Fans: a Sociology of French Club Football
The lack of spectators and therefore of income has been a
recurrent structural weakness in French football at club level. Sports
spectating has never been a key feature of French social fabric in the same way
as it has in Britain, at least not on such a mass scale. Football has long been
the major spectator sport, but it has attracted far smaller crowds than in
England or Italy. Since the French World Cup victory, however, publicity has
been given to an extraordinary increase in crowds, although in fact the
spectators have been coming back gradually over the whole of the 1990s – to the
extent that numbers in French Division 1 stadiums are now almost comparable
with other major European footballing countries – which it had never before
been possible to claim. Whereas 1997 (i.e. pre-World Cup) figures were, with
the exception of PSG and Marseille, more akin to non-Premier league gates in
England (Chaumier and Rocheteau 1997: 554–555), now crowds have significantly
improved. Table 4.1 records a historic high for almost every club. The season
1999/2000 saw for the first time in French football history the average crowds
for all D1 matches break the symbolic 20,000 barrier, the average being 22,324
for the season’s 306 league matches (Chaumier and Rocheteau 2000: 309). The
major clubs now compare with their English equivalents, with Marseille
averaging over 50,000, PSG and Lens just over and just below 40,000
respectively, Lyon around 35,000, and Nantes and Bordeaux hovering around
30,000. However, what is interesting in the figures for Olympique de Marseille,
as undoubtedly the best-supported club in the league, is that they attracted so
much support even when finishing so low in the championship. Some explanations
for OM’s level of support will be explored later in the chapter. Meanwhile,
smaller clubs have been looking optimistically to the future. In the close
season of 2000, the stadiums of Rennes, Metz and Lille were all improved, Sedan
moved to a new stadium in 2001, and Lille’s stadium is due for a complete
upgrade by 2003. The oddity of the league in terms of attendances is AS Monaco,
who play before very small gates in their 20,000 capacity stadium, which has
not been full since a UEFA Cup quarter-final against Roma in 1992. The
travelling support from Italy that helped fill Monaco’s Stade Louis-II a decade
ago, has no equivalent in the French League, with the possible exception of
Marseille. It is significant that nine of the 17 other clubs in the 1999/2000
championship achieved their highest gate when OM were the visitors, and three
others against PSG, a number of whose supporters also regularly travel. A third
club with significant travelling support is Saint-Etienne, whose historic
rivalry with OM ensured the highest gate of the season in Marseille’s Stade
vélodrome. The latter’s 60,000 capacity has, however, not been fully used since
the World Cup – the league record being 57,603 against PSG in an end of season
game in 1998. Relegation to D2 meant a drop in average crowds at Saint-Etienne
from 26,495 (2000/01) to 15,873 (2001/02) (by far the highest in Division 2).
What is causing some optimism for future consolidation is that the upward trend
is not attributable solely to the 1998 World Cup factor, but is a longerterm
phenomenon. Table 4.2 shows that D1 attendances have more than tripled since
the low point of the 1960s and, more importantly, have almost doubled in the
most recent ten years of growth. They seem however to have peaked.
One factor in the increases is that pricing of seats is not
prohibitive, especially season tickets, and, in part thanks to renovation of
stadiums as part of the hosting of the 1998 World Cup, there is still room for
further increases. Season ticket sales (‘abonnements’), for many clubs a relatively
new phenomenon, more than doubled between 1997/98 and 2001/02. They appear
relatively cheap compared to English equivalents. The cheapest season-ticket
seats in 2002 (via supporters clubs) cost the equivalent of £50 in little
Guingamp, £65 in Marseille, and Lyon, £70 in Bordeaux, and £150 in Paris. The
most expensive season tickets cost about £1,000 in Paris, £700 in Marseille,
£650 in Lyon and £550 in Bordeaux (Le Parisien, 3 August 2002: 14). Increased
live television coverage since the mid-1980s (on subscription TV) seems not to
have encouraged spectators to stay at home – quite the contrary. Local Fan
Culture: Interest, Passion or Militancy? The sporting public has always felt a
strong sense of identity with, and indeed ownership of, their local and
national teams since the advent of the professional era. In the
pre-professional era the attachment of local publics to the local club was
actively encouraged by paternalistic employers, in so far as it might be a way
of structuring the lives of their workforce. The sport’s values fitted the
needs of a big factory. Recent studies of fans (Broussard 1990; Wahl 1989) have
stressed the emotional investment in supporting their team, not to mention the
investment of time and money in travelling to matches, such that issues of
identity and status are bound up with manifestations of so-called football
hooliganism. However, Patrick Mignon (1998: 181), one of the French football
sociologists most familiar with the British football context, prefers to talk
of lack of passion as characteristic of French football supporters. France (at
least until very recently) had no football fan culture. Writing in 1997 he put
the number of French Ultras at 50,000 as opposed to 200,000 in Italy. The term
‘Ultra’ has been borrowed from Italian football culture to describe the ‘real
fan’, usually young members of a supporters club. Only a minority of the most
fervent supporters used to come to matches wearing the team’s colours. He saw a
link between this lack of passion for football and the lack of interest shown
in it by national politicians or by intellectual elites, who traditionally
looked down on it as a pointless activity. A recent manifestation of this
attitude that provoked some interest was an article by Robert Redeker, on the
editorial board of the influential left-wing journal Les Temps modernes, in
which he argued that France’s growing obsession with sport was destroying
political life in France. He argued that the impact of sport has been
totalitarian, impoverishing the lives and intelligence of millions of men; that
sport (and football of course is the main culprit) has destroyed a real
community united in the form of a political community and replaced it by an
ersatz, phoney community united by sport. He condemns the star system of
sportsmen, its corruption and drug taking and its adoption of the commercial
values of big business. He draws a parallel with Marx’s description of religion
as ‘opium of the people’, saying that sport is worse. He admits to being unable
to understand why the French public does not find professional sport
‘unutterably boring’ (Jeffries 2001: 21). How do we explain this traditional
lack of passion for football? It has always, since its beginnings in the late
nineteenth century, been in competition with other sports, whether it be
initially gymnastics and cycling or rugby, especially in certain regions such
as the south-west. Cycling in the shape of the Tour de France bestrode the
century in the French imagination, and since the 1960s onwards the Five Nations
rugby tournament and the Roland-Garros tennis championship have interested all
social classes in France. More recently, in the 1970s and 1980s, basketball,
volleyball and handball have established followings in small towns and in the
suburbs of the three metropolises. Alongside this change, newer participatory
and individualistic sports such as ‘la randonnée’ (hiking or walking), jogging,
swimming and the west-coast sports and their offshoots such as various forms of
‘glisse’ (covering surfing, new snow sports, and rollerblading) are threatening
the traditional ‘English’ sports. Mignon quotes a figure of three-quarters of
the population in 1985 who declared they undertook some form of sport or
physical exercise, compared to a quarter in 1967. This had risen to 83 per cent
of 15- to 75-year-olds in a survey of 2000 (Mignon and Truchot 2001). This
growth of individualistic and less institutionalised sport may be interpreted
as a change in values within French society, and a form of modernisation, divesting
themselves of local attachments, and cultivating a greater distance from
partisan passions within sport. From this perspective, the spectator becomes
more of a Baudelairian ‘flâneur’, interested certainly, but maintaining a
degree of ironic detachment and distrust of passionate involvements. Surveys
showed that while football crowds were fairly young, the working classes (white
collar and blue collar) made up a good half of fans in the stadium. However,
overall the crowd was socially very heterogeneous, and representative of French
society as a whole, with the exception of the underrepresentation of the highly
educated from within the upper middle classes. There were variations according
to whether the club came from a heavily industrial town or from Paris, where
white-collar fans were more numerous (Mignon 1998: 186–189). This social
heterogeneity cannot on its own explain the lack of passion for football in
France. Mignon’s thesis is that whereas in Britain, until recently at least,
football support was traditionally very much the expression of a class culture
and supporters formed a more homogeneous community, in France football
supporting was secondary to other more important attachments and divisions that
defined identity. The nineteenth-century struggle between the Church and State
and its associated ideological rivalries divided football. So too, later, did
the Labour movement’s opposition to football organised around the factory and
the revolutionary left’s subsequent criticism of the professionalisation of the
sport. The French Labour movement (whether socialist or communist) did not
favour the growth of a separate working-class culture, but sought to promote
