Towns and Cities: a Socioeconomic Geography of French Football Clubs
This chapter looks at the socio-economic geography of
football as reflected both in its development into a national game and its
promotion of local and regional identity through the growth of professional
clubs, particularly in small industrial towns, but more recently in France’s
handful of big cities. The special case of Paris, with its periods as a
footballing desert, will deserve a separate section. The Emergence of a
National Game based in Small Industrial Towns Jacques Marseille (1990) has
argued that the geography of French football reflects the French industrial
revolution of the twentieth century.
Patrick Mignon (1998), too, argues that the aspects which characterise French football culture are attributable to the slow development of cities and urban cultures in France. French peasant society resisted industrialisation far longer than in England, and this has left its mark on the structure of French football and its clubs. Unlike Britain, there were no enclosures which drove people off the land and into cities at the end of the eighteenth century.
There were never the real equivalent of huge nineteenth-century industrial cities like Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield and Manchester or Glasgow where football represented the core of social life for working men and where watching and talking about the local professional team was handed down from generation to generation as part of young people’s socialisation into the adult world. In France the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century was not a massive upheaval of population and a spawning of major new cities. Rather than concerning the whole country, it affected pockets of population, mainly in the north around Lille (including Roubaix, Tourcoing, and Lens), the north-east (Alsace-Lorraine – Strasbourg, Metz, Nancy), the centre and south-east (e.g. Saint-Etienne, and the Lyon area), around the Marseille conurbation, and the Paris region.
It was also more gradual, rather than quickly changing the balance of power between town and country. The rural exodus did not really accelerate until the 1950s and the real modernisation of France was effected only in the post-Second World War period of economic growth up to the 1970s. There was still a third of French workers employed in agriculture in the late 1930s. A further difference between France and Britain is that the working-class districts in cities were less deeply rooted and more heterogeneous than in Britain.
The growth of big towns in France was less uniquely linked to industrial development. In cities like Lyon and Paris the industrial working class constituted only part of the working population, many of whom were still employed in small workshops and were distributed across the conurbation, mingling with other social groups, so that the large urban centres that did exist were not uniformly made up of the industrial working class On the other hand, industrialisation elsewhere spawned a number of scattered small, one-industry towns. Shortage of manpower here had meant that employers, as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, encouraged a contingent of worker peasants into the factories as well as recruiting immigrant workers for the hardest jobs.
This, plus a paternalistic management style in heavy industry, favoured a particular type of working-class environment, the ‘ville-usine’, a one-factory town, more the size of a large village indeed. In this context, football teams having the support of a big factory infrastructure began to have an advantage over the more middleclass, big-city sports clubs that were less tightly organised. All the local talent was channelled into such factory or company clubs, as the huge majority of the small town population was made up of industrial workers and no other leisure activities were available. This again was a contrast to the situation in Paris.
Individuals like Raymond Kopa, after he had lost two fingers in an industrial accident, saw football as a potential escape from the mine and felt that status acquired from local soccer would help him get an apprenticeship and an electrician’s job (Beaud and Noiriel 1990: 83–87). Also, large tracts of France were relatively untouched by industrialisation, in particular the southwest. Compared to Britain, then, a different relationship between the development of professional football clubs and urban geography was inevitable in France. By the time of the expansion of football in the 1920s (a quadrupling of registered players and a tripling of spectators) and the run-up to professionalisation, the geography of football reflected the new economic geography of industrial France.
The distribution of clubs across numerous small or mediumsized towns worked against the growth of large urban support such as existed in Britain and Italy. French industrialisation was initially based not on the rapid development of big companies but on the small and medium-sized familyrun firm. Such firms have been closely linked to football clubs in small to medium-sized towns, as in the north Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing, in the east Sedan, Sochaux, Reims, in the south-east Saint-Etienne (Marseille 1990: 72). During this period that saw the beginnings of football’s adoption by the masses, the biggest clubs were often directed by industrialists and businessmen whose names remain associated with the success of their teams or with the stadiums: a brewer from Lille, Jooris, played a key role at the head of LOSC; the textile magnate Prouvost was president of FC Roubaix; the Laurant brothers, heads of a small drapery firm, ran Sedan; the wealthy grain merchant Le Cesne directed Olympique de Marseille from 1909 to 1922.
These sponsors provided equipment, dealt with transfers and bonuses (illicit until professionalisation in 1932) and often gave clubs a stadium, responsibility for which was often taken over by the municipalities during the 1920s, when the teams became symbols of the whole town and not just of its founding firm (Bromberger et al. 1995: 180–181). In the professional era, the best-known examples of successful clubs that owe their origins to this type of environment are FC Sochaux-Montbéliard and AS Saint-Etienne. The latter was founded in 1919 by the Guichard family, owners of a large grocery chain (now the Casino hypermarket chain) based in Saint-Etienne and still sponsored by the Guichard family. FC Sochaux was run by the town’s main employer, the motor magnate Jean-Pierre Peugeot, who created a factory-sponsored team that became openly professional before regulations permitted, taking it from the Second Division of the regional Burgundy League in 1929 to become national professional champions in 1935.
Clubs from small towns like these were highly dependent on a wealthy local industrialist who acted as sponsor. The attractiveness of such a club to players was obvious: as cup winners in 1937 each Sochaux player received a Peugeot coupé 201 as a bonus (Wahl 1989: 284). With the decline of industry it is no coincidence that Sochaux and Saint-Etienne have yo-yoed between Division 1 and Division 2 since the 1990s. Elsewhere, in non-industrial France, in market towns like Auxerre in Burgundy or Guingamp (Brittany), local notables, often with political ambitions, sought to promote themselves through football. The paternalism of such bosses was often criticised by inter-war trade unions.
Wahl (1989: 189) quotes a union leader: ‘Capitalist football’s exploitative bosses excite their workers on the pitch just as they push them to increase their work rates in their factories.’ Unions also worried about the transformation of the company clubs into town clubs when the FFF was formed in 1919, which they saw as diluting class consciousness as players from different social classes came together in the same team (Bromberger et al. 1995: 182).
Company owners certainly expected football to add value for their firm’s image. But their influence on football was more in terms of its organisational structures, which were modelled on those of French companies: they were very hierarchical, where operatives had to follow orders of the boss and his managers. This disciplined paternalist model is that of Peugeot for instance (Fridenson 1989: 53). In texts talking about the football team, Bromberger found a discourse of productivity: hard work, discipline, no discussion or questioning being accepted (Bromberger et al. 1995: 183). It is worth underlining that pressure for creating a national professional league in 1932 came more from Peugeot and a few club chairmen than from overwhelming popular demand.
While crowds had of course increased around certain clubs to the point of making gate receipts important in developing the club, footballers did not have a national profile as stars in the same way as other sportsmen. Between the wars the national sporting heroes were boxers, tennis players and cyclists. The result of Georges Carpentier’s fight for the world heavyweight title against Dempsey in Madison Square Garden had been awaited with bated breath by thousands of Parisians outside the Press Agency offices. Just before the war, the two epic world-title battles of Marcel Cerdan (whose affair with Edith Piaf merely served to increase his celebrity) were even more eagerly followed.
The President of the Republic is reported to have announced the result of the second contest during an after-dinner speech. The four musketeers of Davis Cup tennis fame (Borotra, Cochet, Brugnon and Lacoste) were important enough to have had the new Roland Garros stadium specially built to show off their world-beating skills. Tour de France cyclists and exponents of the six-day races in the Vélodrome d’hiver in Paris were heroes (the Pélissier brothers and André Leducq).
Club footballers did not generally enjoy national fame, and the results of France’s international football team were poor (further fuel to the modernisers’ argument for professionalisation). The odd personality, inevitably an international player, gained a certain notoriety. Before and after the First World War, goalkeeper Pierre Chayriguès was the first goalkeeper to command the penalty area. Lucien Gamblin was the rock at the heart of the French defence in the first victory against England in 1921. Paul Nicholas was national captain and a prolific goal scorer in the 1920s.1 Among the first professional club teams, some of the most successful played in small provincial towns of less than 50,000 inhabitants (Sochaux, Sète, Antibes, Cannes).
Crowds were inevitably limited. Cities like Lyon, Bordeaux and Nice did not have successful teams, or for certain periods had no professional club at all. Toulouse had a team only from 1937 onwards, with little success. Football pulled the crowds only in the north, the south-east and Paris. The south-west preferred rugby, the west cycling, and the centre was a sporting desert, report Lanfranchi and Wahl (1998). Significantly for the future, however, the four teams to attract crowds of over 10,000 for league games, l’Olympique de Marseille, le Racing Club de Paris, le Racing Club de Strasbourg and l’Olympique lillois, were the ones from major industrial conurbations (Lanfranchi and Wahl 1998). Against the background of slow, small-scale and patchy industrialisation, there is a set of hypotheses to explain why support for football did not grow as much as in England or Scotland.
The habit of travelling to away matches to support one’s home club did not develop, as distances between French towns are far greater, and so more expensive than in England, and transport axes made it less easy to travel between provincial towns (all roads and railway lines led to Paris). The late start of the national league and its interruption before the end of its first decade meant that spectator habits were ill-formed and it had to start again almost from scratch after 1945. Since football developed typically in small to medium-sized towns having only one club, supported by the municipality, there was less chance of the development of local derby rivalries to increase the intensity of support. Another distinctive feature of football support was the different shape of the working week: the English Saturday afternoon at the match was a French Sunday afternoon, since the five-and-a-half day week did not establish itself in France until 1936 or even later.
Lanfranchi and Wahl (1998) also point out that the size of stadiums generally reflected this relatively modest following compared to other national leagues. In France, two of the better teams, Sète and Sochaux, played in grounds with a maximum capacity of 5,000 spectators. Elsewhere in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s huge new stadiums were being built: in England Wembley (over 100,000 capacity), in Italy, in anticipation of the 1934 World Cup, Rome, Bologna, Milan and Florence (50,000), in Spain the Neucamp in Barcelona, and in Berlin the Olympic Stadium. The only French contribution to this trend was the Stade de Colombes, north of Paris, with a capacity of 45,000, built not specifically for football but for the 1924 Olympic Games held in Paris.
It none the less acted as national stadium for international football (and rugby) matches, and, significantly, for the final of the French Cup, thus giving status to this annual match and to football in general. As later (1984 and 1998), the hosting of international football tournaments in France provided opportunities for football to benefit from public authority help to improve its infrastructure. The first of these, the hosting of the World Cup in 1938, saw the capacity of Colombes increased to 60,000, and the old Parc des Princes (Paris) to 35,000. Two new stadiums of 30,000 were built in Bordeaux and Marseille, although they too were, significantly, built as multi-sport stadiums. The name of the Marseille stadium, le Stade vélodrome, indicated it was built to be able to host the finish of stages in the Tour de France as well as other cycle races.
The stadiums in Lille, Strasbourg, Reims, Le Havre and Antibes also underwent refurbishment (Pickup 1999: 32; Sinet 2002: 63).
Patrick Mignon (1998), too, argues that the aspects which characterise French football culture are attributable to the slow development of cities and urban cultures in France. French peasant society resisted industrialisation far longer than in England, and this has left its mark on the structure of French football and its clubs. Unlike Britain, there were no enclosures which drove people off the land and into cities at the end of the eighteenth century.
There were never the real equivalent of huge nineteenth-century industrial cities like Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield and Manchester or Glasgow where football represented the core of social life for working men and where watching and talking about the local professional team was handed down from generation to generation as part of young people’s socialisation into the adult world. In France the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century was not a massive upheaval of population and a spawning of major new cities. Rather than concerning the whole country, it affected pockets of population, mainly in the north around Lille (including Roubaix, Tourcoing, and Lens), the north-east (Alsace-Lorraine – Strasbourg, Metz, Nancy), the centre and south-east (e.g. Saint-Etienne, and the Lyon area), around the Marseille conurbation, and the Paris region.
