure). Such decrees had one significant consequence for the continuity of French football’s governing bodies after the Liberation: the resignation of Jules Rimet as President of the French Football Federation (Pickup 1999: 34). This will certainly have helped French football and its administrative organs to recover from the collaborationist period and indeed escape the sometimes brutal ‘épuration’ (literally ‘cleansing’ of collaborators) at the Liberation, since Rimet’s resignation signalled a refusal to collaborate. Vichy’s attempts to outlaw professionalism went through various stages. A form of professional status was reintroduced in 1942, but hedged around with various conditions: no transfers were allowed; professionals had to play for the club they were registered with before the war; and no club could have more than seven professionals on their books. Delaunay et al.’s history of French football interprets the compulsory fielding of four (inevitably local) amateur players by clubs as a desire to create genuinely ‘regional clubs’ (Pickup 1999: 34). In 1943 the High Commissioner decreed that all clubs would have amateur status, whilst professional players would become State civil servants (fonctionnaires d’Etat). Further, they would play for one of 16 federal teams, each representing a region. Pickup says these federal teams did allow a degree of continuity for professional football and were a haven for those players who were able to avoid deportation to Germany through the Service du travail obligatoire (STO), the compulsory labour scheme which operated while France was occupied. However, the French international Fred Aston recalls that, playing during the Occupation for the Paris Capitale team, he and other former professionals were given civilservant status and were sent into schools to justify their pay, and indeed to prevent them from being sent to Germany under the STO (Brochen 2001c: 17). Vichy’s radical reform never really became bedded in. Initially the federal teams were scarcely ‘regional’ in character, the federal competition was not properly financed, and the competition was interrupted by the advancing allied forces that gradually liberated France in the course of the summer and autumn of 1944 (Pickup 1999: 34). The general desire of the Resistance-inspired governments that replaced Vichy to sweep away the dead-end of Pétainism allowed French football to return reasonably speedily to its former shape, especially as there had in fact been little change of personnel in the running of the clubs; nor was there any huge ‘épuration’ (Wahl 1989). By the end of 1944, a national championship was organised for 24 clubs split into two groups, one North and one South (transport infrastructures were inevitably in disrepair). It took until the 1946/47 season to come back to one national First Division of 20 clubs. There was understandably a feeling of starting again to build professional football that had undergone an incomplete (or even false) professionalisation only shortly before the interruption of the war and was therefore in a stage of development that lagged even further behind that in Britain. Sport, Freedom of Association and Public Service Values Given the initial refusal to adopt business values in the early years of professionalisation and the war’s interruption of the professional system, an essential component of French football is its link to the voluntary sector, municipal life and participatory democracy. Post-war the State has guaranteed the public service values that pervade sport in France by adding regulatory and funding frameworks that tie grass-roots and elite sport together – ties that recent developments in the commercialisation of sport are threatening to put asunder. We have seen how French clubs professionalised in the 1930s, very late compared to Britain, and only half-heartedly, whereas Newton Heath – later to change their name to Manchester United – was paying its players legally by 1885. Most English clubs formed themselves into limited companies in the nineteenth century to protect their founders from financial liability from any club debts, and, although under FA rules they were not able to be used as tradable speculative companies, they were none the less businesses from the start (Conn 1997: 32). French clubs on the other hand have developed under the structures of a very French institution, the so-called ‘association 1901’ or ‘association à but non lucratif’ (non-profit-making association). The law of 1901, establishing the freedom of association, was seen at the time in France as a major advance in democratic rights. For the first time in its history the French State authorised any group of citizens to come together legally to undertake a common activity of their choice. At the height of the secularisation and Republicanisation of French civil society, the measure was partly to make it easier for secular and Republican groups to come together in order to challenge the grip of the religious congregations on social activity (Collinot 1997: 4). In France, in the early century when sports clubs were mushrooming, the 1901 law was the natural statute under which to create small-town amateur clubs like the Association de la Jeunesse auxerroise sports club in 1905. When such clubs turned professional, the club’s officers found that the 1901 law provided all the necessary legal protection for club officials, while allowing them to trade on behalf of the club, and pay employees. In the spirit of non-profitmaking, whether religious or secular, and of the sporting ethic inherited from Coubertin and the tradition of bénévolat (voluntary work by local notables deriving social status from time invested in the service of local sport), it was unknown for the Société anonyme (limited company) model to be used for professional clubs. The 1901 law guaranteed that, in principle, the association’s officers (President, Secretary, Treasurer, and other executive committee members)