access to a more universal culture as part of its emancipation. British class
divisions were more rigid in the key period of the growth of football culture –
between the wars and up to the 1960s – and this tradition lives on in the
stadium (or did at least until the 1990s). In France the promotion of the
Republican ideal through the school system from the late nineteenth century
onwards has created a dominant value that views society as a sum of autonomous
individuals, who cannot be reduced to groups defined primarily either by their
social class, region, sex, age or ethnic background – censuses in France cannot
for example ask questions about racial or ethnic origin. French football
support has therefore to situate itself in a public space defined by this
tension between community and society. Being a fan means declaring a group
identity, but in a context where forms of collective action have always been
seen as part of a struggle for the right to belong to the national community of
citizens as a whole. The argument, after Ehrenberg, that the attraction and
impact of football is linked to the struggle for equality and social mobility
(the level playing-field of sport being a metaphor for the Republic), means
that in a country such as France where the egalitarian movement has found
expression in a social struggle (the Labour movement) but also a political
struggle (the Republican movement) for access to citizenship and not for the
right to live according to one’s own rules in one’s own community, it is
understandable that private passions such as football supporting have been
accorded a secondary position. Football support has consequently been in a
fragile position in the context of other competing leisure interests. Whereas
Mignon sees the British and German models of football fandom as based on
community identity (i.e. class identity as much as local identity), the French
model, he hypothesises, might be based on an activism or militancy model
(‘mobilisation’): a club, just like a political party, needs to convince its
supporters that what it is offering is worth investing time and effort in; and
there needs to be more than a single reason to join: to be together with
like-minded people (sociability), certainly, but also to see a high-quality
spectacle, that projects a meaning beyond itself, that is offering some
symbolic value (Mignon 1998: 195–199). The lowest point in football support in
France was the late 1960s, which corresponds to a period of great social change
and great socio-political mobilisation. Henri Mendras (1988: 20) chooses 1965
rather than 1968 as the date marking the break between tradition and modernity
in France. It saw the start of modern mass commercialisation and mass
consumption (France’s first supermarket), mass higher education and the
inevitability of the university crisis (Nanterre University opened), mass
access to literature through increasing levels of education (expansion of the
‘livre de poche’), mass television (as ownership of sets rose), personality
politics (the first directly elected French President), the beginning of the
drop in the birth rate, and an increase in women’s employment. The drop in
numbers of football fans in the 1960s may also be partly explained by new
leisure activities. At a more profound level, the great social institutions
that had socialised the French for decades had entered a period of crisis, from
the Catholic Church to the education system, from the orthodox political
parties to the Army (conscription for service in the war of decolonisation in
Algeria rendered national service ideologically suspect). Pop culture was
becoming the dominant part of mass culture, being at one and the same time a
key element of mass consumption and a site of counter-culture in which to
protest against the massification of culture and society. In this context
football had little symbolic meaning to offer. ‘Modern’ life in the shape of
AngloAmerican pop music, mass consumerism, mass ownership of cars, television,
the cinema, restaurants, on the one hand, and more active engagement with
alternative culture or ‘gauchisme’, on the other, left football looking old-fashioned
to some, male chauvinistic to others. To the more politically militant it could
be regarded as the opium of the people, distracting from revolutionary
consciousness. Stadiums were particularly empty in 1968, except on the
occasions when they were full to bursting point with political protesters, such
as the famous Charléty stadium meeting in May 1968. Mignon’s view (1998:
199–200) of football fandom as a form of militancy rather than an expression of
community can also be used to explain a particularly French phenomenon in
football support of the modern era: the Ultras, who stage-manage their
engagement with the world of football in their noisy and colourful spectacles
on the terraces, and who have thereby reinvented French traditions of football support.
As a by-product, for a while at least, they also invented a particular French
type of football violence that appears to have different roots and different
aims to British ‘football hooliganism’. However, before moving to a
consideration of the new supporter phenomenon in the major clubs of today, any
history of French fandom would need to start with the saga of ‘les Verts’, AS
Saint-Etienne, that was crucial in the rebuilding of interest in football from
its low point in the 1960s. Since the Second World War, only a few club teams
have established strong local and national followings and international
reputations: Reims was one in the 1950s, followed by Saint Etienne in the
1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, despite incursions by Monaco, Nantes, Bordeaux
and Auxerre, the domestic scene has been dominated by the rivalry of big-city
clubs Olympique de Marseille (OM) and Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), both of whom
have tasted national and European success, and Europeanlevel followings as well
as spectator violence. These two clubs, plus Racing Club de Lens, are the only
ones that have fanatical supporters such as English clubs take for granted, and
they will be examined below. The Green Cauldron gives Birth to ‘le 12e Homme’
For more than a decade from the middle 1960s to the late 1970s, French football
was dominated by ‘les Verts’, the Greens from Saint-Etienne, who won seven
championships out of ten between 1967 and 1976, and five French Cups between
1968 and 1977, finding themselves in a European competition in every season bar
three from 1967 to 1983. The unfashionable little industrial town in the Forez
region was, metaphorically at least, dominated by the Geoffroy-Guichard
stadium, that came to be called ‘le chaudron vert’, the green cauldron, such
was the heat generated by their supporters – not only in matches against their
key rival Olympique de Marseille but especially during their progress in the
European competitions of the 1970s. Just as Anfield built up a reputation for
invincibility that affected teams visiting Liverpool, so did Geoffroy-Guichard
for European visitors to deepest France. Saint-Etienne was an attacking team,
their star players had charisma: the Revelli brothers, Jean-Michel Larqué the
organiser, and striker Rocheteau, with a perm to put even the 1970s Keegan in
the shade. Their European matches were often very closely contested, with
results in doubt, which heightened the tension and the noise in the stadium. In
the European Cup, 1975 saw the Greens’ progress halted at the semi-final stage
by Beckenbauer’s Bayern Munich, the eventual winners. But the match that stays
in the memory of the sporting public is the quarter final against Dynamo Kiev
in 1976. Having lost the first (away) leg 2–0, Saint-Etienne snatched a
nail-biting victory in the return home leg 3–0 after extra time. Defeat in the
final against Bayern (again) at Hampden Park, Glasgow, by a single goal
confirms, for Wahl, ‘the national public’s attachment to losing heroes
courageously resisting inhuman adversaries’ (Wahl 1989: 315). In 1977 they lost
in the quarter-finals, again to the eventual winners, this time Keegan’s
Liverpool, who scored the winner late in the game at Anfield. Some Liverpool
supporters look back on this game as a high point in their European saga,
defeating the then favourites for the cup, with the noisy and colourful support
of the Kop. The support given by the Saint-Etienne public gave birth to the
notion of the extra player, ‘le 12e homme’, ‘the twelfth man’ helping the team
to success.
Since the Second World War, only a few French club teams
have established national followings. If Reims were the first in the 1950s,
then Saint-Etienne were certainly the second, significantly aided by television
coverage of their European matches. While a national following for a club team
on live television was new, so too was the supporter phenomenon in the stadium.
What we now may too easily take for granted in terms of noise and colour was
uncommon at the time. Saint-Etienne supporters in their masses, adopting
English fan cultures, dressed in the club colours of green and white, waving
scarves and banners, sang and chanted their support throughout the matches. The
European influence of Liverpool fans’ travels, following their team into
Europe, should not be underestimated in the creation of a new fan culture by
imitation, in France and other countries. It was the British model of support
that was the major influence available to Saint-Etienne, who adopted it all the
more easily since the Geoffroy-Guichard stadium was built on British lines and
the town and its supporters fitted the industrial working-class model of
British football. SaintEtienne’s visit to Anfield in 1977 and Liverpool’s
victorious European Cup Final in Paris in 1981 were important landmarks.
However, the Greens very first European Cup match was at another home of
British football fervour, Ibrox Park, against Glasgow Rangers in the 1957/58
season. They visited Celtic Park in 1968/69, Ibrox again in 1975/76 (and won).