It was also more gradual, rather than quickly changing the balance of power between town and country. The rural exodus did not really accelerate until the 1950s and the real modernisation of France was effected only in the post-Second World War period of economic growth up to the 1970s. There was still a third of French workers employed in agriculture in the late 1930s. A further difference between France and Britain is that the working-class districts in cities were less deeply rooted and more heterogeneous than in Britain.
The growth of big towns in France was less uniquely linked to industrial development. In cities like Lyon and Paris the industrial working class constituted only part of the working population, many of whom were still employed in small workshops and were distributed across the conurbation, mingling with other social groups, so that the large urban centres that did exist were not uniformly made up of the industrial working class On the other hand, industrialisation elsewhere spawned a number of scattered small, one-industry towns. Shortage of manpower here had meant that employers, as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, encouraged a contingent of worker peasants into the factories as well as recruiting immigrant workers for the hardest jobs.
This, plus a paternalistic management style in heavy industry, favoured a particular type of working-class environment, the ‘ville-usine’, a one-factory town, more the size of a large village indeed. In this context, football teams having the support of a big factory infrastructure began to have an advantage over the more middleclass, big-city sports clubs that were less tightly organised. All the local talent was channelled into such factory or company clubs, as the huge majority of the small town population was made up of industrial workers and no other leisure activities were available. This again was a contrast to the situation in Paris.
Individuals like Raymond Kopa, after he had lost two fingers in an industrial accident, saw football as a potential escape from the mine and felt that status acquired from local soccer would help him get an apprenticeship and an electrician’s job (Beaud and Noiriel 1990: 83–87). Also, large tracts of France were relatively untouched by industrialisation, in particular the southwest. Compared to Britain, then, a different relationship between the development of professional football clubs and urban geography was inevitable in France. By the time of the expansion of football in the 1920s (a quadrupling of registered players and a tripling of spectators) and the run-up to professionalisation, the geography of football reflected the new economic geography of industrial France.
The distribution of clubs across numerous small or mediumsized towns worked against the growth of large urban support such as existed in Britain and Italy. French industrialisation was initially based not on the rapid development of big companies but on the small and medium-sized familyrun firm. Such firms have been closely linked to football clubs in small to medium-sized towns, as in the north Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing, in the east Sedan, Sochaux, Reims, in the south-east Saint-Etienne (Marseille 1990: 72). During this period that saw the beginnings of football’s adoption by the masses, the biggest clubs were often directed by industrialists and businessmen whose names remain associated with the success of their teams or with the stadiums: a brewer from Lille, Jooris, played a key role at the head of LOSC; the textile magnate Prouvost was president of FC Roubaix; the Laurant brothers, heads of a small drapery firm, ran Sedan; the wealthy grain merchant Le Cesne directed Olympique de Marseille from 1909 to 1922.
These sponsors provided equipment, dealt with transfers and bonuses (illicit until professionalisation in 1932) and often gave clubs a stadium, responsibility for which was often taken over by the municipalities during the 1920s, when the teams became symbols of the whole town and not just of its founding firm (Bromberger et al. 1995: 180–181). In the professional era, the best-known examples of successful clubs that owe their origins to this type of environment are FC Sochaux-Montbéliard and AS Saint-Etienne. The latter was founded in 1919 by the Guichard family, owners of a large grocery chain (now the Casino hypermarket chain) based in Saint-Etienne and still sponsored by the Guichard family. FC Sochaux was run by the town’s main employer, the motor magnate Jean-Pierre Peugeot, who created a factory-sponsored team that became openly professional before regulations permitted, taking it from the Second Division of the regional Burgundy League in 1929 to become national professional champions in 1935.
Clubs from small towns like these were highly dependent on a wealthy local industrialist who acted as sponsor. The attractiveness of such a club to players was obvious: as cup winners in 1937 each Sochaux player received a Peugeot coupé 201 as a bonus (Wahl 1989: 284). With the decline of industry it is no coincidence that Sochaux and Saint-Etienne have yo-yoed between Division 1 and Division 2 since the 1990s. Elsewhere, in non-industrial France, in market towns like Auxerre in Burgundy or Guingamp (Brittany), local notables, often with political ambitions, sought to promote themselves through football. The paternalism of such bosses was often criticised by inter-war trade unions.
Wahl (1989: 189) quotes a union leader: ‘Capitalist football’s exploitative bosses excite their workers on the pitch just as they push them to increase their work rates in their factories.’ Unions also worried about the transformation of the company clubs into town clubs when the FFF was formed in 1919, which they saw as diluting class consciousness as players from different social classes came together in the same team (Bromberger et al. 1995: 182).
Company owners certainly expected football to add value for their firm’s image. But their influence on football was more in terms of its organisational structures, which were modelled on those of French companies: they were very hierarchical, where operatives had to follow orders of the boss and his managers. This disciplined paternalist model is that of Peugeot for instance (Fridenson 1989: 53). In texts talking about the football team, Bromberger found a discourse of productivity: hard work, discipline, no discussion or questioning being accepted (Bromberger et al. 1995: 183). It is worth underlining that pressure for creating a national professional league in 1932 came more from Peugeot and a few club chairmen than from overwhelming popular demand.
While crowds had of course increased around certain clubs to the point of making gate receipts important in developing the club, footballers did not have a national profile as stars in the same way as other sportsmen. Between the wars the national sporting heroes were boxers, tennis players and cyclists. The result of Georges Carpentier’s fight for the world heavyweight title against Dempsey in Madison Square Garden had been awaited with bated breath by thousands of Parisians outside the Press Agency offices. Just before the war, the two epic world-title battles of Marcel Cerdan (whose affair with Edith Piaf merely served to increase his celebrity) were even more eagerly followed.
The President of the Republic is reported to have announced the result of the second contest during an after-dinner speech. The four musketeers of Davis Cup tennis fame (Borotra, Cochet, Brugnon and Lacoste) were important enough to have had the new Roland Garros stadium specially built to show off their world-beating skills. Tour de France cyclists and exponents of the six-day races in the Vélodrome d’hiver in Paris were heroes (the Pélissier brothers and André Leducq).
Club footballers did not generally enjoy national fame, and the results of France’s international football team were poor (further fuel to the modernisers’ argument for professionalisation). The odd personality, inevitably an international player, gained a certain notoriety. Before and after the First World War, goalkeeper Pierre Chayriguès was the first goalkeeper to command the penalty area. Lucien Gamblin was the rock at the heart of the French defence in the first victory against England in 1921. Paul Nicholas was national captain and a prolific goal scorer in the 1920s.1 Among the first professional club teams, some of the most successful played in small provincial towns of less than 50,000 inhabitants (Sochaux, Sète, Antibes, Cannes).
Crowds were inevitably limited. Cities like Lyon, Bordeaux and Nice did not have successful teams, or for certain periods had no professional club at all. Toulouse had a team only from 1937 onwards, with little success. Football pulled the crowds only in the north, the south-east and Paris. The south-west preferred rugby, the west cycling, and the centre was a sporting desert, report Lanfranchi and Wahl (1998). Significantly for the future, however, the four teams to attract crowds of over 10,000 for league games, l’Olympique de Marseille, le Racing Club de Paris, le Racing Club de Strasbourg and l’Olympique lillois, were the ones from major industrial conurbations (Lanfranchi and Wahl 1998). Against the background of slow, small-scale and patchy industrialisation, there is a set of hypotheses to explain why support for football did not grow as much as in England or Scotland.
The habit of travelling to away matches to support one’s home club did not develop, as distances between French towns are far greater, and so more expensive than in England, and transport axes made it less easy to travel between provincial towns (all roads and railway lines led to Paris). The late start of the national league and its interruption before the end of its first decade meant that spectator habits were ill-formed and it had to start again almost from scratch after 1945. Since football developed typically in small to medium-sized towns having only one club, supported by the municipality, there was less chance of the development of local derby rivalries to increase the intensity of support. Another distinctive feature of football support was the different shape of the working week: the English Saturday afternoon at the match was a French Sunday afternoon, since the five-and-a-half day week did not establish itself in France until 1936 or even later.
Lanfranchi and Wahl (1998) also point out that the size of stadiums generally reflected this relatively modest following compared to other national leagues. In France, two of the better teams, Sète and Sochaux, played in grounds with a maximum capacity of 5,000 spectators. Elsewhere in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s huge new stadiums were being built: in England Wembley (over 100,000 capacity), in Italy, in anticipation of the 1934 World Cup, Rome, Bologna, Milan and Florence (50,000), in Spain the Neucamp in Barcelona, and in Berlin the Olympic Stadium. The only French contribution to this trend was the Stade de Colombes, north of Paris, with a capacity of 45,000, built not specifically for football but for the 1924 Olympic Games held in Paris.
It none the less acted as national stadium for international football (and rugby) matches, and, significantly, for the final of the French Cup, thus giving status to this annual match and to football in general. As later (1984 and 1998), the hosting of international football tournaments in France provided opportunities for football to benefit from public authority help to improve its infrastructure. The first of these, the hosting of the World Cup in 1938, saw the capacity of Colombes increased to 60,000, and the old Parc des Princes (Paris) to 35,000. Two new stadiums of 30,000 were built in Bordeaux and Marseille, although they too were, significantly, built as multi-sport stadiums. The name of the Marseille stadium, le Stade vélodrome, indicated it was built to be able to host the finish of stages in the Tour de France as well as other cycle races.
The stadiums in Lille, Strasbourg, Reims, Le Havre and Antibes also underwent refurbishment (Pickup 1999: 32; Sinet 2002: 63).
The nationalisation of football was not solely a function of
the professional league. The French Cup, with the possibility of small teams
beating the big professionals, had a similar ‘magic’ to the FA Cup in England.
Some tiny localities have gained momentary or more lasting fame in the annals
of the Cup by famous victories (or famous stumbles at the last hurdle – for
instance the recent case of the semi-professionals Calais who reached the final
in 2000 only to lose to a disputed penalty against cup holders Nantes).
Examples of successful small industrial clubs go back to the pre-professional
era. The large village side of Valentigney (Franche-Comté) reached the final of
the French Cup in 1926. The majority of its 5,000 inhabitants worked in the
Peugeot car factory, and all but one of their players were from the region.
The following year a similarly small side, US Quevilly, sponsored by a Normandy industrialist (who imported two English stars Puddefoot and Deans) reached the final (Thibert and Rethacker 1996: 61). Cup legends inevitably involve larger-than-life club chairmen, figures who have always loomed large in the folklore of French football. Georges Bayrou, Chairman of Mediterranean coast club FC Sète, used to stay in the dressing room for big matches, unable to watch his beloved green-and-whites. Losing Cup finalists in 1923, 1924 and 1929, when they reached the final in 1930 he decided he had to join the President of the Republic, Doumergue, in the tribune d’honneur at Colombes.
He sat through the goalless first half with top hat firmly planted on his head, but at half-time could stand it no longer and left for the dressing room, where he took off his hat and frock coat, mopped his brow, and opened the window to listen to the 35,000 spectators outside. He heard Racing Club de Paris take the lead, and then with a minute to go he heard Sète equalise, and go on to win in extra-time. That evening in the Gare de Lyon, Paris, a ticket inspector was surprised to find in a second-class compartment, Chairman Bayrou sitting with the Cup placed lovingly on the seat opposite. He was even more surprised when Bayrou took out his wallet and paid for a separate ticket for the sacred object he had been dreaming of bringing home to Sète for the past ten years.
Football versus Rugby: Bordeaux and the Conquest of the South-west In the nationalisation of the sport, soccer’s conquest of the rugby regions in the south-west took much longer than that of industrial France. Bordeaux had had English influence through the wine trade for even longer than other ports, and Anglomania in Bordeaux in the late nineteenth century ensured that modern sports clubs were founded just as early as anywhere else in France. The Girondins de Bordeaux club dates in fact from 1881, but was not originally a football club, and it became an outdoor omnisports club in 1910. Rugby was promoted by the Bordeaux social and merchant elite who sent their sons to British public schools.