did not profit personally or even get paid, that no dividends were distributed to members, and that the club was run according to open democratic principles, meaning all club officers and committee members were subject to election by club members. Organisation of a football club was, then, essentially unpaid voluntary work, and therefore community based and public-spirited. The 1901 law also protects club members and the public by imposing a statutory duty on such an association to respect health and safety regulations, employment law and so on. If it is found they infringe any of these rules they can be closed down (Miège 1993: 48). Of France’s 730,000 associations active in 2002, 170,000 were sports clubs, counting about 13 million playing members (French Sports Ministry website). At the point of the sport’s professionalisation, 30 years of voluntary public service in running football clubs on this basis was bound to militate against adopting a private business ethos. Today’s modernisers would say the same thing in a slightly different way: that the amateur ethos of French football club structures based on the Association 1901 structure (that turned out to be highly resistant to true professionalisation) has slowed the development of the professional game. Local Municipal Involvement Another aspect of public sector involvement in football resides in the financial support provided for local teams by municipalities. Town councils have seen it as part of their public mission to subsidise sports activity. Local mayors have also seen the political capital to be made out of supporting the town’s team. This remains the case today: even at D1 level, French football clubs are still supported financially by local authorities through the ‘subventions’ system which in the season 2000/01 represented on average 4 per cent of D1 clubs’ income and 15 per cent for D2 clubs (Grandemange and Cazali 2002). Even Paris SaintGermain, the richest club, was nervous about the possible effect on their municipal subsidy of the change of the Paris mayor following the 2001 municipal elections, which saw, for the first time, a left-wing majority on the Paris City Council. This sense of public mission and local political involvement extends to French professional clubs making use of the local municipal stadium, although a governmental decree clarifying the law on this in 2001 means that professional clubs now have to be charged a realistic rent for its use (Lagarde 2002: 4). With the single exception of that of AJA, grounds still remain the property of municipalities who are required to pay for maintenance and reconstruction. Funding for the upgrading and redevelopment of the ten World Cup venues in 1998 came from a mixture of private and public sources, but the football clubs themselves (who are essentially tenants) did not have to pay even a symbolic franc (see Chapter 3).

A sense of community and a sense of local public involvement have been strong and enduring features of French football, which has become a key tool in local politics, used, sometimes corruptly (see Chapter 8), by local political figures to further their local and national careers. The fate of the local football club can often be an election issue. The extent of a city’s involvement can be gauged from the example of Marseille, where the municipality used to give 5 million francs subsidy per year to OM and charge nothing for the use by the club of the municipal stadium (Samson 2000). This gives the mayor significant influence within the club. The mayor, plus his number two, their hospitality guests, and various councillors are always to be seen in the Presidential Box at home matches, alongside the club’s top officials. In one of the darker moments of OM’s 2000/01 season, with both relegation and municipal elections looming, Mayor Gaudin publicly commented that the club’s major shareholder, Robert Louis-Dreyfus, would have to get more directly involved in running the club. The plight of the club was worrying, especially since the mayor had been influential in bringing Louis-Dreyfus to OM in the first place, after the downfall of Bernard Tapie. The municipality seems to have most direct influence on the non-professional side of the club. The non-profit-making association (OM Association) that exists alongside the professional SAOS to run the amateur and youth sides of OM is chaired by a close friend of the mayor, under the influence of the mayor’s number two R. Muselier. It receives 5 million francs annually from the city council and 3 million from the Conseil général (the local county council) to look after a few hundred amateur players. This compares very favourably with a municipal grant of 180,000 francs per year to the local Post Office sporting club that has 7,000 members. The city takes OM much more seriously, then, than its other local sports clubs and presumably expects to exercise influence in proportion. In this respect Le Monde has commented that the dream of the top people in the Mairie is to run the club (Samson 2000). Professional football in general is still reliant on municipal subsidies, and this aspect of the ‘French exception’ has come into conflict with European developments and France’s wider national ambitions to create ‘a strong France in an independent Europe’, as French clubs, essentially non-profit-making organisations operating within the context of high taxation and exceptionally high social costs falling on all French employers, have come to terms with the European Single Market and the commercial realities of European competition law, as expressed in the Bosman ruling. Sports federations and sports clubs can be considered as businesses if they undertake economic or commercial activity and so come under European competition law (Treaty of Rome articles 85– 86 guaranteeing the free working of competition and the raising of all barriers to trade on the internal market [Miège 1996: 87]).

