Introduction: Studying French Football/Sports.

Acknowledgements

‘No man is an island.’ A single authored book – a non-fiction book more particularly – can rarely be entirely the work of one person. There are first of all the multiple sources – written and human – that have been consulted over a number of years (and which hopefully have all been properly acknowledged). There are particularly those writings of others that have proved full of inspiration and fired enthusiasm for the subject. There are those organisations that have believed in the project enough to give financial help for travel. There are those information professionals in libraries and documentation centres who have found or ordered books and articles. There are those friends who knowingly or not have been engaged in conversations about some aspect of the work that the author was trying to clarify. There are others who have kindly agreed to read parts of the manuscript, have commented on it, and thus helped excise embarrassing errors or clarify an argument. The series editor and publishers are always well focused in this kind of contribution. There are those who have taken a more distant interest in the work itself perhaps, but who none the less have offered moral support and kind encouragement. From time to time there is some inspirational music. And then there is one’s nearest and dearest, who does more by just being there, but knowing when to keep out of the way, than she knows. For there comes a time when the author has to shut himself away and finish it off, complete the second or third drafts of the more rebarbative chapters, bring it up to date, and take full and final responsibility for the whole, knowing it could be better, but knowing too it is no good to anybody until it is published. It is invidious to pick out some people for one type of help and others for another, and to put them in any order other than alphabetical. They generally know how they have helped. I shall just list them below therefore. I make an exception for my wife Cathy who deserves pride of place, more than ever, for her love and support, and to whom I dedicate this book. My thanks to: Pierre Bourdieu, Agnès Chauveau, Hugh Dauncey, Kathryn Earle, Alan Fidler, Gloria Gaynor, Richard Giulianotti, Chrystel Hug, Samantha Jackson, Claude Journès, Françoise Lebrun and friends, Daniel Leclercq, Christian Lépagnot, Jo de Linde and the Financial Times Paris Office, Patrick Mignon, Hélène Pérennou, ‘Loulou’ Pérennou, Dave Place, Jessica Plane, Nick Swingler, Marie-Pierre Toulet, Andy Young; also to the staff of the Bibliothèques André Malraux and Mouffetard (Ville de Paris); the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel; the Documentation Centres of the CSA, the INSEP, the Institut Français de Presse; Robinson Library (Newcastle University); and for financial help, the Institut français d’Ecosse, Newcastle University Small Research Grants.

Geoff Hare August 2002

Introduction: Studying French Football

Why Study Football in France? Why is it important to study French football? Isn’t France supposed not to be a sporting country? A few years ago interest in sport and in football as indicated in attendances at Division 1 (D1) matches, was about half that of England, Italy or Germany. French football clubs are consequently financially impoverished and its top players go abroad, under the freedom of contract offered by European legislation (essentially the Bosman ruling), to earn the kind of money their British, Italian and Spanish equivalents are paid – indeed the exodus is not confined to their internationals, but affects their second rank players too, now to be found sitting on the bench in various English stadiums. Numbers of French professionals playing abroad were: 75 in 1998/99, 87 in 2000/01, and 113 in 2001/02 (Chaumier and Rocheteau 2001: 656–699), and of the French Euro 2000 squad, eight plied their trade in England, six in Italy, two in Spain, two in Germany, and only four in France. However, readers don’t need to be reminded that the top two English teams of 2001/02 were managed by Frenchmen, that France won the 1998 World Cup, and then indeed in 1999 they gave the English inventors of the game as big a footballing lesson on the Wembley turf as that inflicted by Puskas’s Hungary in 1953, and finally rounded off two marvellous years with the last-ditch victory over Italy in the 2000 European Championship. Such a run of success had to end at some stage, even if the manner of France’s ignominious early exit from the 2002 World Cup was a shock. Time will tell whether it was just a blip or whether it heralds a more serious decline. The 1998 World Cup victory underlined that a mere sport, as mediated through television, can suddenly move a whole nation in various ways. The saga of ‘les Bleus’ has had a galvanising effect on reappraisals of French identity, crystallised a renewed national self-confidence, and confirmed France’s position in the world through global TV exposure for its success stories (high tech industrial products, luxury goods, cultural tourism). From Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’ and Hobsbawm’s ‘invention of tradition’, we know that sport and national identities have long been intertwined. Sport (especiallymale sport), and its mediation through the national press and TV, has played a crucial role in the construction and representation of national identity. Just as English defeats on the cricket field in the last decade or so have been represented as symbolic of the nation’s decline (Maguire 1999: 177), so French football victories have been seen as the revelation of