The 1970s were a time when British and Italian fan cultures were in advance of
the more sedate Germans, as confirmed by interviews with Liverpool players of
the time (‘When Liverpool ruled the world’, 15 May 2001, BBC1). Saint-Etienne’s
travels were the vehicle for importation into France of the more colourful,
noisier and, in the 1980s, the more violent aspects of British fan culture.
Since then, while AS Saint-Etienne have gone through various ups-and-downs of
relegation and promotion, sometimes associated with financial or transfer
scandals, the tradition of fervent support has continued. Geoffroy-Guichard is,
in the minds of opposing supporters, a ‘lieu de mémoire’, a place to respect
and to show one’s mettle. Ultras: Support, Involvement and Identity In the
middle 1980s the new spectator phenomenon became more organised, and more
violent, with English and Italian influences, as French clubs played more often
in Europe and travel became easier and cheaper. Mignon (1998: 212) reports that
‘Kops’ initially typified northern clubs, with a quieter and more community
atmosphere, whereas southern stadiums had more organised groups of ‘Ultras’,
who imitated the Italian type of terrace spectacle. The Italian style has
gradually come to dominate French stadiums. In most club stadiums, the favoured
position for the young Ultras, as at Anfield, is behind the goal, in the
virages or ends. A characteristic of the new French supporters is their
organisation into ‘associations’, or supporters clubs, whose members make up
more than 20 per cent of total fans. A key point to stress in terms of
differences between French supporters associations and English supporters clubs
is their relationship with the football club. Mignon’s concept of activism or
militancy as the model for French supporters is useful here. Some supporters
associations are highly integrated to the club. Their members participate as
unpaid volunteers (bénévoles) in tasks such as stewarding, selling drinks and
sandwiches and other merchandise on behalf of the football club. While
remaining legally separate from the club in terms of their constitutional
existence, some ‘official’ supporters associations earn a percentage of the
sales of the merchandise and are effectively subsidised by the football club –
this helps pay for travel to away games for example. Some associations raise a
significant amount of money for the club. The official supporters associations
are usually quite distinct however from the groups of Ultras who put on the
animations or tifos in their ends. The new supporters associations of the 1980s
and indeed today, are much more independent of the football club, sometimes
produce their own fanzine, and are much more militant and critical of club
policy (see pp. 73–77 re Marseille). These associations can be subsidised by
the football club to help organise the terrace spectacle – buying a huge flag
for example – and may be allowed storage space at the stadium. Under Tapie’s
chairmanship at Marseille large supporters associations gained the right to
sell season tickets cheaply to their members. Mignon’s analysis of the
different types of association is that some seek to increase their influence
and presence by sheer weight of numbers; others define themselves as
avant-gardist or an elite of the most faithful followers of a team, apt to turn
on the fair-weather supporters with the equivalent of
‘Where-were-you-when-we-were-shit?’ chants. At the extreme end of the Ultra
phenomenon are groups who refuse all contact with the football club hierarchy,
and who may refer to themselves as ‘casuals’ or ‘hools’, adopting an English
vocabulary and attitude to support as confrontation, either with police or with
other supporter groups. Some are openly neo-fascist and xenophobic. Mignon
(1998: 221) claims there are also one or two who are ideologically of the
extremeleft. This ideological orientation will be explored further re Olympique
de Marseille (pp. 74–75) and Paris Saint-Germain (pp. 80–89). Some football
clubs such as Lens have adopted a paternalistic attitude towards the ‘official’
supporters clubs in an attempt to exercise some control over the image of the
club. Broussard (1990: 208) describes French club hierarchies’ lack of
understanding of the football supporter in the 1980s and their suspicion of the
Ultra movement. Writing in Génération supporter (1990), he claimed only two or
three French clubs had fanatical supporters such as English clubs take for
granted: Paris Saint-Germain, Olympique de Marseille, and perhaps Girondins de
Bordeaux. Looking back to the 1990s the ‘sang et or’ of Lens would have to be
added to such a list. Racing Club de Lens When, in May 1998, Racing Club de
Lens won the French championship for the first and so far only time, with an
87th minute goal at Auxerre, not only were there 5,000 fans waiting at the
Lille airport to welcome home the players and officials at 1.30 a.m., but by
the time the team reached Stade Bollaert, at 3 a.m., the stadium was
three-quarters full with 30,000 home fans singing the Marseillaise and waving
red-and-gold scarves to acclaim the arrival of the trophy and the Sang et Or
(Ramella and Touboul 1998: 3). In terms of overall numbers, Lens can now count
on the third highest average home crowd (38,800 in 2000/ 01) behind OM and PSG,
which means an average 91.7 per cent of seats filled in the stadium (Chaumier
and Rocheteau 2000: 507). In a France Football survey (published 7 January
2000), Lens fans were the most satisfied of any with their stadium facilities
and entertainment value. They were also voted the best fans in France, the most
passionate, with the best singing. Whereas most French clubs built up a
tradition for their young fans to gather in the virages behind the goals, the
Lens public’s favoured position was in the stands, and young and adult fans
mixed, all dressed in their blood-red and gold colours. They reportedly used to
share their half-time chips and beer with opposing supporters, except with the
local rivals Lille and Paris (Mignon 1998: 213). Friendly visitors were more
likely to be those from similarly proletarian towns such as Saint-Etienne or Le
Havre. In explaining the particularities of the Lens fans, Marie-Pierre Toulet
(2000) found that while the Lens club has cultivated cheap ticket prices, there
was also a culture of control in the relationship of the club to the supporters
associations. There are concessions to allow families to attend: more than
1,500 ticket holders are children, and 15 per cent are women. Although the
directors acknowledge the important role of corporate sponsorship, the club
endeavours not to penalise the bulk of working-class fans and so has a policy
of affordable entry. Half of Lens supporters come from modest backgrounds or
are unemployed. Tickets are easily available locally, for example through seven
Auchan hypermarket stores in the region. The 1998/99 campaign increased
attendance, with new deals for the under-16s who benefited from special
reductions: 400 francs per season (20 francs per match). Season ticket holders
have priority seats for European and national cups with certain seats costing
only 10 francs (Toulet 2000: 38–39).
Their northern fan base in an old mining area is reminiscent
of those of Newcastle or Sunderland. An important symbol for many fans is the
miner’s lamp on the head. Their down-to-earth passion has led some commentators
to conclude that the Blood and Gold supporters are the most ‘British’ of all
French fans. Indeed the club stadium looks more like the square English ground
as opposed to traditional French curved omnisport grounds. Club Chairman
Gervais Martel recognises the heart of the club is ‘populaire’, close to the
‘peuple’, but is attempting to extend the club’s popularity to the whole region
NordPas-de-Calais and further afield. Their official supporters club has
subscribers scattered through regional branches all over France: Aisne,
Pas-de-Calais, Oise, Somme, Seine-et-Marne in the north of France, and even in
the Puy-de-Dôme in the centre, the Bouches-du-Rhône and the Drôme in the
south-east. Fans are encouraged to use the club’s well-developed Internet site
to keep in contact with the club. (ibid.: 38–40) The other side of the coin is
that in 1991, following recommendations by the League management committee,
Lens grouped all its supporters associations under a new entity, Supp ’R’Lens.
The club’s declared aim in setting up this official supporters club was to
promote and reinforce local attachment to the club: ‘The mission of these
sections is to make Racing Club de Lens and its colours more widely known, that
is to get people talking about the club . . . positively. Lens supporters,
apart from their reputation for loyalty and sportsmanship, therefore offer
through their associations a dynamic image which can only benefit the club’
(Demazière et al. 1998: 232). Toulet concluded (2000: 40–41) that this strategy
was part of a wider process, initiated by Martel, aimed at transforming the
club’s structures by increasing contacts with local firms and developing
merchandising. In the era of football-business, Supp ’R’Lens has become both a
PR tool and an instrument of control. The club has expectations of its official
supporters. Annual meetings between club officials and supporters reinforce the
message that the supporters are ambassadors of the club and of the town. With
its 6,500 affiliated supporters and 65 sections spread over eight departments
and five regions, Supp ’R’Lens is hegemonic. However, as elsewhere, in the
1990s Ultras groups emerged, more militant and determined to remain independent
of the club authorities. They are highly visible in the stadium, organising the
visual spectacle. Most of them are students and have adopted the Ultra culture
from Italy or England. The main ones being Red Tigers (200–250 members),
North’s warriors (100–150 members). These groups reject the traditional image
of the Lens supporters voted as the best public in France. By doing this, as
well as asserting their independence from the club, they go against a system of
values that is at the heart of local football support in Lens: the inheritance
of the mining communities with strong values of community and solidarity and
local pride (Demazière et al. 1998: 234).