This trend was helped by the existence of a local traditional version of rugby, ‘barette’. From 1889 rugby was actively spread to local schools, as local tournaments were organised. The majority of south-west rugby clubs were subsequently founded as offshoots of school associations. A snowball effect, strengthened by Bordeaux winning the national rugby championship in 1904 and featuring in every final up to 1911 (losing only two), spread the trend to all sections of the population and to the surrounding towns and villages of the whole of the south-west, not an industrialised part of France, before football had a chance to compete with it.2
In 1920, Bordeaux, France’s fourth or fifth largest city, was the only large town with no football club, but the split of rugby into amateur and professional in 1931 and the creation of a national professional soccer championship in 1932 broke down the dominance of the Coubertin ethic of sport as a game, that valued fair play and amateurism, the essential being to take part. The idea of sport as a ritual, bringing together people from the same locality or community behind a winning side, enticed the Girondins de Bordeaux to join the professional football league in 1937.
The building of a magnificent new municipal stadium (now a listed building) for the 1938 World Cup, where two matches featured Brazil, went some way to setting a trend and giving the Bordeaux public a new ‘lieu de culte’ (shrine) and a team they could identify with in the national and international context that football was beginning to offer. The successful implantation of soccer in the south-west is such that in the 1980s, at the initiative of its ex-rugby international mayor, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Bordeaux was to become one of the first French cities to move into the modern football business and make the club a symbol of both the city and the region on the national and international stage (Augustin 1990: 106).
Modernisation and Suburbanisation: Football’s ‘30 Glorious Years’ of Decline After 1945 France underwent the great economic and social transformations that are commonly referred to as ‘les trente glorieuses’(Fourastié 1979), thirty years of economic growth up to the period of the mid-1970s and the ‘chocs pétroliers’, the economic downturn associated with the sudden rise in crude oil prices. Importantly, by the 1960s and 1970s, the post-war rural exodus had finally transformed France into an urban society and this urbanisation worked against the small-town football culture that had grown up. Mignon and others explain the crisis that afflicted French football in the 1960s as a consequence of the scale of the urban change that then took place.
The first-generation city dwellers of this era had not been socialised into football culture. For members of the new urban youth culture, football was old-fashioned. Pop music was a more attractive focus around which to build an identity and a lifestyle. For the adult aspiring middle classes there were newer and more family-based leisure forms to tempt them, especially television, which became a mass social phenomenon in the late 1960s and 1970s. The generalisation of car ownership offered the possibility of escaping from the cities, at least on Sundays, especially for those first-generation city dwellers who still had roots in the countryside or a former family house now used as a ‘résidence secondaire’. Prestigious smalltown French clubs disappeared or dropped into the second division never to come back up – for example, Sète, Alès, Roubaix-Tourcoing.
Regular weekly sports spectating had never established itself sufficiently widely in France to survive the watershed of the Second World War. Compared to English spectating habits, there is no summer equivalent of cricket. Geographically, rugby is not a national sport. Horse racing is concentrated in the Paris area and practically all betting is off-course, indeed in cafés, via the publicly run PMU. Post-war there were thousands of cafés named ‘Café des sports’ where enthusiasts gathered rather than on the terraces. The main spectator events are one-offs – the French Open tennis at Roland Garros (socially elitist); and motor sport: the French Formula 1 Grand Prix, the Le Mans 24-hour race, and the motor-cycle Bol d’or.
The Tour de France cycle race, although it lasts three weeks, is a one-day per year outing for most followers, or even less: ‘two minutes of lurid lycra’, as Julian Barnes (2000) strikingly describes the experience for most roadside onlookers. While football certainly re-established itself post-war as the major French spectator sport, it still attracted much smaller crowds than in England or Italy. Indeed the period from 1950 to 1980 was characterised by declining or stagnant attendances. From an average of 11,403 per D1 match in 1949/50, attendances fell steadily to 6,555 in the 1968/69 season, climbing to 11,301 in 1976/77, only to fall back again to 9,778 in 1984/85 (Wahl 1989: 309; Chaumier and Rocheteau 1997: 554).
Attendances only returned to 1950 levels (12,000) in the 1987/88 season (Mignon 1999: 80–81). If the drop in numbers in the 1960s may be partly explained by rising standards of living that opened up access to new daytime leisure activities through the motor car, by the time football changed to evening kick-offs (on Saturdays) many potential spectators had acquired the other modern habit of staying at home in the evening to watch television. The Special Case of Paris Most European capital cities have long boasted major football clubs.
London, Rome, and Madrid have a tradition of more than one top side. There are various reasons why Paris was never a traditional footballing city, at least until the late 1970s, and it is not a coincidence that this was the first time Paris got an elected executive mayor (Jacques Chirac). Compared to provincial teams, large-scale support for a Paris football club, such as has developed since the 1970s for Paris Saint-Germain, is unusual. Geographical mobility, the influx of more and more provincials into the capital, had over decades, even over the last two centuries, diluted any special Parisian identity. The extent of the long-standing pulling power of the capital was famously criticised by Jean-François Gravier in his book Paris et le désert français (1958), a call for a halt to this hyper-centralisation. As early as 1923, Le Miroir des sports noted the difference between the sense of identity of provincial towns as opposed to the metropolis.
The newspaper claimed: ‘Paris is now a concentrated version of the provinces. Paris has in this respect lost its character’ (Wahl 1989: 227). Parisians with provincial roots long remained attached to their original département, as opposed to building up partisan support for a Parisian team, at least until the major demographic changes of the ‘trente glorieuses’ culminating in the mid-1970s. Football had certainly taken root as a leisure activity in Paris in the late nineteenth century among middle-class practitioners, and the French Cup, in the days of amateurism, had been dominated in the post-First World War period by clubs from the Paris region, such as its first winners Olympique Pantin. Red Star and the Racing Club (both founder members of the professional league) were also successful teams of the pre-war period and into the 1940s, Red Star winning the French Cup four times in the 1920s and again in 1942, and Racing five times between 1936 and 1949. These successes are now but a distant memory in the Paris region.
Red Star was relegated from Division 1 in 1948, reappearing between 1967 and 1973, and unexpectedly emerging from nowhere as giantkillers when reaching the semi-finals of the League Cup in 2000. Racing, after a spell in Division 2 in the 1950s, maintained their position in the top flight until the early 1960s. However, by the end of the 2000/01 season Racing was languishing in the National (Division 3) from which Red Star were relegated into the amateur ranks of the CFA (Division 4) (Labrunie 2001a). Racing still play at the famous Yves du Manoir stadium in the middle-class suburban district of Colombes. Red Star has its headquarters in the working-class town of SaintOuen to the north of the city of Paris, and plays almost in the shadow of the new Stade de France in Saint-Denis. Ironically there had been a brief hope in 1998 of Red Star becoming a realistic candidate to use the new national stadium as its home ground. Neither of the two clubs, from very different social milieux, were seen as representing the city of Paris. Even though based in the Paris region they were significantly identified with suburban municipalities quite distinct from Paris intra muros.
The following year a similarly small side, US Quevilly, sponsored by a Normandy industrialist (who imported two English stars Puddefoot and Deans) reached the final (Thibert and Rethacker 1996: 61). Cup legends inevitably involve larger-than-life club chairmen, figures who have always loomed large in the folklore of French football. Georges Bayrou, Chairman of Mediterranean coast club FC Sète, used to stay in the dressing room for big matches, unable to watch his beloved green-and-whites. Losing Cup finalists in 1923, 1924 and 1929, when they reached the final in 1930 he decided he had to join the President of the Republic, Doumergue, in the tribune d’honneur at Colombes.
He sat through the goalless first half with top hat firmly planted on his head, but at half-time could stand it no longer and left for the dressing room, where he took off his hat and frock coat, mopped his brow, and opened the window to listen to the 35,000 spectators outside. He heard Racing Club de Paris take the lead, and then with a minute to go he heard Sète equalise, and go on to win in extra-time. That evening in the Gare de Lyon, Paris, a ticket inspector was surprised to find in a second-class compartment, Chairman Bayrou sitting with the Cup placed lovingly on the seat opposite. He was even more surprised when Bayrou took out his wallet and paid for a separate ticket for the sacred object he had been dreaming of bringing home to Sète for the past ten years.
Football versus Rugby: Bordeaux and the Conquest of the South-west In the nationalisation of the sport, soccer’s conquest of the rugby regions in the south-west took much longer than that of industrial France. Bordeaux had had English influence through the wine trade for even longer than other ports, and Anglomania in Bordeaux in the late nineteenth century ensured that modern sports clubs were founded just as early as anywhere else in France. The Girondins de Bordeaux club dates in fact from 1881, but was not originally a football club, and it became an outdoor omnisports club in 1910. Rugby was promoted by the Bordeaux social and merchant elite who sent their sons to British public schools.
This trend was helped by the existence of a local traditional version of rugby, ‘barette’. From 1889 rugby was actively spread to local schools, as local tournaments were organised. The majority of south-west rugby clubs were subsequently founded as offshoots of school associations. A snowball effect, strengthened by Bordeaux winning the national rugby championship in 1904 and featuring in every final up to 1911 (losing only two), spread the trend to all sections of the population and to the surrounding towns and villages of the whole of the south-west, not an industrialised part of France, before football had a chance to compete with it.2
In 1920, Bordeaux, France’s fourth or fifth largest city, was the only large town with no football club, but the split of rugby into amateur and professional in 1931 and the creation of a national professional soccer championship in 1932 broke down the dominance of the Coubertin ethic of sport as a game, that valued fair play and amateurism, the essential being to take part. The idea of sport as a ritual, bringing together people from the same locality or community behind a winning side, enticed the Girondins de Bordeaux to join the professional football league in 1937.
The building of a magnificent new municipal stadium (now a listed building) for the 1938 World Cup, where two matches featured Brazil, went some way to setting a trend and giving the Bordeaux public a new ‘lieu de culte’ (shrine) and a team they could identify with in the national and international context that football was beginning to offer. The successful implantation of soccer in the south-west is such that in the 1980s, at the initiative of its ex-rugby international mayor, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Bordeaux was to become one of the first French cities to move into the modern football business and make the club a symbol of both the city and the region on the national and international stage (Augustin 1990: 106).
Modernisation and Suburbanisation: Football’s ‘30 Glorious Years’ of Decline After 1945 France underwent the great economic and social transformations that are commonly referred to as ‘les trente glorieuses’(Fourastié 1979), thirty years of economic growth up to the period of the mid-1970s and the ‘chocs pétroliers’, the economic downturn associated with the sudden rise in crude oil prices. Importantly, by the 1960s and 1970s, the post-war rural exodus had finally transformed France into an urban society and this urbanisation worked against the small-town football culture that had grown up. Mignon and others explain the crisis that afflicted French football in the 1960s as a consequence of the scale of the urban change that then took place.
The first-generation city dwellers of this era had not been socialised into football culture. For members of the new urban youth culture, football was old-fashioned. Pop music was a more attractive focus around which to build an identity and a lifestyle. For the adult aspiring middle classes there were newer and more family-based leisure forms to tempt them, especially television, which became a mass social phenomenon in the late 1960s and 1970s. The generalisation of car ownership offered the possibility of escaping from the cities, at least on Sundays, especially for those first-generation city dwellers who still had roots in the countryside or a former family house now used as a ‘résidence secondaire’. Prestigious smalltown French clubs disappeared or dropped into the second division never to come back up – for example, Sète, Alès, Roubaix-Tourcoing.
Regular weekly sports spectating had never established itself sufficiently widely in France to survive the watershed of the Second World War. Compared to English spectating habits, there is no summer equivalent of cricket. Geographically, rugby is not a national sport. Horse racing is concentrated in the Paris area and practically all betting is off-course, indeed in cafés, via the publicly run PMU. Post-war there were thousands of cafés named ‘Café des sports’ where enthusiasts gathered rather than on the terraces. The main spectator events are one-offs – the French Open tennis at Roland Garros (socially elitist); and motor sport: the French Formula 1 Grand Prix, the Le Mans 24-hour race, and the motor-cycle Bol d’or.