the opposite. The French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 1996, had challenged the artificiality of the French team, saying that some players had chosen French nationality as a matter of convenience (Marks 1999: 50), pointing the finger at Desailly and Vieira, for example, born in Ghana and Senegal respectively. But the growth of the Extreme Right was slowed down (temporarily at least) after the World Cup victory, which moved on the debate about the legitimacy of the place of ethnic minorities (to use the British terminology) within the French nation. Given the team’s ethnic mix, the only way the national team’s achievement could be celebrated, the only way the nation could identify with the victory, was by equating the nation with the same diverse ethnic mix as the team. The French white establishment could identify with a balding Kabyle born in a poor Marseille banlieue and with a tall shy Guadeloupean, on equal terms with a shaven-headed goalkeeper of Spanish extraction; they could identify with all of them equally as representatives of the nation; and Blacks and Beurs (second and third generation North African Arab immigrants) all over France could be proud of their community’s contribution to a French national achievement. Without forgetting of course the unassuming, middle-aged ex-factory worker with the Corrèze accent who as national team manager came to represent all the values of ‘la France profonde’ and of la République: solidarité, travail, droiture, professionnalisme (solidarity, work, honesty, professionalism). In short, football became, for a privileged moment at least in the summer of 1998, the major focus for integration and solidarity in a Republic where the terms have a founding value. The wider popular impact of following the two cup wins is also clear, for example, from the result of the Journal du Dimanche opinion poll of the Top 50 French people (6 August 2000: 1, 30). In summer 2000, for the first time since it was inaugurated in 1988, it was topped by a footballer, Zinedine Zidane. The ex-Maoist intellectual Philippe Sollers commented in the same issue: ‘I am an unconditional admirer of Zidane, Anelka, and Trezeguet. I jump up when France wins, not just at football, but everywhere and increasingly often.’ This is merely one example of equating the French national football team with a wider idea of the whole nation winning. Indeed we have seen this idea gain currency in the immediate aftermath of France 1998 in the form of the transformation of the French ‘Astérix complex’1 into the metaphor of ‘une France qui gagne’ (France as a winner). In other words, a French national inferiority complex being replaced by a belief in French effectiveness – a new national selfconfidence. Football has become a common metaphor for an upsurge of general national self-belief, a recognition – a perhaps still fragile recognition – that France is emerging from a long period of depression as the nation has come painfully to terms with its war-time collaborationist past, with decolonisation, with loss of status in a world now dominated by ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and the English language, and with an economy and society bedevilled by high unemployment. Through football, the French have discovered they are not eternal losers. This is new. French football history abounds with accounts of heroic defeats (1958 and 1982) and of national coaches basing tactics on the essential individualism of their players. This recurrent national self-image purveyed through football equates to the Astérix complex. This refers to the expectation of ultimate defeat for ‘les petits Français’, just like the Gauls led by Astérix against the Roman legions, while, importantly, emerging with honour safe and some small victories of clever and stylish individualism against overwhelming odds. This Astérix complex has proved durable, especially since the 1982 and 1986 World Cup semi-final defeats by Germany. The only way French football and its national history could be celebrated – until 1998 – was if style was considered more important than effectiveness. If victories could not be expected on the European or world stage, then at least France could play ‘champagne’ football, à la Platini or Kopa. The same might have been said for other aspects of French life: the intellectual Raymond Aron had said something similar in the 1950s regarding the French not being winners: that they preferred to be right, or to do things properly, even at the price of defeat.2 Or at least there was a time when the received idea was that France enjoyed world renown in luxury goods, perfume, fashion, wine, in culture and the arts, but not in business and industry or high technology. The recent French footballing victories have laid this ghost, certainly in the context of football and, some people would argue, possibly more widely. The ‘World Cup effect’ has not entirely disappeared – certainly not in terms of the increased interest in football, as seen for example in increasing numbers of spectators in stadiums. The contention of this book is therefore that football is important in France, and that it can be used as a window on French society more generally; that the way football is organised, played and watched reveals interesting, wider differences between France and Britain. Indeed, how sport has or has not been a legitimate object of study within France may also prove revealing. One aspect the author has regrettably had to omit, for lack of knowledge and space, is women’s football, which is just starting to grow in importance and deserves a subsequent study to itself.