Despite the existence of these independent fan groups, the
Lens model of support is none the less the more traditional model. Supp ’R’Lens
is closely controlled by the club, and has been seen as a reflection of the
paternalism of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais’s old social democratic tradition. What
Lens is not doing and cannot afford to do, is to gentrify their approach to
fans at the risk of losing their traditional fan base. Olympique de Marseille
(OM) The second city of France is much more a part of Mediterranean and Latin
culture, with a linguistic as well as cultural history opposing it to the north
of France, and a reputation for an explosive and exuberant temperament. The
best study is Bromberger’s work on football supporter ethnography, based on an
analysis of Marseille in comparison to the Italian cities of Naples and Turin.
He found the local context was highly determining as regards supporter culture
and identity (Bromberger et al. 1995: 72–73). Marseille has cultivated an
identity as a rebellious city (‘frondeuse’), and over the centuries this
reputation has provoked either fear or amused condescension in the rest of
France. Janus-like, it has been portrayed in literature and film as a
cosmopolitan city with a reputation for organised crime, lack of law and order,
and a murky political history, at the same time as resembling the set of a
comic opera, peopled by tall-tale-telling lovers of pastis, carefree and
uneducated perhaps but with the gift of the gab. Over time, various episodes
have created a consciousness of being the nation’s scapegoat. In the 1914–18
war the Marseillais were stigmatised as being unpatriotic. Between the two
world wars the city was portrayed as the French Chicago, the Mafia capital of
France. This negative image of the town worsened with the serious structural
crisis following France’s decolonisation and the consequent decline in the
activity of the Marseille port, hitherto fully employed in trade with the French
North African empire and beyond. Previously the link between the North and the
South, it had lost both by the 1970s. There followed de-industrialisation, poor
urban planning, depopulation, and recession. In the local passion for the
city’s football team is this bitterness about its history and wounded local
pride, directed against the rest of France, but particularly against the
capital city Paris, representing power, as opposed to the apparent
powerlessness of the Marseillais. So any major victory of OM is seen as
ostentatious revenge on fate and a legitimate reversal of the course of
history. Any setback such as a refereeing error awakens a sense of injustice
and evidence of a plot brewed by an arrogant capital. For Bromberger et al.
(1995: 73) the dominant form of the local culture as represented in the local
fan culture is that of victimisation. Humiliation is a word that still comes to
the lips of fans in response to defeats they can attribute to poor management
or here-today gone-tomorrow directors (see reports by Le Monde following the
5-1 defeat by Saint-Etienne in December 1999 – Barth 2000a). This is not
restricted to the poorer classes, Bromberger observes, since OM’s supporters
come from all social classes (Bromberger et al. 1995: 74). As a fan explained:
‘The stadium has taken the place of the local area. It is where people meet
each other, where the labourer rubs shoulders with the lawyer, where people
fall in love, and where a silly little bugger will be accepted as a silly
little bugger and not be rejected’ (Barth 2000a). In the 1980s, for
economically hard-hit Marseillais, the football club became a life-belt to
cling on to, a community offering mutual support. A number of young Ultras
created an atmosphere that new OM chairman Bernard Tapie recognised as
important for the whole of the football public of the city. The Ultras had
1,200 members in 1990, a place in the stadium to store their gear (flags,
drums, etc.), a van, various products to sell (T-shirts, stickers, scarves, and
so on), but they remained fairly independent of the club, that at different
times had been suspicious of them and felt they detracted from the image of
Marseille. The relations between club (directors, manager, and players) and
supporters is historically different to that in England or Italy where the
players, whether winning or losing, will go and applaud their fans at the end
of the match. For supporters who have made the effort and expense to go to an
away match, this is seen as a recompense for their loyalty and their sacrifice.
Until recently this has been rare in France, where there has been no real
encouragement by the clubs for players to get involved in the community by
visiting hospitals, youth clubs, supporters club, etc., and where there is a
huge gap between players and spectators. In Britain players are more likely to
come from the same milieu as the fans and often have stood on the terraces that
they now play in front of. Chris Waddle was one such: a supporter of Sunderland
as a lad, who, when he came to Marseille, was much appreciated for his attitude
towards the fans. Other French players had little idea what it was like to be a
supporter. Brought up in the isolation of a youth coaching centre, they had
lost contact with the day-to-day realities of fandom. This growing gap is a key
factor in the process of marginalisation of groups of young fans in the 1980s.
Some adopted attitudes associated with the extremeright party, the Front
national. Having grown in support from nowhere after the recession of the early
to mid-1980s, by 1989 the FN was getting 15 per cent of votes in local
elections in the Marseille area, and racist taunts from the terraces to
visiting black players developed at about this time (Broussard 1990: 192). The
terraces were reflecting the atmosphere of the region. More recently, by the
year 2000 most members of supporters clubs declared themselves ‘apolitical’,
yet against the Front national. A majority of them indeed are of immigrant
extraction. A leader of one such association (Marseille trop puissant) attended
meetings of Ras l’front, a militant anti-racist organisation (Barth 2000a). Le
Monde claimed that no OM fans were now supporters of the Front national (Samson
2000). Whether winning or losing, but particularly losing, football has reinforced
Marseille fans’ sense of local identity that Bromberger defines as paranoia
wider than the local football culture and typical of the whole city, a
population feeling unjustly under attack from the outside, creating a
propensity to regroup behind its own colours and look after its own. In 1993/94
this ‘syndrome of exclusion’ (Bromberger et al. 1995: 74) was reawakened, after
several years of success, through conflict with the national football
authorities over the ‘affaire Tapie’. Revelations of match-rigging and
corruption brought the enforced relegation of OM to Division 2. Fans again
exhibited a persecution complex, against the media and against fans of other
clubs. The Ultras often feel they are not understood by their club, and that
they are the only ones carrying the flame, drawing strength from this
isolation. As with Saint-Etienne, Marseille fans have claimed their aims are
‘not to kill, but to support OM and to take responsibility for the spectacle’,
along the lines of Italian supporters (Broussard 1990: 189). Their militancy
and latent violence was particularly apparent in the 1999/ 2000 season: the
club had sold their captain Laurent Blanc in the close season, and during a
particularly poor spell of results demonstrations by fans led to a meeting
between players and fans organised by club officials in an attempt to calm the
situation. However, the meeting turned into a confrontation, verbal and
physical. Fans attacked two players’ (expensive) cars and manhandled players
and officials, who were clearly intimidated (Barth 2000a). At the end of the
season their new captain Robert Pires left for Arsenal. In the 2000/01 season
pressure from the fans on the chairman Robert Louis-Dreyfus was instrumental in
the controversial return of Bernard Tapie as director of football. Marseille
would seem to be the club where relations between supporters clubs and the
football club are the most complex – not only because of the particular culture
of the city, but also because of certain concessions made to them by Tapie in
an attempt to encourage support. The result of this has been the creation of
vested interests that divide the club and supporters associations. In the 1980s
the club gave concessions to the biggest associations of Ultras to sell OM
merchandise and season tickets to their members. In the 1999/2000 season, for
example, the associations were able to cream off 100 francs for every 600franc
(£60) season ticket they sold. The sums involved are not inconsiderable, since
four major supporters associations have about 5,000 members each. They are
thought to control 28,000 season tickets, giving them a turnover of 2.8 million
francs (£280,000). This financial income has over the years helped the Ultras
supporters associations to grow and to organise themselves into powerful
pressure groups. Two of these, called ‘les Ultras’ and ‘les Yankees’, have set
up limited companies to sell merchandise such as scarves and T-shirts. Whilst
Tapie tolerated this economic activity as the price of their support – and
indeed it may be argued they repaid it when fan pressure made the club bring
him back in 2001 – the club directors have appeared more and more irritated by
it in recent years. The club chairman up to 1999, Jean-Michel Roussier,
attempted to regain control of the database of the associations’ several
thousand season ticket holders’ names and addresses with a view to using it for
direct selling of merchandise on behalf of the club. A struggle to regain full
control of season ticket sales is also a latent issue. Demonstrations by fans
preceded Roussier’s replacement in April 1999 by Yves Marchand, the
director-general of AdidasFrance, appointed by Robert Louis-Dreyfus, who, as
owner of Adidas, had bought the club in 1996. Poor results and more fan
demonstrations in 1999 through 2001 led to changes of manager and to
Louis-Dreyfus taking personal executive control of the club. Apart from the
long-standing local cultural explanation (civic pride and/ or humiliation being
closely linked to the success or failure of the football club) and the issue of
vested interests on the part of certain local associations, a wider explanation
of the current battle for power is to see it as a battle of values, with fans
using the same militant tactics as used by the steelworkers of the north of
France or other professional groups in the defence of their jobs and their
community. The club is certainly a community for the more militant young fans.