The right-wing free-market Balladur government of 1993–95, in the bluff shape of Minister Charles Pasqua, recognised that local authority subventions to professional clubs were illegal, more particularly for clubs that were trading commercially in the form of SAOS (Société anonyme à objet sportif) or SEMS (Société d’économie mixte sportive) (therefore ‘à but lucratif’). Henceforward they could only get sponsorship from French regional authorities (Echégut 1994: 21). Maximum allowable town hall support for D1 clubs in 1996/97 was 30 per cent of budget, in 1997/98 20 per cent, and in 1998/99 10 per cent (Miège 1996: 94–95; Bayeux 1996: 103–104). First division clubs had long derived over 15 per cent of their income from local authorities, and Second Division clubs over one-third. Martigues (who were to be relegated from D1 in 1996) relied on the town for half of their budget (van Kote 1994). Local authority subventions have been considered by towns to be part of their image promotion and a reinforcement of their local identity, an instrument for attracting inward investment. Now it was becoming seen by Brussels as a means of discrimination through illegal public subsidies destroying fair competition, coming under article 92 of the Treaty of Rome which bans help given by states or public authorities where this creates unjustified competitive advantage. Whereas the European Commission and the European Court had been indulgent towards sport on this matter, the European Parliament has taken a harder line. The 1984 law has been modified by a further article in August 1994 (Balladur government) and a decree of 24 January 1996 (Juppé government) gradually phasing out subsidies from town halls to clubs (whether SAOS, SEMS, or Associations à statuts renforcés), with a complete ban having been envisaged by the end of 1999. However, the Sports Minister of the left-wing government (1997/2002), Madame Buffet, managed to delay the implementation of this. She attempted, however, to define the areas in which such support can be given and tried to tighten accountability structures. Her sports reform bill of 2000 attempted to protect clubs’ municipal subsidies. This reflects her own and the government’s stronger ideological attachment to public service values and public involvement in local life. A governmental decree of 2001 set out that local authority subsidies to professional clubs could only be in support of activities of ‘general [public] interest’ and up to a ceiling of 2.3 million euros per club per year. This mainly concerns the coaching and educational side of the club’s youth academy. All such subsidy needs to be rigorously accounted for. Regarding municipal services to a club, these have a ceiling of 1.6 million euros per season or 30 per cent of income. This can be for buying advertising space, use of a club’s logo as part of the town or region’s public relations activities, and match tickets that are given out free to local amateur clubs or schools or for other hospitality purposes. The local authority cannot guarantee loans, nor offer help from members of staff paid by the town hall etc., and can no longer give the professional club (as opposed to its association) free use of the municipal stadium, but must charge a rent (Grandemange and Cazali 2002). Sport as a Public Service Needing Republican Regulation French institutional and legal structures, then, traditionally reflect a view of sporting activity as part of the public service mission of the State and of local authorities. The ethos of the Republic is that the State is responsible for the improvement of the general well-being of its citizens and for efforts to integrate all citizens into the nation (‘la République une et indivisible’). As Mignon (2000: 236) points out, a law of 1920 obliges municipalities to offer facilities for sporting recreation. This notion of sport and recreation being a Republican public service mission may also be traced back to Coubertin’s Olympic ideal (taking part is more important than winning), seeing sport as a philosophical and ethical approach to life, ‘promoting the development of the physical and moral qualities that are the basics of sport’, and ‘through sport, educating young people in a spirit of better mutual understanding and friendship, thus contributing to the building of a better and more peaceful world’ (Miège 1993: 9). It has also been reinforced by the idealistic, socially progressive governments of the Popular Front (1936) and of the Liberation (1944), when much was done to widen access to leisure activities and sport. French theorists have identified a more general typological split between northern and southern European nations in their approach to State–sport relations (Miège 1993: 99). Indeed, France may be seen as the archetypal example of the Latin model (with Italy as the exception that proves the rule). The northern liberal model, as in Great Britain, treats sport as essentially