The Academic Study of French and Britain In Western Europe today, sport may be seen as a ‘total social phenomenon’, to use Marcel Mauss’s term, in that it traverses and affects the whole of society, and therefore reveals all its dimensions. In this respect, studying sport in general, and football in particular, involves looking at the physical, mental and social behaviours of its actors (practitioners [players, administrators, managers], financiers, and audiences), in an attempt to establish some coherent interpretation of all its components, be they historical, sociological, economic, cultural, or ethnographic. Any study that has the ambition to understand sport in its totality will be enriched by the inclusion of a mosaic of analyses from these different angles of view. Following Roger Caillois’s claims that the sociology of a given civilisation is directly related to the particular configuration of ‘games’ (‘jeux’) existing within it, and Norbert Elias’s contention that sport is a privileged site for understanding social relationships and their evolution, Pociello sees the study of sporting practices as offering insights into society, from the psychology of participants and spectators to the socio-political analysis of national or multinational organisations running professional sporting events. Indeed the two poles of his approach cannot be divorced: any analysis of commercial sporting institutions, for example the football World Cup, must take into account the common grass-roots sporting culture, the ethics, feelings and values that are shared by its audience and that are a key to the sport’s resonance within society. Given the growing impact of sport in contemporary society, sports studies are inevitably led therefore to pose questions about the norms and values that a given sport carries, and about the social and political functions that the sport comes to assume within a given society (Pociello 1999). While it is accepted that football is a multi-faceted social phenomenon, with social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions that must be explored, the overarching theme that will emerge in this study, in an attempt to give the book its coherence, is the issue of the values that football carries. A major question posed by Patrick Mignon (1998: 8) in this context is whether the values carried by football are simply the expression of identifiable collective cultures, or whether we are dealing with a process of top-down construction of values by the State or the media. Our study will not necessarily resolve this wider issue of sociological theory. However, the hypothesis adopted is that these values are not static or constant, but are subject to change, and that football is one of the most visible sites of tension between old and new values, between competing cultural and social models; in other words, that football is an ideological battleground. The last years of the twentieth century have been particularly productive of change in this respect.