The Tour de France cycle race, although it lasts three weeks, is a one-day per year outing for most followers, or even less: ‘two minutes of lurid lycra’, as Julian Barnes (2000) strikingly describes the experience for most roadside onlookers. While football certainly re-established itself post-war as the major French spectator sport, it still attracted much smaller crowds than in England or Italy. Indeed the period from 1950 to 1980 was characterised by declining or stagnant attendances. From an average of 11,403 per D1 match in 1949/50, attendances fell steadily to 6,555 in the 1968/69 season, climbing to 11,301 in 1976/77, only to fall back again to 9,778 in 1984/85 (Wahl 1989: 309; Chaumier and Rocheteau 1997: 554).
Attendances only returned to 1950 levels (12,000) in the 1987/88 season (Mignon 1999: 80–81). If the drop in numbers in the 1960s may be partly explained by rising standards of living that opened up access to new daytime leisure activities through the motor car, by the time football changed to evening kick-offs (on Saturdays) many potential spectators had acquired the other modern habit of staying at home in the evening to watch television. The Special Case of Paris Most European capital cities have long boasted major football clubs.
London, Rome, and Madrid have a tradition of more than one top side. There are various reasons why Paris was never a traditional footballing city, at least until the late 1970s, and it is not a coincidence that this was the first time Paris got an elected executive mayor (Jacques Chirac). Compared to provincial teams, large-scale support for a Paris football club, such as has developed since the 1970s for Paris Saint-Germain, is unusual. Geographical mobility, the influx of more and more provincials into the capital, had over decades, even over the last two centuries, diluted any special Parisian identity. The extent of the long-standing pulling power of the capital was famously criticised by Jean-François Gravier in his book Paris et le désert français (1958), a call for a halt to this hyper-centralisation. As early as 1923, Le Miroir des sports noted the difference between the sense of identity of provincial towns as opposed to the metropolis.
The newspaper claimed: ‘Paris is now a concentrated version of the provinces. Paris has in this respect lost its character’ (Wahl 1989: 227). Parisians with provincial roots long remained attached to their original département, as opposed to building up partisan support for a Parisian team, at least until the major demographic changes of the ‘trente glorieuses’ culminating in the mid-1970s. Football had certainly taken root as a leisure activity in Paris in the late nineteenth century among middle-class practitioners, and the French Cup, in the days of amateurism, had been dominated in the post-First World War period by clubs from the Paris region, such as its first winners Olympique Pantin. Red Star and the Racing Club (both founder members of the professional league) were also successful teams of the pre-war period and into the 1940s, Red Star winning the French Cup four times in the 1920s and again in 1942, and Racing five times between 1936 and 1949. These successes are now but a distant memory in the Paris region.
Red Star was relegated from Division 1 in 1948, reappearing between 1967 and 1973, and unexpectedly emerging from nowhere as giantkillers when reaching the semi-finals of the League Cup in 2000. Racing, after a spell in Division 2 in the 1950s, maintained their position in the top flight until the early 1960s. However, by the end of the 2000/01 season Racing was languishing in the National (Division 3) from which Red Star were relegated into the amateur ranks of the CFA (Division 4) (Labrunie 2001a). Racing still play at the famous Yves du Manoir stadium in the middle-class suburban district of Colombes. Red Star has its headquarters in the working-class town of SaintOuen to the north of the city of Paris, and plays almost in the shadow of the new Stade de France in Saint-Denis. Ironically there had been a brief hope in 1998 of Red Star becoming a realistic candidate to use the new national stadium as its home ground. Neither of the two clubs, from very different social milieux, were seen as representing the city of Paris. Even though based in the Paris region they were significantly identified with suburban municipalities quite distinct from Paris intra muros.
As we have seen, football developed most successfully in
France, at least until the oil crisis and the recession of the 1970s and 1980s,
around small town clubs supported by a homogeneous working-class community and
sponsored by its dominant family firm and the local authority. This may help
explain the fact that, until the era of football as big business, the city of
Paris itself has never really had a highly successful team.
Identification of the whole city of Paris with a single club has been difficult, and unlike other towns, local municipal aid had not been forthcoming until very recently (Marseille 1990: 71), since Paris (unlike all other municipalities) has only had a local government structure allowing an executive mayor since 1977, therefore no structure that allowed political capital to be made out of supporting the local club, and so no source of municipal financial help for a club. There were also difficulties to do with fan identification, as will be discussed in the next chapter. More recent attempts either to found major clubs in the capital or to revive existing clubs have depended heavily on big business sponsorship and broadcasting rights.
Indeed, as we shall see below, it is becoming the case in the current era that big clubs can now only emerge from large metropolitan areas. The founders and particularly the sponsors of the newest Parisian club, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), realised that the city of Paris is well placed to capitalise on this, and PSG emerged as a European force out of nothing in a very short time in footballing terms. Founded in 1970 in the small suburban town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye to the west of Paris, and admitted to Division 2, they immediately won the Division 2 championship and have played henceforward in the top division. The couturier Daniel Hechter took over in 1973 as one of the earliest of the new breed of businessmen-chairmen, but left with a life ban from football after the doubleticketing scandal of 1977 (Bourg 1986: 152).
PSG was then built up in the late 1970s and 1980s by Chairman Francis Borelli and a board of other business specialists, winning the championship in 1978 in the chairman’s first season, and then two French cups (1982, 1983), and another championship in 1985. But subsequent performances on the field were uneven, with a big loss of projected income when being eliminated from the European Cup in the first round in 1986 to Vitkovice, and qualifying for Europe only once more under Borelli, in 1989, again going out too early to make any money. Using the renovated Parc des Princes in the 1980s, Borelli was the first chairman to install private hospitality boxes, bringing in an income of 5 million francs in 1985 (Wahl 1989: 340). Borelli found himself under further pressure from a rival initiative in Paris from one of France’s most successful businessmen.
The highly successful arms and communication company chairman JeanLuc Lagardère, wanting to associate his Matra-Hachette-Europe 1 firm with a top sports brand, chose to try and revive the historically famous and (as he saw it) under-exploited brand of Racing Club de Paris. He was elected chairman of Racing in 1983. He spent 50 million francs in advance budget in 1984 and 1985 (twice as much as Air France’s annual advertising budget) (Bourg 1986: 73–74).
He was quite open about the promotional advantage he intended to achieve, saying he was not doing it simply out of a personal interest in football (ibid.: 71). In addition to the domestic promotional opportunities, he tried to use the multiracial character of the team to promote his companies in Black Africa and North Africa. Racing was promoted from D2 in 1984, immediately relegated, promoted again to D1 in 1986, changed the club name to Matra Racing in 1987, and finished seventh in D1, was relegated as Racing Paris in 1990, and re-formed as Racing FC 92 after the Matra partnership failed, and now play in front of fewer than a thousand spectators in the National (D3). The fate of PSG’s ephemeral rival suggests that even a city as big as Paris cannot escape the rule that, in France, a town or city is only big enough for one football club, otherwise there is a problem of identification and support. The late 1980s and early 1990s were however not good for Paris football. Borelli left PSG with a 51 million franc deficit.
It took the beginning of the latest era in the economics of French football – as subscription television took a more dominant role in the organisation of the game – for things to start looking up for the Paris club. In the 1990s, support from the City of Paris and the television company Canal+ made PSG one of the biggest clubs in France. The commercial side of this success will be discussed in Chapter 7. However, as will be seen in Chapter 4, there is still a fragility about its identity with its fans to be overcome, even in a period when the big city clubs are starting to assert their dominance over French professional football. The Rise of the Big City Club: Regional Capitals, International Ambitions Alongside Paris, the 1990s saw the rise of France’s regional capitals and major cities among the football elite – half a century after England and Italy.
This can be seen in the clubs that have been taken over by major national and international media companies (see also Chapters 7 and 8) and in the candidacies for host city status for the 1998 World Cup finals. Within the European Single Market and with the decline of the nation-state as the key framework within which cities have to operate, it appears that major French towns are using football for promotion of local and regional identity and as an instrument for attracting inward investment.
Identification of the whole city of Paris with a single club has been difficult, and unlike other towns, local municipal aid had not been forthcoming until very recently (Marseille 1990: 71), since Paris (unlike all other municipalities) has only had a local government structure allowing an executive mayor since 1977, therefore no structure that allowed political capital to be made out of supporting the local club, and so no source of municipal financial help for a club. There were also difficulties to do with fan identification, as will be discussed in the next chapter. More recent attempts either to found major clubs in the capital or to revive existing clubs have depended heavily on big business sponsorship and broadcasting rights.
Indeed, as we shall see below, it is becoming the case in the current era that big clubs can now only emerge from large metropolitan areas. The founders and particularly the sponsors of the newest Parisian club, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), realised that the city of Paris is well placed to capitalise on this, and PSG emerged as a European force out of nothing in a very short time in footballing terms. Founded in 1970 in the small suburban town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye to the west of Paris, and admitted to Division 2, they immediately won the Division 2 championship and have played henceforward in the top division. The couturier Daniel Hechter took over in 1973 as one of the earliest of the new breed of businessmen-chairmen, but left with a life ban from football after the doubleticketing scandal of 1977 (Bourg 1986: 152).
PSG was then built up in the late 1970s and 1980s by Chairman Francis Borelli and a board of other business specialists, winning the championship in 1978 in the chairman’s first season, and then two French cups (1982, 1983), and another championship in 1985. But subsequent performances on the field were uneven, with a big loss of projected income when being eliminated from the European Cup in the first round in 1986 to Vitkovice, and qualifying for Europe only once more under Borelli, in 1989, again going out too early to make any money. Using the renovated Parc des Princes in the 1980s, Borelli was the first chairman to install private hospitality boxes, bringing in an income of 5 million francs in 1985 (Wahl 1989: 340). Borelli found himself under further pressure from a rival initiative in Paris from one of France’s most successful businessmen.
The highly successful arms and communication company chairman JeanLuc Lagardère, wanting to associate his Matra-Hachette-Europe 1 firm with a top sports brand, chose to try and revive the historically famous and (as he saw it) under-exploited brand of Racing Club de Paris. He was elected chairman of Racing in 1983. He spent 50 million francs in advance budget in 1984 and 1985 (twice as much as Air France’s annual advertising budget) (Bourg 1986: 73–74).
He was quite open about the promotional advantage he intended to achieve, saying he was not doing it simply out of a personal interest in football (ibid.: 71). In addition to the domestic promotional opportunities, he tried to use the multiracial character of the team to promote his companies in Black Africa and North Africa. Racing was promoted from D2 in 1984, immediately relegated, promoted again to D1 in 1986, changed the club name to Matra Racing in 1987, and finished seventh in D1, was relegated as Racing Paris in 1990, and re-formed as Racing FC 92 after the Matra partnership failed, and now play in front of fewer than a thousand spectators in the National (D3). The fate of PSG’s ephemeral rival suggests that even a city as big as Paris cannot escape the rule that, in France, a town or city is only big enough for one football club, otherwise there is a problem of identification and support. The late 1980s and early 1990s were however not good for Paris football. Borelli left PSG with a 51 million franc deficit.
It took the beginning of the latest era in the economics of French football – as subscription television took a more dominant role in the organisation of the game – for things to start looking up for the Paris club. In the 1990s, support from the City of Paris and the television company Canal+ made PSG one of the biggest clubs in France. The commercial side of this success will be discussed in Chapter 7. However, as will be seen in Chapter 4, there is still a fragility about its identity with its fans to be overcome, even in a period when the big city clubs are starting to assert their dominance over French professional football. The Rise of the Big City Club: Regional Capitals, International Ambitions Alongside Paris, the 1990s saw the rise of France’s regional capitals and major cities among the football elite – half a century after England and Italy.
This can be seen in the clubs that have been taken over by major national and international media companies (see also Chapters 7 and 8) and in the candidacies for host city status for the 1998 World Cup finals. Within the European Single Market and with the decline of the nation-state as the key framework within which cities have to operate, it appears that major French towns are using football for promotion of local and regional identity and as an instrument for attracting inward investment.
Bordeaux A forerunner was the city of Bordeaux, which
attempted in the 1980s to rebrand itself via football. Historically, as we have
seen, French football clubs have been closely tied to their locality, and
indeed to their local town hall, and therefore to local politicians.