dependent on individual initiative, and its organisation and regulation are left to national federations as the sports’ governing bodies. This extends to such important matters as the building and financing of a national stadium, even if they are patently failing to do this. British sports organisations appear totally independent of the State, which merely ensures the material conditions needed to allow a given sport to prosper through public grants or other form of help in building infrastructure and facilities. Public investment in the organisation of Euro 96, the European Nations Cup held in England in 1996 (admittedly a smaller event than the World Cup), was limited to £100,000. The French government subsidised the World Cup by the equivalent of £190 million. In Britain, government has even handed over the responsibility for awarding grants to sports clubs and associations to a non-governmental organisation, the National Lottery. In France funding is allocated by a public body, the FNDS (Fonds national pour le développement du sport – National Fund for Sports Development), some of whose money comes from the Loto sportif (State-run football pools) and the Loterie nationale (National Lottery), both of which are public bodies. In the southern European interventionist model the promotion and development of sport are seen as public services, for which the State takes some degree of responsibility. Where the State does not take direct responsibility for organising or regulating a given sport, the sports authority concerned is at least under some degree of public control (Miège 1996: 10–11, 1993: 99). In France a mechanism of official recognition (agrément) by the Sport Ministry allows, for instance, the imposition of model statutes on sports governing bodies to ensure democratic functioning and accountability (Miège 1993: 48). This means having an Annual General Meeting of club members who approve the annual budget (or not), and electing a management committee for four years that cannot be paid and which elects an executive. Clubs therefore have wide representation, and freedom of opinion is ensured within the club, which must operate ethically with no illegal discrimination (Miège 1993: 48). In return for this State ‘tutelage’ and official recognition of the sport’s public service mission as being of ‘public utility’, a sporting body or affiliated club becomes eligible for official grant aid, in proportion to their number of members (Mignon 2000: 237). The Ministry delegates to the French Football Federation (FFF – equivalent to the English FA) the monopoly of organisation, regulation and representation of. In turn the FFF delegates the right to organise a professional league to the LFP. Whereas for the first four decades of the league the professional clubs were separated from the amateur game, since the early 1970s the professional league has been even more closely linked into the nation-wide practice of football by a pyramidal system of promotion and relegation involving national divisions (semi-professional in Division 3) down through the amateur regional and local district divisions. The tutelage exercised by the State is real and allows supervision of the legality and fairness of a federation’s decisions, for example in respect of disciplinary measures. The State can in theory withdraw official approval of the Federation’s position as the governing body of football, since the FFF’s authority has simply been delegated by the State on behalf of the nation’s citizens. Although the French State is becoming more interventionist as legal complexities increase, it systematically consults the French Olympic Committee (CNOSF), the highest sports governing body in France, on policy (Miège 1996: 18–19). The system may not work perfectly, as a recent parliamentary report (the Asensi report – see Potet 2000a) pointed out. However, the State’s interest in ensuring democratic functioning and accountability in sport is shown by its desire, through the Asensi report, to expose where it is falling down in practice – which is often at the level of the national federation. The report found a lack of transparency, self-perpetuation in terms of social class amongst the leading officials, and a lack of opposition voices on national committees. It remains to be seen whether the political will is there to bring reform to the top of the political agenda. Of Western European countries, France has the strongest State intervention in sport. Comparisons established by the Council of Europe in 1993 found that France was the top of the European league for public finance for sport as a percentage of the whole of sports spending, and spending from the central State budget was ten times that of the UK (Table 2.1). The French Republican State justifies this level of intervention in terms of the need to ‘ensure the general interest of sport prevails over the multitude of private interests that traverse it’ (Miège 1993: 68).