Pierre Bourdieu had a particular view of the direction that sport has been evolving in the last two decades of the twentieth century. This view started from the idea of Elias and Dunning, who showed that what characterised modern sport at its outset was its autonomy as a social sphere within civil society, its ability to organise its own practices in its own terms for their own sake – not for financial gain, and free from State control. This remained true for a long time after different sports moved out of their exclusively amateur period into the professional era. Then, from the 1980s onwards, as business practices have entered different sports at club and international level, sport has gradually been losing this autonomy. Its ludic, non-material values have been under attack from business logic. In Western Europe the sport at the forefront of this erosion of autonomy has been professional football, and its self-regulation is being broken down. The Trojan Horse of business logic, to use Bourdieu’s image (1999: 16), is television, which has transformed football from practice into a new kind of spectacle. Indeed one could go further and conclude that the influence of television as a marketing tool has turned football into a commodity to be bought and sold. And as was seen in 1998, the ultimate TV entertainment commodity is the World Cup, although professional club competitions (like the new World Club Championship and the European Champions League) are also subject to this trend. France is not alone in undergoing this evolution in its national league at club level, although France’s particular national cultural specificities have apparently mediated its effects in certain ways, differently certainly to Britain. Within the hypothesis of football as a battleground of cultural values, it will be asserted that although French and British football are more and more subjected to the same commercial pressures that Bourdieu identified, the cultural histories of the two societies provide a different balance of power in this same ideological battle of cultural values. Certainly both countries are subject to increasing standardisation of European law (the Bosman ruling is a key landmark in professional sport), and are experiencing the same globalising economic pressures bringing increasing standardisation of consumption and ways of life as major European or global groups are formed by fusions of hitherto national companies. There are, however, certain differences of political culture and of institutions that mean that the liberalisation and commercialisation that are changing British football have met greater resistance in France from strong values of public service and statism. These values have governed the growth and organisation of sport in general and of the media companies that, on both sides of the channel, are building a symbiotic relationship with major professional sports clubs and events. A further historical difference is that French football differs from its British counterpart in its organisational structures. Its regulatory system and its governing bodies and clubs have been shaped by the French State’s concept of the public service, of Republican and democratic values, and of centralist interventionism, as opposed to laissez-faire individualism (Miège 1993). These French specificities are to do with the particular tradition of French statism, and the different speeds of development of national broadcasting systems. On the one hand, France moved initially much more slowly than Britain from an exclusively public broadcasting sector and heavily State-regulated sector to a mixed public and commercial broadcasting system, and then moved much more quickly to a pay-per-view subscription TV system. On the other hand, in the tradition of French statism and public service, the special relationship between sport and the State in France has protected its values better than in most other European Union countries. One could add that until the victory in the World Cup no one could have argued that this protection had significantly helped the international competitiveness of French teams, whether at club level or national level. The Ubiquity of Sport in Contemporary Culture There is no doubting the growing social importance of sport within late modern society. Many analysts have drawn attention to its development, not only in western countries but across the world from South America to emerging African and Asian nations. Sport is the flavour of the decade and football the flavour of the moment. The 1990s have been called the age of sport. Even the Queen, in one of her annual messages to the Commonwealth, in 1998, noted the importance of sport as a carrier of important modern values (Daily Telegraph, 9 March 98: 1), unwittingly echoing a former editor of Marxism Today, Martin Jacques, who claimed we are witnessing the ‘sportification’ of our culture:

Almost all of us, whatever our age, wear trainers. No designer label is complete without its sportswear collection. Sports personalities have become cultural icons, sought after by sponsors and advertisers alike. And where sport was once low-brow, now it is the stuff of serious literature. Sport has become ubiquitous. It is the metaphor of our time . . . [J]ust as rock became the dominant cultural form of the Sixties and Seventies, so sport has become dominant in the Nineties, invading areas of life where previously it had no presence: sport as fashion, as showbiz, as the body beautiful, sport for health, sport as a new source of value, sport as business. (Jacques 1997: 18)