Municipal subsidies were sought to counter increasing travel costs of clubs in the period following the First World War. In 1920 the town of Marseille financed the construction of a new stadium (Wahl 1989: 231), and in 1931 Saint-Etienne followed suit. By the 1980s, municipal subsidies remained on average at one-quarter of a club’s income. Seen as a public service and something the town (and its local politicians) could and should take a pride in, football clubs with relatively small income through the turnstiles became very reliant on free use of the municipal stadium, or an annual grant often equalling the amount of local taxes that would have been paid by the club on its turnover. A town’s aid usually had a stabilising role rather than being a driving force behind the business.
But this created a dependency relationship and town halls felt they had the right to interfere in the running of clubs. Their representatives sat on the management committee in Metz, Nancy, Nice, Toulouse, Lens. Sometimes the mayor was the club chairman, as in Lens (Wahl 1989 328–329). However, in the 1980s, with the advent of new economic conditions, came a new breed of club chairman and a new relationship between club and locality, at least in some ambitious big cities such as Marseille and Bordeaux. Cities began to have ambitions to use their football team to promote their image more widely. In the 1970s the political fortunes of the mayor of Bordeaux, former Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, were ebbing.
He had lost badly as official Gaullist candidate in the presidential elections of 1974, lost the presidency of the Greater Bordeaux council, lost the presidency of the Regional Council of Aquitaine and lost influence in the local county council (Conseil général). His need of a coup to re-establish his standing coincided with the arrival as Chairman of Girondins de Bordeaux of the ambitious Claude Bez. With the help of significant municipal aid they collaborated to turn the Girondins into a top French club, and indeed succeeded to the extent that Bordeaux qualified for Europe every year from 1981 to 1988, reached European semi-finals in 1985 and 1987, and were French champions in 1984, 1985, and 1987. Chairman Bez’s success in building up the business side of the club brought greater support from the mayor, which through advances and loans helped renovate the stadium. The club was used as a unifying symbol of the whole region.
To help win inward investment, the local Chamber of Commerce marketed the region by inviting decision-makers to see matches from new private hospitality boxes (Wahl 1989: 340). In 1988 the Girondins went to play exhibition matches in Los Angeles as regional standard bearer of an Aquitaine delegation attempting to sell local produce and attract investment from across the Atlantic. Mayor Chaban-Delmas claimed the promotional effects for the town were worth 25 to 50 times the original investment (Augustin 1990: 106–109).
However, unexpectedly exiting the potentially lucrative European Cup in the first round in 1985/86 to Fenerbahçe (Turkey) cost them dear and began a financial destabilisation of the club. Chaban left civic office only through age and infirmity in 1995, after 48 years as mayor.
World Cup Host Towns The 1990s saw other large towns and in particular the major cities of France take an interest in the possibilities of using football for communication purposes. The host towns of the 1998 World Cup make a useful case study to investigate this new or confirmed interest in football by the major regional capitals of France, and to see how this is transforming the economic geography of French football in the twenty-first century. One of the issues that preoccupied all the host towns was image communication. Every large town in France now has its communications strategy and communication unit (often reporting directly to the mayor’s office).
Distinctive market positions are defined, corporate images are created to endow the town with a recognisable personality and these are communicated by logos and slogans. The aim is to encourage inward investment, sometimes to promote tourism (France is after all the world leader as a tourist destination annually welcoming more visitors than its own total population). Equally important aims are to involve local citizens and engage them in a common purpose (Sperling 1991: 20–21), and always, at the very least indirectly, to serve local electoral purposes by heightening the profile of the mayor and his or her team by publicising their work for the municipality to the electorate (Parker 1993b: 163). Municipalities are communicating to at least two distinct publics, therefore, one internal, one external, and are able to use football to do both.
Even medium-sized towns (under 90,000 inhabitants) spent between 150,000 and 1 million francs per year on communication in the 1990s (Alvis 1994). Much smaller towns, and more recently the new regional authorities with their own elected bodies with large powers and budgets since the decentralisation law of 1983, also rapidly followed suit (Hare 1995). Municipal public relations are often built around annual events organised by the town or with which the town is associated through sponsorship or participation. Some events have achieved national notoriety and are powerful vectors of image: whether relatively new ones such as Francofolies, the La Rochelle festival of popular song, or the Montpellier Classical Music Festival. News coverage in the press and on television offers much more credibility than direct advertising (Sperling 1991: 37–42).
Paying for the privilege of being a ville d’étape in the Tour de France cycle race ensures exposure during the television sports coverage, but also guarantees media portraits of the town and its attractions and local specialities. In 1994, for example, the year of the opening of the Channel Tunnel and of the TGV Nord, Calais and Lille invested in this public relations exercise as villes d’étape. Whereas television coverage of the Tour is followed much more in France than abroad, the 1998 World Cup had been (correctly) predicted to have the biggest global television audience ever, and the opportunities for self-publicity to the rest of Europe and the world for purposes of attracting inward investment was a once-only opportunity.
Hosting the World Cup in the region was a way that local cities and regions could prepare the way, in partnership with big business keen to invest in major city clubs in the late 1990s, to forge a new relationship between football club and locality. Being a World Cup host city was crucial for ambitious municipalities; as the mayor of the smallest host city put it: ‘In the collective memory, Montpellier will be one of the ten best known French towns in the first quarter of the twenty-first century’ (Echégut 1998: 39). Dauncey (1999) found that, to a great extent, the candidates to host matches in the World Cup of 1998 were self-selecting, given the nature of French professional football where only a restricted number of top teams attract the followings to warrant the large grounds demanded by FIFA (seating for 40,000 spectators).
However, the geography of the host cities tells us something about the local politics and economic geography of French football in the late 1990s. France’s hosting of the 1984 European Championships, and the infrastructure development that had then occurred, also favoured some grounds, such as the Stade de la Beaujoire in Nantes, purpose-built in 1983, which meant the updating was comparatively inexpensive. Leaving aside the two stadiums in the Paris area (the new Stade de France in the suburb of Saint-Denis, and the Parc des Princes), the provincial host cities (where 49 of the 64 matches were played) were geographically spread across the country: Bordeaux and Toulouse in the southwest, Nantes in the west, Lens in the north, Lyon and Saint-Etienne in the centreeast, and Marseille and Montpellier on the Mediterranean coast.
From amongst the initial group of candidate cities, Rouen, Lille and Nancy reluctantly withdrew because their regional authorities realised that the renovation or new stadium costs involved – even with subsidies from the State – would be too great when the clubs were not in Division 1. Geographically the north of France was covered by the choice of Lens, a successful top club for many years, and so Lille had to bow to its near neighbour, although Lille’s home town club, LOSC, has since been promoted to Division 1 and indeed looks capable of establishing itself as a major force. Of France’s big regional capitals with big football stadiums, Strasbourg notably excluded itself. Although in general its stadium was considered of high quality, having been much renovated for Euro 84, it could only provide 17,000 seats.
The club and the city and regional authorities could not agree. The club is one of the modernisers in its organisational structures and ambitions, being owned by the French arm of the international McCormack sports management group, but the socialist mayor, Catherine Trautmann, had other priorities in a city that is both a major European capital in terms of European institutions and has major problems of delinquency and a large extreme right vote. The club had cost the city a lot of money in subsidies in previous years (not least in the 1984 European Nations Championship), and the municipality opted out of subsidy of football.
This controversial refusal was none the less seen by the local political opposition as a missed opportunity (Saint-Martin 1998: 60; Scotto 1997: 29, and 1998: 25). The final list of cities hosting matches was (for Dauncey) predictable. He argues that the historical links of French football ‘to industrialisation and the demography of French towns and cities, combined with political traditions of centralism and contemporary moves towards more responsibility for the regions created a complex of forces favouring regional capitals’ (Dauncey 1999: 104).
The one anomaly as a host town appears to be Montpellier, so low in the urban hierarchy (twenty-fourth largest city in France), but its municipal ambitions meant it was determined to be a host city as part of its long-term strategy of self-promotion. The local city and regional authorities invested heavily in football in the 1980s and 1990s, which have seen the club rise from the lower leagues (Division d’honneur) to European competitions. As part of the communication exercise that was the World Cup the mayor and the president of the Regional Council undertook a regional tour as early as 1996 to publicise the city’s hosting of the World Cup among the local population. They were able, before the end of 1997, to measure economic effects, in terms of jobs, with many local firms working on the renovations to the stadium, the smallest of the ten, its capacity being enlarged by 50 per cent to turn it into a 35,500 all-seater stadium. The Montpellier conurbation has grown rapidly over the past 20 years, fuelling the ambitions of its long-term mayor Georges Frêche.
The general gain for Montpellier, as for other host towns, was in notoriety abroad or brand awareness. The town of Lens is a different case. It appears very small, but is in a largish conurbation in the densely populated Lille region, and has a highly successful, long-standing Division 1 team (1997/98 champions) with the excellent facilities of the Stade Félix-Bollaert. Its support was voted the best in the country in the 1999/2000 season (France Football, 7 January 2000). The position of Saint Etienne, geographically close to Lyon and relatively low down the urban hierarchy, would normally suggest that it would lose out to its much larger neighbour; however, the unparalleled footballing tradition of Saint-Etienne and the facilities available at Stade Geoffroy-Guichard outweighed such concerns. For the host towns and cities, the World Cup was very much about selling themselves as regional capitals to the half-a-million foreign supporters among whom were a good proportion of VIPs invited by sponsors, as well as a thousand foreign journalists and many ‘deciders’ from French companies (not to mention the potential visitors watching on television).
The State (seeing the cities also as part of ‘le produit France’ in general) provided expertise and staff: the key public relations operation was organised by the host towns in collaboration with the DATAR, the regional Development Agency. One hundred and twenty foreign company directors were invited to the host towns in a highly targeted fashion. Thirty American industrialists in biotechnology were invited to Lyon; Belgian food industrialists to Bordeaux; British aeronautics and aerospace interests were present in Toulouse, to cite just three examples (Echégut 1997, 1998).
Becoming a host club for the World Cup was equally crucial for the local football club, since it was a once-only opportunity to benefit from huge State and local-authority help to improve stadium infrastructures. One might say that what was happening was public investment in clubs whose ‘modernising’ chairmen were aiming to privatise once the investment had been made. Total costs of improving these mostly rather old stadiums and of furnishing infrastructures around them were shared by central government, cities and regions, and did not fall onto the clubs that use them. Public input to the improvement of football’s infrastructures was therefore considerable.
The collectivités locales (city, metropolitan, departmental and regional authorities) contributed overall 1.44 billion francs (£140 million) simply to the renovation of grounds and the improvement of general urban facilities (for instance the city of Lyon built an extension of the city Metro to the Stade de Gerland). The sum disbursed by local authorities represented some two-thirds of the total costs. Taking Nantes, Lyon and Marseille as examples, going from the least to the most expensive of the old stadiums, the total costs of renovation and its sharing out between the State and different local authorities may be seen in Table 3.1. Big Towns, Big Budgets, Big Clubs The World Cup was a major opportunity for French cities and regions to position themselves on the national and international stage through sport.
Whereas 30 years ago French football’s economic geography was different, it is less and less of a surprise to see that France’s seven biggest cities had Division 1 clubs in 2000/01: Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Nantes. Toulouse were subsequently relegated, but have one of the top rugby clubs in France. Monaco exists too at this top level because it is heavily subsidised by its ruling royal family, in the same way that the biggest city clubs are sponsored by their municipalities. Rennes comes in at twenty-second rank in the biggest French towns, and has as majority shareholder one of France’s richest businessmen, François Pinault, owner of the Pinault-Printemps-Redoute group, whose sponsorship allowed Rennes to spend 345 million francs in new recruits at the start of the 2000/01 season.