A membership leaflet describing what the Ultras association offers says: ‘This
is where you can talk about what OM and the Ultras are doing, get involved in
the group by bringing new ideas or helping prepare the [terrace] spectacle.
Various activities are available: [French] bowls, card games, bar football
games, table tennis, darts, pool’ (Barth 2000a). Fans often criticise the
business values of the club: ‘For [the club directors], the best team in the
world is not the one with the most championships but the one selling the most
shirts’ (ibid.). There may be a lack of coherence in the expressions of fans’
anger (wanting the club to buy the best players, wanting Tapie back, and
rejecting business values), but Marseille fans are rejecting the take-over of
‘their’ football club by outside commercial interests, the transformation of
the people’s game into a global business. And the different supporters
associations do not find it easy to work with the club. Le Monde quotes one
association leader as saying: ‘This club has been carried by us and our
parents, we have worked for it, we have made it known world wide, and now we
are being dispossessed by financiers’ (ibid.). This has resonances of any
number of industrial disputes (more likely to be called ‘social’ disputes in
France) to save factories, jobs and communities, as the French economy adapts
to global forces. The vocabulary of the Marseille fan is more parochial and
less political than that used by those attacking McDonald’s and the global
commercial values it seems to represent, but the tone is similarly militant and
angry. Supporters associations have had difficulties in working together at
national level, and so far no equivalent of José Bové, the leader of the
Confédération paysanne, has emerged to give them an articulate national focus
such as he has created by linking in the public mind ‘la malbouffe’
(poor-quality industrially produced food) with a whole economic system and
globalisation. Food is still more central to French culture than is football.
Ultras and Soccer Violence Violence between French fans is a relatively
small-scale activity compared to England and may have been exacerbated by lack
of police experience in controlling it. French police have not developed the
habit of accompanying visiting fans to and from the ground to ensure security.
Police authorities, particularly in some towns such as Saint-Etienne, were used
to relying on repressive rather than preventative measures, and were also
reticent about taking down fencing in stadiums for the World Cup. In his
analysis of British ‘supporters and hooligans’, Patrick Mignon (1990) points the
way to understanding certain differences in the phenomenon of ‘football
violence’ between France and Britain. He uses Ehrenberg’s analysis of
hooliganism as being a way of getting noticed, as opposed to the ordinary
supporter remaining invisible and anonymous. The ones see themselves as
participants in the spectacle, the others merely spectators. ‘Keeping up
appearances’ has become democratised through its expression in football
grounds. Mignon situates the phenomenon in the global context of an individualistic
society having lost its accepted markers of social position and identity. At a
time when the whole of our culture exalts individual achievement through
personal effort rather than collective action, fans from the bottom of the
social scale with no prospects through school or job manufacture an identity by
displacing attention from the pitch to the terraces, and thus emerging from
anonymity. As with the punk movement, they manage literally to make a spectacle
of themselves. They have taken over the symbols and the space provided by the
modern football game in their bid to be noticed at all costs. Football gives
them a rare occasion to confirm they exist. Appearance is everything, and
usually it is only the appearance of violence, rather than the reality, that
they threaten, as Broussard found. While the above is common to both British
and French expressions of soccer ‘hooliganism’, there are differences that
emerge from the different social, cultural and economic history and geography
of the two countries. Mignon claims British class barriers have lasted longer
than in France and that the chances of social mobility for the British
unskilled or semi-skilled industrial worker are less than the French.
Hooliganism is therefore a logical solution in an unreasonable situation,
whereby part of the working class is using traditional forms of collective
solidarity to produce individualistic strategies allowing them to become
somebody. Other differences include the reduced scale of spectators in French
stadiums, the relative lack of local rivalries in France, including religious
ones – no towns have two big clubs, not even Paris – and the deterrent effect
of the longer distances to travel to away matches in France. Whereas the
British fiveand-a-half day week allowed football, on a Saturday afternoon, to
be lived as an expression of a working-class community whose name and honour
the team was defending, the lack of a free Saturday afternoon for decades in
France, combined with the smaller scale of industrial towns, did not favour a
parallel evolution with its attendant passionate rivalries. More general
regional and northsouth rivalries are lesser in France, Mignon claims. It is
true that the main opposition is between Paris and the provinces, which
explains why the problem of hooliganism as confrontation between rival fans has
concentrated around Paris Saint-Germain as the club everybody loves to hate.
The Invention of a Footballing Tradition: PSG and its Fans Parisian
partisanship in football is new. In 1923 Le Miroir des sports was already
arguing that geographical mobility had diluted any special Parisian identity to
explain the lack of partisan support for a Parisian team (Wahl 1989: 227).
Patrick Mignon, who has directed the most sociological research on Parisian
supporters, argues that to understand how modern football support in the Paris
region is different to elsewhere one needs to look at how, since the 1970s,
there has been a conscious effort to create a new club, PSG, a new public and a
local identity. This involved the invention of a tradition and the creation of
a community of fans more or less from scratch (Mignon 1998: 225–226). What
football traditions there had been in Paris had been broken when Racing Club de
Paris had gone down to Division 2 in 1964, and then into Division 3. Daniel
Hechter’s Paris Saint-Germain tried to fill the void in the middle 1970s. As a
relatively new club, having been founded in 1970, PSG was looking to create a
loyal following. The innovation for Paris of an executive mayor elected by
universal suffrage in 1977 and the city’s interest in the club in the form of
subsidies and then the arrival of the television company Canal+ as major
shareholder in 1991 made PSG important to stakeholders of far greater financial
and political weight than a few thousand supporters. But supporters were
needed. In 1979, the new chairman Francis Borelli played a key role in
encouraging the formation of a group of young fans that came to be known as the
Boulogne Kop, by offering ten matches for 10 francs to under-16s at the Parc
des Princes.
The club also subsidised travel to away matches and lent
premises for storage of drums and flags. By the 1980s these fans had taken on a
punk fashion and then became skinheads in imitation of fans of English clubs
(whose scarves they wore), and turned to fairly run-of-the-mill violence
against visiting supporters. Footballing success came to PSG in 1982 and 1983
with French Cup wins, then the League title in 1985/86, and frequent
participation in European competitions; but good seasons could easily be followed
by poor ones. From 1985 the PSG fans organised themselves on Italian lines,
into supporters associations, by organising travel to away games and pre-match
‘entertainment’ (smoke bombs, giant flags), and selling T-shirts and other
items with their logos on them. They remained independent of the official
supporters clubs that were subsidised by the club, and all-told numbered
300–400 fans in the late 1980s. The 1990s saw PSG become one of the most
successful clubs in France if not the most successful, winning the Championship
in 1994, three French Cups (1993, 1995, 1998), two League Cups (1995, 1998),
and the second European Competition won by a French club, the European Cup
Winners’ Cup in 1997. Success allowed numbers of spectators to grow, as seen in
Table 4.3. In terms of spectator numbers in the 1990s, PSG has consistently
attracted the highest crowds in the league – except for the exceptional seasons
of OM since 1999/2000. Crowds in the Parc des Princes have begun to resemble
those of other major European cities in terms of size (almost), in numbers of
supporters associations, in manifestations of hooliganism (in the 1980s), and
in their association with the extreme right, in a section of the Kop de
Boulogne. In the early 1990s, Mignon’s surveys showed that the fans were 90 per
cent male, coming from the whole of the Paris region (20–30 per cent from the
city of Paris intra muros), and were fairly representative of the social
classes of the area – that is, far more white-collar working class than blue-collar.