Jacques is not sure the sportification of society is wholly a good thing. Looking at similar social phenomena, but with more positive conclusions, French ethnologist Christian Bromberger, à propos of the 1998 World Cup, talked about the ‘footballisation’ of French society (Losson and Villepreux 1998). One unexpected aspect of the impact of France 98 was a legitimisation of sports studies in French intellectual circles, whether among sociologists, economists or cultural historians. The French serious daily press gave the World Cup major coverage, where football had not previously merited more than a few column inches from time to time. The newspaper of reference, Le Monde, read by French political, economic and intellectual elites, carried a daily 8-page World Cup supplement for the month of the competition. Subsequently football coverage (and sports coverage in general) has noticeably increased from pre-1998 norms. In the month preceding the 1998 World Cup, two major (international) academic conferences dealing with football were held in Paris: one, entitled ‘Football et cultures’, was hosted by the organisation funding and managing all State-directed research, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) (see Lenoir 1998); the other, on ‘Football: jeu et société’, was organised by the National Institute for Sport and Physical Education, Institut national du sport et de l’éducation physique (INSEP). Their sponsorship by the three ministries of Youth and Sport, Education, and Research showed how football was coming to be seen as part of mainstream culture. Hitherto, the serious French studies of football that existed were often characterised by a long-standing academic and intellectual elitism towards the analysis of popular culture. In the French academic world especially, this elitism was difficult to break down. The liberal intellectual attitude to football was that it was a pointless activity, and so not worthy of study. For the structuralistfunctionalist analyst, football was seen as conducive to social disruption and came under deviance studies. To the Marxist intellectual, football was ideologically suspect, a part of the dominant ideology of capitalism, inhibiting the development of a revolutionary consciousness among its supporters (football as opium of the people). Jean-Paul Sartre was aware of this attitude among his fellow contributors to Les Temps modernes. He remarked: ‘Ha! Football ! can you just see their faces at Temps modernes if I went to watch a match?’3 This disdainful attitude to football that Sartre, to his credit, appears to have found amusing still finds expression from time to time, as in a piece in April 2001 by Robert Redeker of Les Temps modernes, where he argues that the wave of interest in football is ‘cretinising’ the French (Jeffries 2001). Early studies on the sociology of leisure and sport, published in France or elsewhere, by Dumazedier (1962), Weber (1970, 1971), Pierre Bourdieu (1980) and Elias and Dunning (1986) can now be seen as seminal. Through their analyses the legitimacy of the study of football as social practice has been established, its economic ramifications recognised, and its status acknowledged as a useful window on social and cultural change, offering particular insights into cross-cultural differences, as the sport becomes globalised, and into crossnational divergences that persist. In his articles written in the 1970s Eugen Weber drew attention to the social and political significance of French sport. Innovative work on sport and leisure such as Dumazedier’s Vers une civilisation du loisir (1962) has helped demonstrate the centrality of practices previously thought insignificant. Pierre Bourdieu and some of his research team (notably Faure and Suaud 1994a, 1994b, 1999), have turned their attention to the sociological analysis of sporting practices. Bromberger (1987, 1995, 1998) has brought his ethnographic approach to bear on the place of football in the daily lives and culture of inhabitants of Marseille for instance. The sociologist Alain Loret (1996) shows how the organisation of sport reflects much deeper economic structures and social values: his analyses of new individualistic, ‘fun’ sports (surfboarding, rollerblading) showed how they were a protest against established, mainstream (team) sports such as football, taken up in France in the late nineteenth century and moulded around Pierre de Coubertin’s ideas. He shows how highly regulated competitive sports express the values of industrial society: performance, results, classification and how they may be being overtaken by recent innovations in alternative physical leisure practice. The French national institute for elite sportsmen and women, the INSEP, has a research department which, in addition to studies of sports science (bio-mechanics, physiology, and psychology), has a sociology unit headed by Patrick Mignon who has published extensively on fan culture. Indeed, since sports sociology is a compulsory part of the training on STAPS courses (Sciences et Techniques des Activités Physiques et Sportives) for physical education and sports teachers, coaches, managers and administrators, there exist a number of French sports sociology textbooks (e.g. Pociello 1999). Historians too have provided valuable source books on football, such as those by Alfred Wahl (1989, 1990a, 1990b). Useful summaries of the institutional, regulatory and legal framework of sport in France have emerged from Miège (1993, 1996) and Thomas (1991), finding different patterns of approach between the northern and the southern European states. A good source on the history of French sports policy is Callède (2000). Within the context of rapidly changing communication technologies and the liberalisation of media industries (and their globalisation), the recently growing economic importance of sports such as football has stimulated several socio-economic analyses of French sport. Jean-Marie Brohm (1992, 1998), in the Marxist tradition of condemning professional sport as exploitative, has studied the political sociology of sport. Bourg (1986, 1991, 1994, 1997), Maitrot (1995), Poiseul (1992, 1996a, 1996b, 1998) and Halba (1997) have examined the economics and business practices of contemporary sport. Finally, French media studies specialists have just begun to take an interest in the symbiotic relationship between sport and major press and television companies (Thomas 1993; Ferran and Maitrot 1997).