Montpellier still manages to punch above its weight. The other top division clubs in 2001/02 were all based in towns of 100,000 inhabitants (Metz) or less. Metz and Sedan are throwbacks to the earlier period of dominance of small to middle-sized industrial towns; Auxerre and Troyes are middle-sized market towns with strong footballing traditions, like Bastia (in Corsica). What at first sight seems the most obvious exception to the rule about French football becoming dominated by the top city clubs is recently promoted Guingamp, a small-town Breton club, founded 1912, with a stadium of 18,040 places that had never been full prior to their promotion in 2000, and which has an honourable record in professional football, having been in D1 before in the 1990s.
It is not a club quite like those small-town clubs around whom the professional league was built, since it rose to prominence in recent years having taken over players from Brest when their neighbour was in financial trouble. However, Brittany is a traditional footballing area, as witnessed too by the promotion of Lorient to D1 in 2001. The public and officials of smalltown clubs such as Lorient and Guingamp are not yet ready to be consigned to sporting history, as their results show, even though they are unable to generate great income from gate receipts, sponsorship, or merchandising. It was perhaps not a surprise that in 2002 both clubs were struggling against relegation, with Lorient losing out yet winning the French Cup.
Municipal subsidies were sought to counter increasing travel costs of clubs in the period following the First World War. In 1920 the town of Marseille financed the construction of a new stadium (Wahl 1989: 231), and in 1931 Saint-Etienne followed suit. By the 1980s, municipal subsidies remained on average at one-quarter of a club’s income. Seen as a public service and something the town (and its local politicians) could and should take a pride in, football clubs with relatively small income through the turnstiles became very reliant on free use of the municipal stadium, or an annual grant often equalling the amount of local taxes that would have been paid by the club on its turnover. A town’s aid usually had a stabilising role rather than being a driving force behind the business.
But this created a dependency relationship and town halls felt they had the right to interfere in the running of clubs. Their representatives sat on the management committee in Metz, Nancy, Nice, Toulouse, Lens. Sometimes the mayor was the club chairman, as in Lens (Wahl 1989 328–329). However, in the 1980s, with the advent of new economic conditions, came a new breed of club chairman and a new relationship between club and locality, at least in some ambitious big cities such as Marseille and Bordeaux. Cities began to have ambitions to use their football team to promote their image more widely. In the 1970s the political fortunes of the mayor of Bordeaux, former Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, were ebbing.
He had lost badly as official Gaullist candidate in the presidential elections of 1974, lost the presidency of the Greater Bordeaux council, lost the presidency of the Regional Council of Aquitaine and lost influence in the local county council (Conseil général). His need of a coup to re-establish his standing coincided with the arrival as Chairman of Girondins de Bordeaux of the ambitious Claude Bez. With the help of significant municipal aid they collaborated to turn the Girondins into a top French club, and indeed succeeded to the extent that Bordeaux qualified for Europe every year from 1981 to 1988, reached European semi-finals in 1985 and 1987, and were French champions in 1984, 1985, and 1987. Chairman Bez’s success in building up the business side of the club brought greater support from the mayor, which through advances and loans helped renovate the stadium. The club was used as a unifying symbol of the whole region.
To help win inward investment, the local Chamber of Commerce marketed the region by inviting decision-makers to see matches from new private hospitality boxes (Wahl 1989: 340). In 1988 the Girondins went to play exhibition matches in Los Angeles as regional standard bearer of an Aquitaine delegation attempting to sell local produce and attract investment from across the Atlantic. Mayor Chaban-Delmas claimed the promotional effects for the town were worth 25 to 50 times the original investment (Augustin 1990: 106–109).
However, unexpectedly exiting the potentially lucrative European Cup in the first round in 1985/86 to Fenerbahçe (Turkey) cost them dear and began a financial destabilisation of the club. Chaban left civic office only through age and infirmity in 1995, after 48 years as mayor.
World Cup Host Towns The 1990s saw other large towns and in particular the major cities of France take an interest in the possibilities of using football for communication purposes. The host towns of the 1998 World Cup make a useful case study to investigate this new or confirmed interest in football by the major regional capitals of France, and to see how this is transforming the economic geography of French football in the twenty-first century. One of the issues that preoccupied all the host towns was image communication. Every large town in France now has its communications strategy and communication unit (often reporting directly to the mayor’s office).
Distinctive market positions are defined, corporate images are created to endow the town with a recognisable personality and these are communicated by logos and slogans. The aim is to encourage inward investment, sometimes to promote tourism (France is after all the world leader as a tourist destination annually welcoming more visitors than its own total population). Equally important aims are to involve local citizens and engage them in a common purpose (Sperling 1991: 20–21), and always, at the very least indirectly, to serve local electoral purposes by heightening the profile of the mayor and his or her team by publicising their work for the municipality to the electorate (Parker 1993b: 163). Municipalities are communicating to at least two distinct publics, therefore, one internal, one external, and are able to use football to do both.
Even medium-sized towns (under 90,000 inhabitants) spent between 150,000 and 1 million francs per year on communication in the 1990s (Alvis 1994). Much smaller towns, and more recently the new regional authorities with their own elected bodies with large powers and budgets since the decentralisation law of 1983, also rapidly followed suit (Hare 1995). Municipal public relations are often built around annual events organised by the town or with which the town is associated through sponsorship or participation. Some events have achieved national notoriety and are powerful vectors of image: whether relatively new ones such as Francofolies, the La Rochelle festival of popular song, or the Montpellier Classical Music Festival. News coverage in the press and on television offers much more credibility than direct advertising (Sperling 1991: 37–42).
Paying for the privilege of being a ville d’étape in the Tour de France cycle race ensures exposure during the television sports coverage, but also guarantees media portraits of the town and its attractions and local specialities. In 1994, for example, the year of the opening of the Channel Tunnel and of the TGV Nord, Calais and Lille invested in this public relations exercise as villes d’étape. Whereas television coverage of the Tour is followed much more in France than abroad, the 1998 World Cup had been (correctly) predicted to have the biggest global television audience ever, and the opportunities for self-publicity to the rest of Europe and the world for purposes of attracting inward investment was a once-only opportunity.
Hosting the World Cup in the region was a way that local cities and regions could prepare the way, in partnership with big business keen to invest in major city clubs in the late 1990s, to forge a new relationship between football club and locality. Being a World Cup host city was crucial for ambitious municipalities; as the mayor of the smallest host city put it: ‘In the collective memory, Montpellier will be one of the ten best known French towns in the first quarter of the twenty-first century’ (Echégut 1998: 39). Dauncey (1999) found that, to a great extent, the candidates to host matches in the World Cup of 1998 were self-selecting, given the nature of French professional football where only a restricted number of top teams attract the followings to warrant the large grounds demanded by FIFA (seating for 40,000 spectators).
However, the geography of the host cities tells us something about the local politics and economic geography of French football in the late 1990s. France’s hosting of the 1984 European Championships, and the infrastructure development that had then occurred, also favoured some grounds, such as the Stade de la Beaujoire in Nantes, purpose-built in 1983, which meant the updating was comparatively inexpensive. Leaving aside the two stadiums in the Paris area (the new Stade de France in the suburb of Saint-Denis, and the Parc des Princes), the provincial host cities (where 49 of the 64 matches were played) were geographically spread across the country: Bordeaux and Toulouse in the southwest, Nantes in the west, Lens in the north, Lyon and Saint-Etienne in the centreeast, and Marseille and Montpellier on the Mediterranean coast.
From amongst the initial group of candidate cities, Rouen, Lille and Nancy reluctantly withdrew because their regional authorities realised that the renovation or new stadium costs involved – even with subsidies from the State – would be too great when the clubs were not in Division 1. Geographically the north of France was covered by the choice of Lens, a successful top club for many years, and so Lille had to bow to its near neighbour, although Lille’s home town club, LOSC, has since been promoted to Division 1 and indeed looks capable of establishing itself as a major force. Of France’s big regional capitals with big football stadiums, Strasbourg notably excluded itself. Although in general its stadium was considered of high quality, having been much renovated for Euro 84, it could only provide 17,000 seats.
The club and the city and regional authorities could not agree. The club is one of the modernisers in its organisational structures and ambitions, being owned by the French arm of the international McCormack sports management group, but the socialist mayor, Catherine Trautmann, had other priorities in a city that is both a major European capital in terms of European institutions and has major problems of delinquency and a large extreme right vote. The club had cost the city a lot of money in subsidies in previous years (not least in the 1984 European Nations Championship), and the municipality opted out of subsidy of football.
This controversial refusal was none the less seen by the local political opposition as a missed opportunity (Saint-Martin 1998: 60; Scotto 1997: 29, and 1998: 25). The final list of cities hosting matches was (for Dauncey) predictable. He argues that the historical links of French football ‘to industrialisation and the demography of French towns and cities, combined with political traditions of centralism and contemporary moves towards more responsibility for the regions created a complex of forces favouring regional capitals’ (Dauncey 1999: 104).
The one anomaly as a host town appears to be Montpellier, so low in the urban hierarchy (twenty-fourth largest city in France), but its municipal ambitions meant it was determined to be a host city as part of its long-term strategy of self-promotion. The local city and regional authorities invested heavily in football in the 1980s and 1990s, which have seen the club rise from the lower leagues (Division d’honneur) to European competitions. As part of the communication exercise that was the World Cup the mayor and the president of the Regional Council undertook a regional tour as early as 1996 to publicise the city’s hosting of the World Cup among the local population. They were able, before the end of 1997, to measure economic effects, in terms of jobs, with many local firms working on the renovations to the stadium, the smallest of the ten, its capacity being enlarged by 50 per cent to turn it into a 35,500 all-seater stadium. The Montpellier conurbation has grown rapidly over the past 20 years, fuelling the ambitions of its long-term mayor Georges Frêche.
The general gain for Montpellier, as for other host towns, was in notoriety abroad or brand awareness. The town of Lens is a different case. It appears very small, but is in a largish conurbation in the densely populated Lille region, and has a highly successful, long-standing Division 1 team (1997/98 champions) with the excellent facilities of the Stade Félix-Bollaert. Its support was voted the best in the country in the 1999/2000 season (France Football, 7 January 2000). The position of Saint Etienne, geographically close to Lyon and relatively low down the urban hierarchy, would normally suggest that it would lose out to its much larger neighbour; however, the unparalleled footballing tradition of Saint-Etienne and the facilities available at Stade Geoffroy-Guichard outweighed such concerns. For the host towns and cities, the World Cup was very much about selling themselves as regional capitals to the half-a-million foreign supporters among whom were a good proportion of VIPs invited by sponsors, as well as a thousand foreign journalists and many ‘deciders’ from French companies (not to mention the potential visitors watching on television).
The State (seeing the cities also as part of ‘le produit France’ in general) provided expertise and staff: the key public relations operation was organised by the host towns in collaboration with the DATAR, the regional Development Agency. One hundred and twenty foreign company directors were invited to the host towns in a highly targeted fashion. Thirty American industrialists in biotechnology were invited to Lyon; Belgian food industrialists to Bordeaux; British aeronautics and aerospace interests were present in Toulouse, to cite just three examples (Echégut 1997, 1998).
Becoming a host club for the World Cup was equally crucial for the local football club, since it was a once-only opportunity to benefit from huge State and local-authority help to improve stadium infrastructures. One might say that what was happening was public investment in clubs whose ‘modernising’ chairmen were aiming to privatise once the investment had been made. Total costs of improving these mostly rather old stadiums and of furnishing infrastructures around them were shared by central government, cities and regions, and did not fall onto the clubs that use them. Public input to the improvement of football’s infrastructures was therefore considerable.
The collectivités locales (city, metropolitan, departmental and regional authorities) contributed overall 1.44 billion francs (£140 million) simply to the renovation of grounds and the improvement of general urban facilities (for instance the city of Lyon built an extension of the city Metro to the Stade de Gerland). The sum disbursed by local authorities represented some two-thirds of the total costs. Taking Nantes, Lyon and Marseille as examples, going from the least to the most expensive of the old stadiums, the total costs of renovation and its sharing out between the State and different local authorities may be seen in Table 3.1. Big Towns, Big Budgets, Big Clubs The World Cup was a major opportunity for French cities and regions to position themselves on the national and international stage through sport.