Fans were young: 41 per cent under 24 and 64 per cent under 35. The public
included fans representing the different waves of immigration into France
(Portuguese, black African, French West Indian, North African Jews).
Underrepresented were women (as elsewhere) and fans of North African Arab
extraction. There were also a few showbiz personalities. Figures from 1996 for
the virages, where the most committed supporters, including the Ultras,
congregate, show 91.5 per cent male, 8.5 per cent female: mostly from the poor
suburbs and less than a quarter from the city of Paris, 54 per cent between 15
and 24, and 36.5 per cent between 25 and 34 years old. One-third were students;
about half were in regular work. There were differences between the Boulogne end
and the Auteuil end: the Boulogne Kop was a bit older and less studenty, and
very white – the Boulogne end is where the extreme right-wing elements have
traditionally congregated, whereas the Ultras in the cheaper Auteuil end
attract some fans of black African or Maghrebi extraction. Those who have been
arrested for ‘football hooliganism’ are often from a higher social class
background than other categories of delinquent (Mignon 1998: 226–231). If, as
Mignon has revealed, the crowds are now in some sense representative of the
social mix of Paris and its region, what identity if any has been created
around the new club, and has it changed over the years? The supporters
associations have names that often give them an identification with Paris
(Lutèce Falco – after the Roman name for Paris; Gavroches – after a famous
literary character, the heroic Paris street urchin from Victor Hugo’s Les
Misérables; les Titifosi – a play on words, combining the Italian tifosi (fans)
and titi, another name for a young Parisian urchin. The Boulogne Boys and the
Supras Auteuil are references not so much to the two local Parisian quartiers
around the stadium, but to the two opposite virages where the groups
congregate, plus a reference to the English or Italian supporter traditions
they identify with. Other names also refer to this foreign tradition with some
reference to Paris or sometimes not at all, as if the support for the local
team was less important than being part of a wider tradition. Crazy Gang
Génération Parisienne seems to refer to Wimbledon FC, whereas Titans may be an
Italian reference. Tigris Mystic is less clear. However, the colours they all
wear are the club colours of red and blue (the colours too of the city’s coat
of arms). In interviews in the 1980s, Broussard reports, fans referred to their
local chauvinism, claiming to defend the capital against the provinces. Among
their chants is ‘Si t’es fier d’être parisien, frappe dans tes mains’ (‘If
you’re proud you are Parisian, clap your hands’). This is not unexpected to a
British audience, and seems to be a direct translation of chants expressing
local identity heard in English grounds. Whereas it could be said that, before
and during the 30 glorious years of growth following the war and liberation,
Paris was a concentrated version of the provinces, urban growth since the oil
crises of the 1970s and recessions of the 1980s have been such that, as Mignon
(1998: 237) puts it, Parisians are more and more Parisian and more and more
suburban. Paris no longer has the monopoly of being the only big urban
metropolis in France, and the term banlieue in France does not mean a
middle-class suburb of detached houses nor solely ghettos of high-rise flats.
The whole of the Paris region is now far more important than Paris intra muros
in terms of numbers, and is socially mixed, even if over a million people
travel into Paris every day to work. The football team can in the modern period
be seen as representing a new bigger Paris, the Paris region that is open to
people of all origins and backgrounds. Proud of Paris identity does not
necessarily mean, therefore, pride in some older view of what the city of Paris
represents as administrative, economic and cultural capital of the nation.
Indeed the original young working-class or lower-middleclass supporters,
students and the unemployed occupied the Boulogne end, claims Mignon (1998:
238), as a protest against the bourgeois Paris that they saw in the area around
the Parc des Princes – Boulogne and Auteuil are very expensive, upper-middle-class
areas. The early club chairman Daniel Hechter set the tone for the officials of
the club, as Broussard (1990: 174–175) reports. When the couturier-chairman and
his directors turned up at home matches or arrived in the provinces, they would
inevitably be dressed in the latest high fashion (seen as ‘des fringues de
pédé’ – ‘poncy gear’ – by opposing fans). Seen from the provinces, this sense
of Parisian distinctiveness is easily understood as provoking hostility. The
club from the capital has always been disliked in the provinces, as too
wealthy, too self-confident, in short too Parisian. This Paris–provinces
rivalry in football merely extends the common notion of the whole of French
wealth and power being concentrated in the capital, turning the provinces into
an economic and cultural desert. The concept of Paris as opposed to the desert
that was the rest of France is a part of everyday mythology, mental processes
and resentments, which the 1983 decentralisation and regionalisation reforms
have not yet broken down. Supporting the only Division 1 side based in Paris,
the small numbers of PSG supporters who travelled to the provinces quite
naturally took this Paris–provinces dichotomy as defining their identity and
their superiority, and indeed provincial resentments forced it upon them. They
would call Lille fans drunkards, or Auxerre followers peasants, reserving their
most abusive insults for the Marseille supporters. If identity vis-à-vis the
provinces was a given, identity of fans within the Paris region needed to be
invented. In these terms, the appropriation of a territory in the stadium can
be interpreted as an affirmation of an identity by the disaffected youth of the
poor banlieues. In contemporary France the term banlieues is generally
qualified by ‘pauvres’ or ‘chaudes’ (i.e. poor and liable to degenerate into
urban violence), and more particularly it is a euphemism for predominantly
second- and third-generation immigrant districts, suffering more than other
districts from social exclusion. While they are not entirely ghettos, they do
contain a high proportion of population descended from black and North African
Arab immigration. An alternative term with similar connotations is ‘cités’
(estates). The initial creation of the Boulogne Kop seems to have come about
for some fans as a prolongation of street rivalries between ‘white’ ‘French’
youths and ‘black’ and ‘beur’ sons of immigrants. Sometimes, Mignon found,
these white youths, whether from working-class or more middle-class
backgrounds, were experiencing downward social mobility or felt threatened at
least by loss of status. They also felt threatened by or were jealous of the
apparently freer and more macho lifestyle of immigrant youths in their gangs,
which seemed like communities that gave them strength. A skinhead style was
adopted by this group of disaffected young white suburbanites and their coming
together in the Boulogne Kop in the 1970s and 1980s was an expression of their
insecure identity, and an attempt to define their own group identity in
contradistinction to what appeared to them to be strong communities
representing the ‘other’. Explained in terms of centre against periphery, they
were claiming the centre against the ethnic other who had, in their minds at
least, taken over the periphery in the form of the banlieues. A large section
of the Boulogne Kop was formed, therefore, according to the logic that they
were claiming one territory against another territory, and creating a place
where like-minded people could come together. This was easily exploited
politically by the nationalist extreme-right. The popularisation in France of
the British punk and skinhead culture from 1978 to 1981 (itself associated with
football hooliganism) gave an easy model to follow. There were examples of violence
against visiting supporters. The skinheads, fewer than a hundred, gained
notoriety on the occasion of a friendly international in Paris between France
and England (29 February 1984). The resulting press coverage gave PSG fans a
reputation for violence. There was damage to other stadiums in August 1985 and
links with racism and neo-nazism at the time when the Front national was
beginning to gain a following. The Socialist government seemed to have failed
to deliver in the same way as the orthodox right-wing governments had failed to
deliver in the 1970s. Unemployment was soaring and the fabric of urban life was
degenerating in the early 1980s. Mignon explains modern racism within this
context as the response of people wishing to protect their status in society
and prevent their way of life from being degraded; or as the response of the
already marginalised or those excluded from mainstream society who see racial
difference as both the cause of their misfortune and the distance they need to
keep in order to maintain their own identity. It is one effect of a feeling of
the loss of control over the conditions of their own way of life and the
feeling that the powers that be were far removed from the day-to-day concrete
problems of life. The presence of foreigners in other teams was, for them,
proof of the country’s decadence and an easy target for abuse, although black
players wearing PSG colours were usually well supported (Mignon 1998: 238–240).