From the English-speaking world, Richard Holt’s Sport and Society in Modern France (1981) was important in creating more interest in analysing the social context of French sport. Other British-based work has come from Philip Dine (1995, 1996, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c, 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2001), Richard Giulianotti (1999), Pierre Lanfranchi (1994), Dauncey (1999), Dauncey and Hare (1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 1999a, 1999b, 2000) and Hare (1999c, 2003). Policy studies, such as those by Dine (1997b, 1998a, 1998b), have looked at the way the French State has intervened in the selection and coaching of elite athletes in order to use success in international sports competitions for domestic and diplomatic purposes. The Frank Cass journals and monograph series, under the guidance of J. A. Mangan, have taken an interest in European sport, including French sport. While one or two other English-language monographs have appeared in the 1990s, often with short chapters on a number of countries, usually including France, by Williams and Wagg (1991), Giulianotti and Williams (1994), Armstrong and Giulianotti (1999), and the remarkable summum Football. A Sociology of the Global Game by Richard Giulianotti (1999), there has been a relative impermeability of British and French sports studies – until the recent conferences. While Elias and Dunning have been much cited and influential in France (their work Quest for Excitement. Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process appeared in French translation in 1994), many French specialists have appeared relatively unaware of other work emanating from British analysts. One exception is the English-speaking Patrick Mignon, whose work shows close familiarity with that of British sports academics (see his La Passion du football (1998) and his chapter in Finn and Giulianotti (2000). Equally, French-speaking academics such as Richard Holt, Pierre Lanfranchi and Philip Dine have managed to get their work recognised in French research circles. The major barrier on both sides has apparently been linguistic. One of the aims of the current work (along with previous work in collaboration with Hugh Dauncey) is to act as a cultural interpreter between the two research communities, and to build bridges of understanding between different cultures. This book may thus be situated within intercultural studies. From Community to Commodity? Social and Cultural Change and French Football The same cultural history approach that brought Jacques, Bromberger and others to see sport as a metaphor for late twentieth century life, and to see football as revelatory of wider social and cultural change, has led analysts to apparently contradictory conclusions. On the one hand, football has been seen as exacerbating (and indeed organising) rivalries between individuals, social groups, towns, regions or entire nations, leading to violence (‘football hooliganism’), while on the other hand, more positively, it has been seen as creating social bonds and relationships, collective identities and a sense of belonging or community. The same event has been seen to stimulate both violent confrontation and social cohesion, as in European Championship competitions or the World Cup. Pociello (1999: 4) indeed sees sport’s contemporary importance in societies such as our own, disrupted as they are by economic globalisation and threatened by ‘social fracture’, as this dual ability to organise confrontation while at the same time reinforcing a sense of community. His view would lead to an interpretation of English fans’ violence during the 1998 World Cup and 2000 European Championships as being a desperate attempt to (re)create a national identity and a sense of personal value that had been lost during the socioeconomic changes of post-imperial Britain, while Scottish fans’ studied avoidance of violent behaviour in France 98 reflected a sense of national identity that defined itself precisely in contradistinction to English identity. Similarly, within the context of French football, past extremes of behaviour by fans of two of France’s most passionately supported club sides, Saint-Etienne and Lens, have been interpreted by Mignon (1998) as the last defensive throws of old industrial communities being torn apart by the restructuring of the French economy in the 1980s. Key words used in this book, ‘community’, ‘spectacle’ and ‘commodity’, refer to the dominant values of the three overlapping phases of the social and