There are particular reasons for the French State’s support for sport. After the Second World War, State and government took an increasing interest in sport, both in terms of developing an elite of competitors (seen as a necessary condition for figuring honourably in international competitions), and in terms of encouraging sport for all (see Dine 1997b, 1998b). The latter corresponded to powerful aspirations on the part of the centre-left governments emerging from the Resistance movement to spread access to leisure activities to the whole population (democratisation) and improve the nation’s health and fitness. Through the ordinances and laws of 28 August 1945, 25 October 1975 and 16 July 1984, the State has therefore gradually spread its authority over an area of activity that had previously been run by private non-profit-making associations. The collaborationist Vichy regime started the State’s intervention in French sport with its Sports Charter (December 1940). After the Liberation of France, the federations never regained their autonomy. The 1945 Act introduced the notion of delegation of power from the State to federations and sporting groups. The 1975 and 1984 laws further structured relations by recognising the power of the federations to regulate their own sport, under the tutelage of the Minister, and by imposing certain types of common statutes on them, while recognising the federations’ ‘mission de service public’ (public service mission). Since the decentralisation laws of 1982 there has also been more intervention in sport at the local and regional levels. Two types of organisational structure now exist in parallel: firstly, sporting institutions themselves (sports clubs, departmental and regional committees, and national federations, hierarchically structured, and democratically accountable), and, secondly, State administrative structures dependent on the Ministry for Sport, again at departmental, regional and national level. See Chapter 5 on the French coaching system, which brings the two sets of structures together. Organising the World Game: France and the International Politics of Football As regards the development of an elite of competitors to represent the nation, and to use sport more generally as an instrument of public policy for national aggrandisement, President de Gaulle is often credited with being hugely influential in setting the tone and in laying down infrastructures in a strategic way. He was appalled at the poor performance of French competitors in the 1960 Olympic Games and resolved to do something about it. However, Dine (1998b), in his analysis of the role of the State in French sport in the post-war period, demonstrates how Gaullist policies borrowed heavily from structures set up under Vichy and that French politics and sport have been intertwined for far longer than the period of the Fifth Republic. He does confirm that since 1960 sport has come increasingly to be seen as an instrument for maintaining and increasing French grandeur. Contrasting the success of French competitors at the Atlanta Olympics of 1996 with France’s failure in Rome in 1960, his analysis underlines the success of the policy of associating international sporting events with politics, describing how, particularly during the Fifth Republic, the State has organised and funded ‘une France qui gagne’, in a peculiarly French approach to sport via State management (‘l’Etat gestionnaire’), a ‘middle way’ between State control typified by former Eastern-bloc countries and the ‘organisational and financial autonomy (and, increasingly, the entrepreneurialism) characteristic of the United States and Great Britain’ (Dine 1998b: 310). Hosting the World Cup finals in 1998, heavily subsidised by the State and the host cities (see Dauncey and Hare 1999b), reflected not only a French tradition of public commitment to sport at home but also an equally important use of sporting events for wider political purposes. In football, despite the fact that up to then French success at European club and international levels had been somewhat muted, France’s long commitment to the world game also owes much to the tradition of individual unpaid enthusiasts in the French sporting federations and clubs. In particular, a small number of prominent administrators have worked enthusiastically to set up international structures to govern football and thereby integrate French football into the wider world game. Equally important, but perhaps with motives closer to home, some prominent sports journalists have also played important roles in organising international competitions. Over the years, French administrators have been at the heart of moves to give an international dimension to football. FIFA, the World Cup, and various European competitions owe their existence to French initiatives. In 1904, in the teeth of English opposition, a world governing body, FIFA, was created on the initiative of French and Dutch representatives. The then President of the French Football Federation, Jules Rimet, was elected as FIFA President in 1920. The concept of a World Cup competition was the brain-child of Henri Delaunay, secretary of the FFF, and Rimet, whose name was borne by the original trophy. France was one of the early hosts when it hosted the third World Cup finals in 1938 (see Sinet 2002). The idea of a European club competition came from Gabriel Hanot, editor of the famous French sports daily L ’Equipe. After English champions Wolves had beaten Moscow Spartak and Hungarian Champions Honved in 1954, the Daily Mail claimed that they were world club champions. The