A recrudescence of violence happened on 18 October 1989 at a European Cup match
against Juventus. A group calling themselves the Pitbull Kop, publishing a
fanzine with the title Pour le prix d’une bière, were featured in a TV
programme Ciel mon mardi (Christophe de Chavanne) in March 1990. Advocating
football violence, they called themselves ‘les hooligans du PSG’. The skinhead
sections seemed to be using football as a recruiting ground for
extreme-right-wing ideas (Broussard 1990). The reputation of the Boulogne Kop
for racism and violence, along with the situation of the Parc des Princes in
its bourgeois district, Mignon argues (1998: 249–250), long prevented the
region as a whole from fully identifying with PSG. It strengthened the idea
that there was a clear division between the city of Paris and the banlieues, a
divorce inside the Paris region between the city centre and the surrounding
areas, that PSG was a club for those people who kept their distance from ‘les
jeunes des cités’ (kids from the estates), from the new France of the
banlieues. Equally, it spread the idea that the youth of the ‘cités’ were not
welcome there and did not feel comfortable there. Choosing PSG was choosing the
centre over the periphery. Seen from the poor estates, the club seemed either
bourgeois or neo-fascist. The Re-invention of PSG’s Identity The more political
side of the Boulogne Kop began to lose its monopoly of Ultra support when other
associations more focused on footballing issues were founded, such as les
Gavroches in 1985 and later the supporters clubs congregating at the Auteuil end,
which, Mignon recounts (1998: 254), were formed as a refusal of the definitions
of fandom imposed by skinheads, casuals or the extreme right. These more
independent supporters associations, independent of the ideological bent of the
original Ultras and more independent of the club, began in the early 1990s to
break the identification of the club with hooligans and racists. They adopted
the Italian model of support rather than the British one. If the hooliganism
aspect was now out of date, the other aspect of British football support did
not really fit the social situation of the Paris fans either. The British model
was of a working-class community coming together with its rituals, its
particular route, on foot, to the stadium, the pubs on the way to the ground
and on the way back, sharing a beer, the physical closeness of the terraces,
the chants and songs, all too exotic for Paris. Too working class and not
reflective or intellectual enough, too based in social class and not enough on
political militancy, argues Mignon (1998: 255). Knowing the chants and songs,
which are less spontaneous than they appear, also depends on long tradition and
familiarity. In Paris, supporters set out from too far away, were too few, and
had not been socialised into a traditional football culture by earlier
generations. Their fan culture fitted the Italian model better, with its stress
on organisation, pre-planning and spectacle. From the mid-1980s onwards, but
particularly in the 1990s, the influence of the Italian model had begun to be
felt. It is highly organised, through hierarchically structured associations
based on militant political groups. Activities in the stadium are planned in
great detail, and use various accessories such as megaphones, huge banners to
unfurl, and confetti. Their objective is to organise a tifo, a particularly
Latin form of entertainment, with a number of animateurs whose role is to
conduct the chanting and singing and generally to stoke up an atmosphere of
support for the home team. The Auteuil end, much more under Italian rather than
English influence than the Boulogne end, is nowadays full of 5,000 well-drilled
young fans with scarves and professionally printed banners identifying the
different organised groups. Two or three conductors, each with their own
supporting drummers, on semi-permanent podiums, one with a portable PA system,
initiate and co-ordinate the chanting – which to English ears is pretty
unimaginative, lacking the wit of Anfield or the passion of St James’ Park. But
the spectacle is the thing. The pre-planning and stage directions of the
animateurs make up for the lack of ‘spontaneous’ fan culture stemming from a
long tradition. A visit to a PSG home game has a different feel to an English
match. The Parc des Princes, with the typical oval virages of French omnisport
stadiums, and a narrow moat, keeps the crowd further from the pitch than most
big English grounds, and absorbs the noise. Only a few visiting fans might be
there – very few clubs have more than a couple of hundred fans who travel to
away games, which also removes a focus for atmosphere. The ends attract the
young members of official and unofficial supporters clubs, who gather in the
stadium much earlier than would be expected in an English game in order to
organise the tifo. The fairly full lateral stands barely take up any of the
chants and the whole affair is relatively passionless. A few screwed-up
programmes may get thrown at a linesman for a close offside decision against
the home side, but the pitch is too far away for them to reach their target,
and the police have frisked the fans as they go in to relieve them of any
bottles or other potential offensive weapons. The Boulogne end seems quieter
than Auteuil, but still has a reputation for booing visiting black players. The
extreme-right gunman arrested on 14 July 2002 for attempting to shoot President
Chirac was described as an avid supporter of PSG, a member of the Boulogne Kop,
having been a local election candidate representing the MNR, a break-away party
from the FN (Guardian, 16 July 2002: 9). Mignon concluded in 1998 by asking
whether the topophilic challenges inherent in creating PSG had been successful.
Certainly the club now has carved its place in football history; it is linked
to a particular territory, its stadium, and enjoys the emotional attachment of
its fans. In the current state of the relations of television and football,
this is not as simple as it used to be, and this will be returned to in Chapter
7. There is a certain fragility and certain contradictions about the
relationship of PSG with its supporters, and indeed its stadium. In 1999 the
club owners were tempted to start again in the new Stade de France, the
national stadium built in the poor northern banlieue of Saint-Denis. Government
was keen since it would have found a tenant to make up the income that for the
time being requires a large State subsidy. It holds 80,000 spectators rather
than the 50,000 of the Parc. It would be a very prestigious home for a club.
There was the danger too that the old Division 3 club based near Saint-Denis,
Red Star, would manage to raise their budget and ambitions sufficiently to
adopt it as their home and in the long run create a more credible competitor
than PSG for the banlieue identity. The immediate community around the Parc des
Princes has never become attached to the club, but changing stadium and habits
would be risky in terms of the relationship that has been built up with the PSG
fans, even though, in various ways, as Mignon says (1998: 259), many Paris fans
come to the Parc and to PSG ‘faute de mieux’ (‘because they have nothing better
to do’). Against this background of depoliticisation of Parisian fans and their
gradual achievement of representativeness of the greater Paris region and its
social mix, a major policy decision by the club in the year 2000 suggested that
the club was finally prepared officially to divest itself of its old bourgeois
and Ville-deParis image and to promote itself as the club of the ‘banlieues’
and the ‘cités’. The attempt to renew PSG’s success in 2000/01 that went along
with various changes of club directors and managers saw the huge investment in
the transfer fee (218 million francs) for Nicolas Anelka. As the club put it:
‘Nicolas is the leader of a global project for Paris and its region’ (Barth
2000c). His arrival from Real Madrid followed those of Stéphane Dalmat and
Peter Luccin, both under-21 internationals from Marseille, and Sylvain Distin,
a former PSG apprentice, from Gueugnon. All three, like Anelka, were young,
gifted and black. They joined other young black players who had come through
PSG’s youth academy at the same time as Anelka. It was the re-signing of the
latter that was accompanied by declarations from the club about the concept of
creating a club to represent the banlieues and the ‘young’ of the Paris region
cités. The re-signing later in the season, from Newcastle, of another former
PSG apprentice from the Parisian suburbs, Didier Domi, was justified in the
same way. France Football quotes a club official as calling the banlieue idea a
strong emotional signal to a large section of the population of the Paris
region that the club was not excluding or forgetting its ‘children’ (8 May
2001: 24). The buying of Anelka was certainly a media coup and stimulated great
interest and initially huge sales of season tickets and replica shirts. In
terms of re-branding, if there had been a feeling that PSG had hitherto been
seen as too bourgeois by some parts of the population of young Paris football
fans, then this move was an interesting attempt to change that image and to
appeal to a similar audience that the television channel, Canal+, the owner of
PSG, was also trying to target: for instance the young beur comic, Jamel
Debbouze, had also been recruited by Canal+. France Football suggests that this
move towards recruiting high-profile young players with whom the banlieues can
identify may have been premeditated by the club’s owners without due regard for
the footballing balance within the club (8 May 2001: 24). True or not, the
young team, under the pressure of the high expectations created, started well
(top of the league in October and qualifying for the second phase of the
Champions League), but in the end failed to match the success of the previous
season, and slipped to mid-way in the French championship, the poorest result
for some time – this despite the appointment as coach in mid-season of Luis
Fernandez. His appointment was also a ‘return to his roots’. Fernandez, the son
of poor Spanish immigrants, had been a PSG player and hero in the 1980s, before
managing them to their only European success in the mid-1990s. He had left his
Spanish club Bilbao at the end of his contract in the summer of 2000 and had
become a paid consultant for Canal+’s football coverage. The suspicion was that
the TV channel was simply waiting for a convenient moment to impose him on the
club. The attempt to re-brand the club and match a segment of the Paris region
audience with the signing of certain types of player had further (unforeseen?)