cultural history of French professional football, as I see it. As everywhere else in Europe, football has undoubtedly helped forge links between people who had no cultural or social identities other than the fact of belonging to a certain urban space. Football’s early development in France has something in common with the creation of a shared sense of place in emerging working-class communities in cities across Western Europe, albeit on a smaller scale than in England, reflecting the smaller scale of the French industrial revolution. Yet French football differs in its organisational structures and in the input of the middle classes and their values. Its system of self-regulation and governance owes much to the French civic tradition of public service, of Republican and democratic values, and of State interventionism, as opposed to British laissez-faire individualism (Miège 1993). There was in the period up to the 1960s, both a growth of small town clubs that represent the community within the nation and an official recognition of sport as a public service. In the period between the two world wars, new and older urban communities founded identities around the local football club.The entertainment value of football as spectacle grew in importance as professionalism, a national league and a transfer system developed and there were pressures to attract crowds and gate income. Differences in scale of support between England and France are attributable to their different socio-economic development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to the later and more fragile implantation of football in the working-class consciousness in France. French public service television became the natural mediator of this spectacle for the nation – at least for matches of national importance – not only the national team, but just as importantly French club teams playing in Europe. Indeed football as national spectacle in the Gaullist era (the 1960s and early 1970s) feeds a sense of national identity. The slower evolution of professional football in the direction of commercialisation in France than in England is to do with a more general French attachment to public service values (or the values of amateurism), community control, and rejection of free-market economic solutions (that the French call ‘liberalism’). The under-development of French football (low income and punitive social taxes on clubs) led, after the ‘Bosman’ deregulation of national protectionist contracts, to an exodus of a hundred or more of France’s top players to England, Italy, Spain, Germany and elsewhere. They have been replaced by imports from Africa, South America and smaller European countries (Hare 2003). As deregulation has been imposed on football, after many other sectors of social and economic life, through the process of Europeanisation and globalisation, there has been local French resistance to this creation of a global marketplace. However, there is growing pressure for France to harmonise (i.e. liberalise and commercialise) its practices regarding professional sport with the rest of the European Union. The newly elected French League management committee, backed by the financially stronger clubs, indeed promised in 2000 – in the name of ‘modernisation’ – to align the structures of French football with those of England, Italy and Spain within two years (Caffin 2000). One tool they are using is television rights. The struggle for control of broadcasting rights to French football between the subscription channel Canal+ and the commercial, freeto-air channel TF1 has had the effect of massively increasing income to football clubs. French football has become, as in other countries, a ‘commodity whose media value is determined by the size and composition of the audience it can deliver to potential advertisers and sponsors’ (Maguire 1999: 152–153). For the first time, in 2002, the French professional league has attached the name of a commercial sponsor to its title. What is happening then, as France enters the new century, is the increasing commercialisation and commodification of football. Top clubs are being re-branded to catch a national and international audience of consumers of a lifestyle associated with a club. A significant example in this respect is Olympique de Marseille’s promotion of itself as OM, deliberately separating its new brand image from its original geographical reality and identity, in order to give itself a national or international audience. In the era of globalisation of markets, commodity is squeezing out community.