Whereas 30 years ago French football’s economic geography was different, it is less and less of a surprise to see that France’s seven biggest cities had Division 1 clubs in 2000/01: Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Nantes. Toulouse were subsequently relegated, but have one of the top rugby clubs in France. Monaco exists too at this top level because it is heavily subsidised by its ruling royal family, in the same way that the biggest city clubs are sponsored by their municipalities. Rennes comes in at twenty-second rank in the biggest French towns, and has as majority shareholder one of France’s richest businessmen, François Pinault, owner of the Pinault-Printemps-Redoute group, whose sponsorship allowed Rennes to spend 345 million francs in new recruits at the start of the 2000/01 season.
Montpellier still manages to punch above its weight. The other top division clubs in 2001/02 were all based in towns of 100,000 inhabitants (Metz) or less. Metz and Sedan are throwbacks to the earlier period of dominance of small to middle-sized industrial towns; Auxerre and Troyes are middle-sized market towns with strong footballing traditions, like Bastia (in Corsica). What at first sight seems the most obvious exception to the rule about French football becoming dominated by the top city clubs is recently promoted Guingamp, a small-town Breton club, founded 1912, with a stadium of 18,040 places that had never been full prior to their promotion in 2000, and which has an honourable record in professional football, having been in D1 before in the 1990s.
It is not a club quite like those small-town clubs around whom the professional league was built, since it rose to prominence in recent years having taken over players from Brest when their neighbour was in financial trouble. However, Brittany is a traditional footballing area, as witnessed too by the promotion of Lorient to D1 in 2001. The public and officials of smalltown clubs such as Lorient and Guingamp are not yet ready to be consigned to sporting history, as their results show, even though they are unable to generate great income from gate receipts, sponsorship, or merchandising. It was perhaps not a surprise that in 2002 both clubs were struggling against relegation, with Lorient losing out yet winning the French Cup.
In the current situation the size of a club’s budget is a
major key to success. Table 3.2 shows there is a link between size of budget
and size of conurbation. Guingamp, the smallest town represented during both
seasons, had the lowest budget of D1 clubs in 2001/02. While Rennes and Monaco
(for reasons to do with their particular individual sponsors/owners) are ranked
higher in the budgetary hierarchy than their size of conurbation would warrant,
it is clear that there is a relation between the size of urban population where
the club plays and its financial position. Lille is an exception, being ranked
much lower than its conurbation (the fourth biggest in France) would warrant.
However, the 2000 season was Lille’s first in the top division after three
years in the second and there is evidence it is attracting more financial
support through its success. Lille finished a remarkable third and qualified
for the preliminary round of the 2001/02 Champions League.
The financial gain this represents allowed budgetary increases that suggest the club may well survive and prosper in the longer term. The key is that the club is in the fourth biggest city and conurbation, has received important support from the municipality in the recent past, and before the municipal elections of 2001 extracted promises of major investment in the stadium. Lille and Lyon: Eurocities The north of France was a hotbed of soccer in the same way as the north-east of England, with a similar industrial working-class tradition. LOSC (Lille Olympique Sporting Club), whose predecessor Olympique Lillois won the very first professional championship in 1933, was most successful in the immediate post-war years. LOSC won two championships and five French Cups between 1946 and 1955. Then, as the old heavy industries gradually saw themselves overtaken in terms of wealth and job creation, LOSC yo-yoed between Divisions 1 and 2 in the 1960s and 1970s, even going down briefly to Division 3. Since winning the Division 2 championship in 1978, LOSC has generally been seen as a natural Division 1 team, if a mediocre one.
However, the catastrophic position of the club’s finances in 1994 almost cost them their professional existence. The key factor then as now is the support of the local authorities. The city, which was in fact from the mid-1990s the club’s major (80 per cent) shareholder, picked up huge bills to wipe out the club’s deficit of 75 million francs. This did not prevent relegation to D2 in 1997. The socialist-led municipality of Lille came up with a strategy to save the club and to rid themselves of the debt by privatising the club, with a promise of major renovation of the stadium. In the summer of 1999 talks were opened with two businessmen, Luc Dayan and Francis Graille, with a view to a take-over. The attraction for the investors was the history of the club (it already had a brand), its location in a big regional capital (Lille is after all a key hub on the high-speed train lines linking Paris, London and Brussels) and the backing of the local authority and metropolitan area.
The city sold its shares for 250,000 francs and gave a promise either to build a new stadium or to renovate the existing stadium from top to bottom by 1 March 2003. The buyers have invested 40 million francs in the club’s budget. The impending municipal elections meant that the timing of the plan was not accidental. The position of executive mayor in a city the size of Lille is a not inconsiderable political prize. It usually brings with it the chairmanship of the metropolitan area, great influence in the regional authority, and leadership of one of the key Socialist Party federations. It is a key springboard to national political office.
Martine Aubry (who happens to come from a political family, being the daughter of Jacques Delors) gave up her post as Minister for Employment and Solidarity and effective number two to Prime Minister Jospin in 2000 in order to fight the mayoral election. Her predecessor, long-term mayor Pierre Mauroy, was a major national figure, and a former Prime Minister. The issue of what to do about the city football club was not something that could be neglected by candidates for mayor in Lille, nor shelved once elected. Before her first month was out and before the end of the already very successful football season, Mayor Aubry revealed the plan to increase the capacity of the existing stadium from 20,000 to 35,000, increasing also the number of corporate hospitality boxes, at a cost to local and regional taxpayers of 200 million francs.
The metropolitan area – la Communauté urbaine – will finance it (Dufour 2001). A month later, the earlier than expected success of LOSC in gaining a place in the qualifying round of the Champions League (which brought in much extra money to the club) caused a planning problem regarding the renovation of the stadium. Champions League stadiums must be all-seater and Mayor Aubry was of course determined that LOSC would not play its home games anywhere else than in Lille. However, the necessary work proved impossible and LOSC borrowed the nearby stadium of Lens. The fact that LOSC has an opportunity to establish itself as a major force in French and European football says much about the changes in the economic geography of French football that in the last decade have seen the rise of big city clubs in regional capitals with international ambitions inside the new European Union. Despite the cost, an ambitious city like Lille cannot wash its hands of one aspect of a regional capital’s assets: a professional football team with European clout. As its private buyers were aware, a club playing in a big metropolitan area is able to command larger crowds from their urban catchment area, significant municipal support, the sponsorship of major companies, bigger budgets, and thereby, in the post-Bosman era of highly mobile players more susceptible to financial inducements than to club loyalty, the likelihood of success on the pitch.
A more substantial symbol than Lille in this respect, in the sense that their success has already been confirmed over a number of years, is Olympique Lyonnais. They are a better example of the new big-city club, too, in that Lyon is not a traditional football area. Succeeding a moribund predecessor, the modern ‘OL ’ was born in 1950 with encouragement from the city and the use of the municipal Gerland stadium. OL went on to establish a record at the time for the number of successive games in Division 1 (1953/83), and won three French cups between 1964 and 1973, with a semi-final in the European Cup Winners Cup in 1964. Despite this honourable record as a relative newcomer to the professional league, compared for example to Marseille, Lyon has not been regarded as a footballing hotbed and the club had no real footballing pedigree. They had never won the French league championship and, until 2001, their last cup dated back to 1973. Over the years, OL had had various promising teams but had been unable to keep their best players.
In the last few years, however, the club from France’s second city has established itself not only as an importer of international stars such as their Brazilian captain and striker, Sonny Anderson, but also as a regular competitor in European competitions, and following the French League Cup victory of 2001 they at last won the coveted League Championship trophy in 2002. Although historically Lyon has been described as a cold, bourgeois city and the Lyon public is reputedly ‘difficult and demanding’ (L ’Equipe électronique dossier, 21 December 2000), for the 2001 Cup Final the team were able to bring 35,000 supporters with them to the Stade de France (Le Monde, 8 May 2001), and the celebrations of the Championship win brought tens of thousands of Lyonnais onto the streets.
The turn-around is such that the club is now regarded as one of the most ambitious in the league (Le Monde, 8 May 2001), having gone, under the chairmanship of local businessman J.-M. Aulas, from Division 2 to the Champions League and from a budget of 17 million francs (including a deficit of 10 million) to 500 million francs between 1987 and 2001. Their stadium, owned and carefully maintained by the city, is of international standard, with 43,000 seats, having been upgraded for both the European championships of 1984 and the World Cup in 1998.
Their chairman does, however, feel that the future of big clubs includes either ownership or management of their stadium and in 2000 was negotiating with outgoing mayor, another former Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, a jointly funded development doubling the number of corporate hospitality boxes in the Stade Gerland (Barth 2000d). Since 1999 they are also sponsored to the tune of 100 million francs by the media company Pathé, giving them the biggest budget in the league. Nor are their ambitions restricted to buying players and success, since investment in youth coaching (they own their Youth Coaching Centre, medical centre and training grounds) has led to their under-17 and under-15 sides becoming French champions in 2000. The emergence of OL as one of the strongest clubs in French football at the turn of the century is not accidental.
Lyon has now joined other major European regional capital cities in having a successful football team to go along with other international esteem indicators. These include an international airport and other major communications links (like Lille, Lyon is a key beneficiary of the TGV high-speed train service) and internationally celebrated cultural institutions and events. The rise of the big-city club in a regional capital reflects wider social and economic changes that Manuel Castells and Anthony Giddens relate to globalisation, where the nation-state is no longer the key site of development. Rather than undermining cities, globalisation is transforming them into vital hubs within the global economy, says Castells (1996). Building on the idea of ‘global cities’ (Sassen 1991), Giddens (2001: 592–595) argues that the contemporary development of the world economy has created a strategic role for major cities, which are increasingly standing apart from their surrounding region and conceiving their areas of influence as transnational, through a network of links with other equivalent cities across the continent and the world.
If local and city governments are more ‘agile forms for managing the global’ (Borja and Castells 1997, cited in Giddens 2001: 594), partly because they enjoy legitimacy from and are closer to those they represent, they can use sport – a football club or the hosting of a major international sports event – as a force for the integration of their plural societies and for galvanising urban regeneration and social and economic change. Barcelona is a model here. In hosting the 1992 Olympics the city’s assets and vision were on show to the whole world, and this generated additional enthusiasm within the city for completing its urban transformation in the strategic Barcelona 2000 plan. Lyon, like Barcelona, is part of the Eurocities movement, 50 of Europe’s largest cities that came together in 1989 to work together as economic actors. Competing in Europe, then, is not just a footballing goal, it is a major part of a big city’s whole economic strategy.
The city of Lyon’s strategic plan under its new mayor is entitled ‘Lyon porte d’Europe’ (Lyon Gateway to Europe). It was not out of love for football that the mayor accompanied OL to Barcelona for a Champions League match, along with 25 key Lyon businessmen, and bought pages of space in Catalan daily papers advertising the city with the slogan ‘We were made for each other’ (Landrin 2001). Rather, it was from a recognition of the importance of a city’s football club in contributing to a city’s international image and economic development. Conclusion When the small town club CS Sedan-Ardennes, from a rural wooded region close to the Belgian border region, found themselves at the top of the French Division 1 in November 2000, their chairman and major shareholder Pascal Urano, a local businessman, accepted that the weakness of the local economy prevented them from paying either huge transfer fees or high salaries.
Nor could they afford a training pitch or youth academy, so quickly had they come back into the top division. They also had to rely, not on locally produced players, but on picking up at bargain-basement prices solid professionals who had left other clubs for a variety of reasons, such as over-staffing or personal incompatibility (Potet 2000b). The original strength of the professional league was largely built around such small or medium-sized towns and the family values of the local factory (and some of these clubs still make themselves felt in the top two divisions).
None the less, in the immediate future, in the era of crossnational and even global commercialism and growing importance to clubs of international competitions, French football looks as if it will be more and more dominated by the big-city clubs. In both cases, the past and the present, the support of the local town hall is crucial. There was a symbiosis that was initially dependent on a set of values that was to do with political self-interest certainly, but in the name of local democracy and a sense of public service. Today the interests of the big-city club and its locality are equally part of a mutual dependence, but with a shared desire to count much more widely than at the local or indeed the national level. These are now secondary to competing in Europe.