consequences. Fernandez and many of the players did not get on: Fernandez could
not command automatic respect from his players – they were too young to
remember his exploits as a PSG player. There was, in addition to this
generational problem, a religious and social divide. Jean-Philippe Bouchard
(2001) contrasts the mentality of the banlieues where the present-day Parisian
players grew up as having nothing in common with the poor suburbs of Les
Minguettes where in the 1970s Fernandez benefited from a climate of social
inclusion and advancement. The economic crises of the 1980s taught his
successors to be individualistic and egotistical. In the 1990s, Islam, the
religion of those of North African and Sub-Saharan African immigrant
extraction, has also developed in the banlieues, and PSG youth teams, recruited
from the banlieues, have a majority of Islamic players. Their training has to
take account of this and adapt for example to the fasting of Ramadan. At least
three professionals including (reputedly) Anelka converted to Islam. French
young players, after the Bosman ruling, are also more likely to see their
footballing future with a prestigious club abroad and therefore less likely to
be as loyal to the PSG jersey as Fernandez might wish. Officials say there are
clans within the club rather than a single community spirit. The players also
refused to wear club blazers, arguing they could not possibly wear PSG badges
to go out on the town (Bouchard 2001: 28). The unrest within the club and its
lack of success has been mirrored in the stadium amongst the fans. Fans from
the Boulogne end had tried to storm the presidential box in February 2001 after
a 4–0 home defeat to Auxerre. A seat had been thrown down on a Marseille fan in
October 2000, putting him in a coma. The most serious incident was during a
European match against the Turkish side Galatasaray in April 2001. Violent
incidents with various offensive weapons that must have been smuggled in
earlier, with the complicity of stewards (bénévoles), had led to the match
being interrupted for almost half-an-hour and police being called (too late)
into the stadium. The incidents were overtly racist in nature, some of the
authors of the violence admitted trying to ‘casser du Turc’ (Turk-bashing). The
incidents may not have been unconnected with the deaths of two Leeds fans in
Turkey the year before, in view of the links between the Boulogne end and
English fans. UEFA imposed a fine of over 4 million francs on the club, plus a
requirement to play its next three European ‘home’ games at a neutral ground at
least 300 km from Paris. The club is now reinforcing the barriers to prevent
movement between different parts of the ground, adding many more security
cameras, and preventing objects being passed into the ground through external
railings. One of the biggest and oldest supporters associations, the Boulogne
Boys, has broken off all relations with the club and ‘declared war’ on the club
chairman (Bouchard and Harscoët 2001). The complicated relationship between PSG
and its fans looks set to continue. Are we seeing the start of a new stage in
the invention of a footballing tradition in Paris, an overt club policy that
identifies PSG and its team with the new France of the banlieues, trying to
capitalise – a little late – on the wave of euphoria for the rainbow French
nation that the national team has come to symbolise? Will this entail an
eventual move to the Stade de France situated in a more appropriate part of the
Paris region and forever associated with the 1998 World Cup victory? Is it the
fear of this that is reactivating the violence of those elements within its
fans for whom PSG gave an identity which precisely rejected the new banlieues
and their ‘black, blanc, beur’ mix? A discontented member of the Boulogne Boys
made explicit certain fans’ opposition to this change of direction by the club,
implicitly rejecting the import of players representing the black banlieues,
when Le Parisien newspaper gave column inches to interviews with fans towards
the end of the 2000/01 season. Olivier is quoted as saying: ‘It is true we
support PSG while at the same time carrying on a struggle against the club.
Anelka, Luccin and some other young players should not be here. They have not
understood that they had responsibilities. They are destroying the image of
Paris’ (Bruna 2001: 3). Luccin, Distin and Anelka all left the club at the
start of or during the 2001/02 season. Conclusion Seen from the perspective of
the 1960s or even the 1980s, the size of attendances at French Division 1
matches at the turn of the twenty-first century is surprising. More than twice
as many people attend matches than in the 1980s and more than three times as
many as in the 1960s. All-time records were regularly broken after the World
Cup victory. But crowds had been improving even before 1998. A judicious and
cheap season ticket policy was a factor. There was plenty of room for more
people following improvements to grounds in preparation for the World Cup, and
most grounds are still rarely completely full. However, an average of 50,000 at
Marseille or over 40,00 at PSG compares reasonably well with other European
cities. There are huge differences, however, in gates between the best and
least well supported clubs, and still a suspicion of fragility about the depth of
commitment. The lack of traditional passion for football in France may be put
down partly to a late start for professionalism, that had to begin again from
scratch following the Second World War. This, plus the late industrialisation
and urbanisation of France which happened really in the 30 years up to the oil
crises of the mid1970s, meant there was no traditional working-class supporter
culture established into which to socialise the next generation of fans. By the
1960s a new more affluent lifestyle and new more modern leisure activities made
football oldfashioned. Where recognisably modern forms of support developed was
in SaintEtienne in the 1970s, precisely in an old industrial working-class town
that was starting to suffer the consequences of economic downturn that was to
decimate the European coal and steel industries. European Cup travel allowed
them to adopt styles of fandom they saw in Liverpool and Glasgow and to express
an identity that was strengthened by their sense of an old industrial community
losing its place in the modern world under pressure of impending or actual
restructuring of the national economy. Similar remarks could be made about Lens
support in the 1990s. In the case of Marseille, where passionate support does
exist, it was the loss of Empire across the Mediterranean and beyond and its
consequences for the local economy, based as it was on its trading links to the
south and the Far-East, that gave Marseillais a sense of resentment against the
rest of France – that OM’s defeats and victories alike fuelled to stoke up a
strong supporter identity. The uneasy relationship between the OM supporters
associations and the club is but an extreme example of a developing phenomenon
in France. While English influences were important and are still evident in
stadiums, the Italian influence has become stronger. The Ultra phenomenon,
fandom as militancy, opting for a freely chosen identity rather than an
inherited one, fitted the French situation. Television in particular gave an
opportunity for fans to become visible, whether through English-style
‘hooliganism’ or spectacular Italian-style terrace displays. This post-modern
interpretation fits PSG fans in particular. The city of Paris had always lacked
an identity other than being a microcosm of provincial France, and until the
mid-1970s it had lacked the political will (and the local political structures)
to support a big club. Once PSG had been established as a brand new club, fans
and traditions of support had to be invented from nothing. Initially, a
dominant identity that emerged among the Ultras was of a young white backlash
against unemployment and disintegration of the social fabric of the Paris
region. This expressed itself by the occupation of a part of the Parc des
Princes stadium (representing the centre) against the periphery of black and
Arab banlieues, the scapegoats for their sense of frustration. At the dawn of a
new century the club adopted a new branding strategy. It tried to re-invent an
identity and appeal to the wider Paris region by promoting players from the
deprived banlieues, like Nicolas Anelka, even if they had to buy him back
expensively from abroad. At the time of writing it is too early to say whether
this strategy will work in the long term, except that the policy’s figurehead,
Anelka, has not settled – again – and has been sold on at a big loss.
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