Globalisation, with its pressures for harmonisation, is affecting France. But globalisation and Europeanisation have not passed without local resistance. France’s position within the global economy of professional football has been brought face to face with its own under-development (in business terms) or, to look at it another way, with its semi-peripheral position in the global media– sport complex, as Maguire (1999: 19, 91–93) has called it. French clubs have seen their best players poached by core European footballing nations. This deskilling of French football has been most keenly and controversially felt by the loss of the most talented products of the famous French youth footballing academies, the Centres de formation that all professional clubs are obliged to finance by their national Federation. Nicolas Anelka was one of the first to be poached – from PSG by Arsenal for half a million pounds in January 1997 – to be sold on two and a half years later to Real Madrid for £22 million. The fact that, in summer 2000, PSG bought back Anelka from Spain for 218 million francs is ironic and redolent of the spoliation and dependency that French clubs see in the current situation. Since PSG, in order to pay the transfer fee, were helped by Canal+ and Nike (MD 2000), it is certainly evidence that French football is being further removed from local community control to become a ‘corporate sport’ owned by the sportsmedia complex. Europeanisation and globalisation have meant a growing commercialisation of football that has gone a long way to breaking the links between community and sporting spectacle. Commodity values have begun to replace the sporting ethos at the heart of football. If French football is still in some ways French, it is in the sense that the governing bodies and the French Ministry of Sport, for example during the French presidency of the European Union, have tried harder than elsewhere in Europe to put the brakes on this headlong rush into greater commercialisation whereby sport is increasingly ‘handcuffed to television’ (Barnett 1995). This is in the tradition of French sports administrators from Coubertin and Jules Rimet onwards who have played key roles in spreading the sporting ethos across Europe and the world (see Chapter 2). This local resistance by the French authorities and governing body to the ideological process that is globalisation has been interpreted by some as a rejection of modernity or modernisation. Others defend it as another French exception. The successive chapters of the book will weave the argument outlined above into a social and cultural history of French football, beginning, in Chapter 2, with a brief history of football in the French national consciousness, covering the importing of English sports by French elites in the late nineteenth century within a divided nation, its popularisation and the ‘incomplete professionalisation’ of football in the 1930s, and the evolution of notions of administering sport as a public good and the implication of the State and municipalities in the national organisation of professional football. Chapter 3 looks at the socioeconomic geography of football as reflected both in the nationalisation of the game and in its promotion of local and regional identity through the growth of its professional clubs, initially in small industrial towns, before the current trend for the growth of the big city club. The special case of Paris, with its periods as a football desert, will merit a separate section. The symbiotic relationship between club and supporters leads us directly into Chapter 4, which situates key moments in the development of fan culture. In a sociology of the French football public, we examine the growth of the modern supporter from the success of Saint-Etienne, the special relationship of the fans and the city of Marseille, the growth of the French ‘Ultras’ and their particular form of identity within football support, and again the special case of the recent creation of a fan culture around Paris Saint-Germain, the club that everybody loves to hate. Chapter 5 focuses on French coaches and coaching systems, including the special place of the French youth academies, that are credited with the flourishing of the current generation of French players. A sixth chapter, on the players themselves, is held together by the theme of national identity, with a section on imports and exports of players at club level (including Waddle and Cantona), but focusing more on the national team, ‘les Bleus’, and its heroes, from Kopa and Platini to the Zidane era, when the multiethnic team took on important symbolic value for the nation. Chapter 7 is devoted to football as a television spectacle, from the transformation of the TV–football relationship with the creation of the payTV channel Canal+, its purchase of PSG, and the impact of digital TV. The business side of club football is addressed in Chapter 8, covering the links between businessmen, politics, and the commercialisation of football. It will examine various ‘affaires’ involving club chairmen such as the larger-than-life Bernard Tapie, and contemporary corporate involvement at club level. The final chapter, after a glance at the fall-out from Korea 2002, will assess the strengths and weaknesses of French football and the current state of its commodification: players as commodities, the post-Bosman exodus, and the issue of neo-liberalism versus the public good as it is perceived in France.

Notes 

1. The term was first used by Alain Duhamel in a wider social and political context (Duhamel 1985).

2. Raymond Aron, in Le siècle des intellectuels, programme 4: ‘De Sartre à Foucault 1958–1980’ by P. Desfons and M. Winock, France 3, 1999. 3. Source: http://www.france.diplomatie.fr/culture/france/biblio/folio/sport/ sport26.html (accessed 10 May 2001).