The French clubs with the biggest budgets are now from the major conurbations. They are the ones that are most consistently successful. The odd one out is Monaco, but its royal family has similar regional and international ambitions and resources to the elected mayors of Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, and Nantes, to which elite list one may be able to add Lille who are set to challenge Lens for the football leadership of the northern metropolitan area.
These half-dozen cities are attractive to major commercial sponsors with similar global ambitions, whereas a club from a small town is no longer attractive or able to muster similar resources, whether from local crowd support or sponsorship. Sedan (founded in 1919) has never won the French League Championship, but has two French cups to its name – from a previous era, 1956 and 1961. In 2001, in their second season back in the top division, they finished an extremely creditable fifth and qualified for the UEFA Cup.
The difference is that Lyon has by 2002 qualified three times running for the more lucrative Champions League. Lille, in finishing third in 2001, also qualifying for the Champions League, established a base camp that can be used by the city in its bid to become recognised as a major European regional capital. Their weakness is that, unlike Lyon, they did not have the resources to prevent the loss of key players to top English clubs in the close season of 2002.
The financial gain this represents allowed budgetary increases that suggest the club may well survive and prosper in the longer term. The key is that the club is in the fourth biggest city and conurbation, has received important support from the municipality in the recent past, and before the municipal elections of 2001 extracted promises of major investment in the stadium. Lille and Lyon: Eurocities The north of France was a hotbed of soccer in the same way as the north-east of England, with a similar industrial working-class tradition. LOSC (Lille Olympique Sporting Club), whose predecessor Olympique Lillois won the very first professional championship in 1933, was most successful in the immediate post-war years. LOSC won two championships and five French Cups between 1946 and 1955. Then, as the old heavy industries gradually saw themselves overtaken in terms of wealth and job creation, LOSC yo-yoed between Divisions 1 and 2 in the 1960s and 1970s, even going down briefly to Division 3. Since winning the Division 2 championship in 1978, LOSC has generally been seen as a natural Division 1 team, if a mediocre one.
However, the catastrophic position of the club’s finances in 1994 almost cost them their professional existence. The key factor then as now is the support of the local authorities. The city, which was in fact from the mid-1990s the club’s major (80 per cent) shareholder, picked up huge bills to wipe out the club’s deficit of 75 million francs. This did not prevent relegation to D2 in 1997. The socialist-led municipality of Lille came up with a strategy to save the club and to rid themselves of the debt by privatising the club, with a promise of major renovation of the stadium. In the summer of 1999 talks were opened with two businessmen, Luc Dayan and Francis Graille, with a view to a take-over. The attraction for the investors was the history of the club (it already had a brand), its location in a big regional capital (Lille is after all a key hub on the high-speed train lines linking Paris, London and Brussels) and the backing of the local authority and metropolitan area.
The city sold its shares for 250,000 francs and gave a promise either to build a new stadium or to renovate the existing stadium from top to bottom by 1 March 2003. The buyers have invested 40 million francs in the club’s budget. The impending municipal elections meant that the timing of the plan was not accidental. The position of executive mayor in a city the size of Lille is a not inconsiderable political prize. It usually brings with it the chairmanship of the metropolitan area, great influence in the regional authority, and leadership of one of the key Socialist Party federations. It is a key springboard to national political office.
Martine Aubry (who happens to come from a political family, being the daughter of Jacques Delors) gave up her post as Minister for Employment and Solidarity and effective number two to Prime Minister Jospin in 2000 in order to fight the mayoral election. Her predecessor, long-term mayor Pierre Mauroy, was a major national figure, and a former Prime Minister. The issue of what to do about the city football club was not something that could be neglected by candidates for mayor in Lille, nor shelved once elected. Before her first month was out and before the end of the already very successful football season, Mayor Aubry revealed the plan to increase the capacity of the existing stadium from 20,000 to 35,000, increasing also the number of corporate hospitality boxes, at a cost to local and regional taxpayers of 200 million francs.
The metropolitan area – la Communauté urbaine – will finance it (Dufour 2001). A month later, the earlier than expected success of LOSC in gaining a place in the qualifying round of the Champions League (which brought in much extra money to the club) caused a planning problem regarding the renovation of the stadium. Champions League stadiums must be all-seater and Mayor Aubry was of course determined that LOSC would not play its home games anywhere else than in Lille. However, the necessary work proved impossible and LOSC borrowed the nearby stadium of Lens. The fact that LOSC has an opportunity to establish itself as a major force in French and European football says much about the changes in the economic geography of French football that in the last decade have seen the rise of big city clubs in regional capitals with international ambitions inside the new European Union. Despite the cost, an ambitious city like Lille cannot wash its hands of one aspect of a regional capital’s assets: a professional football team with European clout. As its private buyers were aware, a club playing in a big metropolitan area is able to command larger crowds from their urban catchment area, significant municipal support, the sponsorship of major companies, bigger budgets, and thereby, in the post-Bosman era of highly mobile players more susceptible to financial inducements than to club loyalty, the likelihood of success on the pitch.
A more substantial symbol than Lille in this respect, in the sense that their success has already been confirmed over a number of years, is Olympique Lyonnais. They are a better example of the new big-city club, too, in that Lyon is not a traditional football area. Succeeding a moribund predecessor, the modern ‘OL ’ was born in 1950 with encouragement from the city and the use of the municipal Gerland stadium. OL went on to establish a record at the time for the number of successive games in Division 1 (1953/83), and won three French cups between 1964 and 1973, with a semi-final in the European Cup Winners Cup in 1964. Despite this honourable record as a relative newcomer to the professional league, compared for example to Marseille, Lyon has not been regarded as a footballing hotbed and the club had no real footballing pedigree. They had never won the French league championship and, until 2001, their last cup dated back to 1973. Over the years, OL had had various promising teams but had been unable to keep their best players.
In the last few years, however, the club from France’s second city has established itself not only as an importer of international stars such as their Brazilian captain and striker, Sonny Anderson, but also as a regular competitor in European competitions, and following the French League Cup victory of 2001 they at last won the coveted League Championship trophy in 2002. Although historically Lyon has been described as a cold, bourgeois city and the Lyon public is reputedly ‘difficult and demanding’ (L ’Equipe électronique dossier, 21 December 2000), for the 2001 Cup Final the team were able to bring 35,000 supporters with them to the Stade de France (Le Monde, 8 May 2001), and the celebrations of the Championship win brought tens of thousands of Lyonnais onto the streets.
The turn-around is such that the club is now regarded as one of the most ambitious in the league (Le Monde, 8 May 2001), having gone, under the chairmanship of local businessman J.-M. Aulas, from Division 2 to the Champions League and from a budget of 17 million francs (including a deficit of 10 million) to 500 million francs between 1987 and 2001. Their stadium, owned and carefully maintained by the city, is of international standard, with 43,000 seats, having been upgraded for both the European championships of 1984 and the World Cup in 1998.
Their chairman does, however, feel that the future of big clubs includes either ownership or management of their stadium and in 2000 was negotiating with outgoing mayor, another former Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, a jointly funded development doubling the number of corporate hospitality boxes in the Stade Gerland (Barth 2000d). Since 1999 they are also sponsored to the tune of 100 million francs by the media company Pathé, giving them the biggest budget in the league. Nor are their ambitions restricted to buying players and success, since investment in youth coaching (they own their Youth Coaching Centre, medical centre and training grounds) has led to their under-17 and under-15 sides becoming French champions in 2000. The emergence of OL as one of the strongest clubs in French football at the turn of the century is not accidental.
Lyon has now joined other major European regional capital cities in having a successful football team to go along with other international esteem indicators. These include an international airport and other major communications links (like Lille, Lyon is a key beneficiary of the TGV high-speed train service) and internationally celebrated cultural institutions and events. The rise of the big-city club in a regional capital reflects wider social and economic changes that Manuel Castells and Anthony Giddens relate to globalisation, where the nation-state is no longer the key site of development. Rather than undermining cities, globalisation is transforming them into vital hubs within the global economy, says Castells (1996). Building on the idea of ‘global cities’ (Sassen 1991), Giddens (2001: 592–595) argues that the contemporary development of the world economy has created a strategic role for major cities, which are increasingly standing apart from their surrounding region and conceiving their areas of influence as transnational, through a network of links with other equivalent cities across the continent and the world.
If local and city governments are more ‘agile forms for managing the global’ (Borja and Castells 1997, cited in Giddens 2001: 594), partly because they enjoy legitimacy from and are closer to those they represent, they can use sport – a football club or the hosting of a major international sports event – as a force for the integration of their plural societies and for galvanising urban regeneration and social and economic change. Barcelona is a model here. In hosting the 1992 Olympics the city’s assets and vision were on show to the whole world, and this generated additional enthusiasm within the city for completing its urban transformation in the strategic Barcelona 2000 plan. Lyon, like Barcelona, is part of the Eurocities movement, 50 of Europe’s largest cities that came together in 1989 to work together as economic actors. Competing in Europe, then, is not just a footballing goal, it is a major part of a big city’s whole economic strategy.
The city of Lyon’s strategic plan under its new mayor is entitled ‘Lyon porte d’Europe’ (Lyon Gateway to Europe). It was not out of love for football that the mayor accompanied OL to Barcelona for a Champions League match, along with 25 key Lyon businessmen, and bought pages of space in Catalan daily papers advertising the city with the slogan ‘We were made for each other’ (Landrin 2001). Rather, it was from a recognition of the importance of a city’s football club in contributing to a city’s international image and economic development. Conclusion When the small town club CS Sedan-Ardennes, from a rural wooded region close to the Belgian border region, found themselves at the top of the French Division 1 in November 2000, their chairman and major shareholder Pascal Urano, a local businessman, accepted that the weakness of the local economy prevented them from paying either huge transfer fees or high salaries.
Nor could they afford a training pitch or youth academy, so quickly had they come back into the top division. They also had to rely, not on locally produced players, but on picking up at bargain-basement prices solid professionals who had left other clubs for a variety of reasons, such as over-staffing or personal incompatibility (Potet 2000b). The original strength of the professional league was largely built around such small or medium-sized towns and the family values of the local factory (and some of these clubs still make themselves felt in the top two divisions).
None the less, in the immediate future, in the era of crossnational and even global commercialism and growing importance to clubs of international competitions, French football looks as if it will be more and more dominated by the big-city clubs. In both cases, the past and the present, the support of the local town hall is crucial. There was a symbiosis that was initially dependent on a set of values that was to do with political self-interest certainly, but in the name of local democracy and a sense of public service. Today the interests of the big-city club and its locality are equally part of a mutual dependence, but with a shared desire to count much more widely than at the local or indeed the national level. These are now secondary to competing in Europe.
The French clubs with the biggest budgets are now from the major conurbations. They are the ones that are most consistently successful. The odd one out is Monaco, but its royal family has similar regional and international ambitions and resources to the elected mayors of Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, and Nantes, to which elite list one may be able to add Lille who are set to challenge Lens for the football leadership of the northern metropolitan area.
These half-dozen cities are attractive to major commercial sponsors with similar global ambitions, whereas a club from a small town is no longer attractive or able to muster similar resources, whether from local crowd support or sponsorship. Sedan (founded in 1919) has never won the French League Championship, but has two French cups to its name – from a previous era, 1956 and 1961. In 2001, in their second season back in the top division, they finished an extremely creditable fifth and qualified for the UEFA Cup.
The difference is that Lyon has by 2002 qualified three times running for the more lucrative Champions League. Lille, in finishing third in 2001, also qualifying for the Champions League, established a base camp that can be used by the city in its bid to become recognised as a major European regional capital. Their weakness is that, unlike Lyon, they did not have the resources to prevent the loss of key players to top English clubs in the close season of 2002.
Notes 1. For information on players of this early period,
see ‘Le roman de l’équipe de France (1904–1975)’, France Football special
issue, 25 December 2001. 2. See Augustin (1990) for the history of football in
the south-west, and Dine (2001) for a discussion of the relationship between
rugby and the south-west of France.
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