editor of L ’Equipe was sceptical and proposed a more structured way of deciding Europe’s top club. UEFA had only just come into existence and refused initially to take responsibility for organising a competition. So L’Equipe contacted the relevant clubs, rules were agreed and FIFA authorised it. UEFA agreed to organise it from September 1955 onwards, once Paris had offered a venue for the final, which brought together the French champions Reims and Real Madrid. The European Nations Championship is another major international competition owed to the work of a Frenchman, Henri Delaunay, who, sadly, did not live to see the first finals take place, again in France, in 1960. France hosted the finals a second time in 1984. Football’s sixteenth World Cup finals were of course held in France in 1998. Decisions about the World Cup, from the highest level of the State, for example in choice of site for the new national stadium, through the multilateral relations linking the State to the Organising Committee (CFO), the FFF, and the clubs and the host towns, followed the tradition of the way sport in France, whether participatory or spectator sport, has been seen as a matter of public interest and as a legitimate concern of the public authorities since the Popular Front of 1936. The strongly presidentialist regime of the Fifth Republic has continued a tradition of using a range of sporting and other cultural manifestations as instruments of world politics, to compensate for France’s relative lack of military or economic power, even into the current period when French economic, industrial and technological power is far greater in world terms than in 1960. French football administrators like Rimet and Delaunay, following in the footsteps of the founding father of the Olympic movement, Coubertin, have been among the most influential visionaries of football as a world game. Importantly, they helped move football beyond the national context to internationalise the playing and governance of the game, at times when its English inventors, with an insularity that went wider than the sporting domain, were reticent about the internationalisation of football and reluctant to become involved at the heart of European or world football until there was no alternative and most decisions were irreversible. Conclusion Football was imported into France quite late from England and Scotland by the middle classes, as a reaction against the regimented and militaristic gymnastics promoted by the new republican regime of the late nineteenth century. The sport spread geographically across the nation in the early twentieth century, particularly in the period of the Great War. The adoption of football as France’s national sport in the inter-war period has echoes of the way working-class communities elsewhere in Europe (but earlier) forged leisure habits and a local identity around the sport. None the less, compared to Britain, French football’s development took place on a much smaller scale and with a much stronger and more persistent middle-class input, both on the playing side and in its organisational structures. This reflected, firstly, the different scale and timing of the French industrial revolution and its consequent urban geography. Secondly, dominant social values were at stake. In Britain, football is essentially dependent on individual initiative and its organisation and regulation are left to autonomous bodies which operate independently of the State. British professional football clubs are run as businesses outside of local government control, they are generally proprietors of their own grounds and are free to enter the stock market as public limited companies. On the other hand, French football’s regulatory system and its governing bodies and clubs have been shaped by the French State’s concept of the public service mission and voluntary community service and civic values, and by Republican and democratic values, and centralist interventionism, as opposed to laissez-faire individualism.

This ethos is now very much in tension with current trends in the global sport-media complex. As deregulation has been imposed on more and more sectors of social life, often in the name of ‘modernisation’, there has been local French resistance to this creation of a global marketplace. However, there has been growing pressure for France to harmonise its practices regarding professional sport with the rest of the European Union. In summer 2000, backed by the financially stronger clubs, the French League management committee promised – as in 1932, in the name of modernisation – rapid alignment of the structures of French football with their European neighbours. By this they meant greater commercialisation and the transformation of the major club structures into limited companies quotable on the French Stock Exchange (Caffin 2000; Psenny 2000, Brochen 2000). As football moved into the twenty-first century and issues of doping and regulation of players’ contracts within EU employment legislation require European-wide not to say global solutions, the French Sports Minister Mme Buffet, for her part, attempted to take the lead in defending ‘l’exception sportive’, arguing that free-market business values cannot be allowed to destroy traditional sporting values. Football as a world game, in its organisational structures, its regulation, and its international competitions, then, owes much to France, and French football has consistently looked outwards and seen itself as a part of a wider sporting world, as well as seeing football as part of the wider social and political context.