French President Emmanuel Macron was present in Qatar on Sunday to watch what many football professionals and sports commentators have described as the most thrilling World Cup final ever. The cameras were on him as he fist-pumped the France team’s extraordinary comeback of equalising goals against Argentina, and later consoling the France players after they lost the match in the penalty shootout that followed a 3-3 draw.
Speaking after the match, Macron, made a clear allusion to political matters at home where he and his government face a tough test of strength in the New Year with trades unions, notably over pension reforms. Commenting the remarkable rallying of the France team, which twice came back from behind to equalise, he said: “Everything is possible if we stay united, if we are together, if there is willpower and talent,” he said. “That’s what this team has shown.”
The French president had already travelled to Qatar, last Wednesday, to watch the France team’s victory in its semi-final match against Morocco, after which he trotted into the changing room to greet the players who he said had made him so “proud”. After exchanging a few words and, with a wide grin, listening to them joyously bursting into song, he got back into his plane to fly off to Brussels where he was to attend, the following morning, an important meeting of the European Council. “On Sunday we’ll be here and you will win again, guys,” he told the players.
He makes the most of photo opportunities alongside the France team, “les Bleus”, which he has praised for its spirit, its hard work that sees it “dampen the shirts”, and for remaining “united” when in difficulty.
But that is of course not supposed to indicate any “politicizing” of sport. That is a notion he denounced as a “very bad idea” when reacting in November to the calls for a boycott of the tournament over alleged corruption behind the attribution of Qatar as host nation, the deaths and ill-treatment of migrant workers brought to the Gulf state to build the infrastructures, its dismal human rights record, and the particularly negative environmental consequences of the games.
Therein lies the paradox cultivated by Macron, just like other politicians before him. France’s sports players are feted when they run, when they win and when they dance. But for the rest, and for decades, it’s been a case of everyone to their own: the political world is happy that the world of football contents itself with the business of kicking a ball, and in exchange the football world is happy with being left by successive governments to its own devices. But for how long can that continue?
The “Blues” of 2022 may still to a degree be tinged with the historic timidity that French football has shown towards taking a stand on issues outside of sport, but a change is clearly underway. That is not the case, however, concerning Noël Le Graët, the head of the French football federation, the FFF, who has shown no reservations in defending Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup, energetically arguing that no participating team, and above all not that of France, should wear armbands denouncing homophobia and other discrimination.
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Le Graët – a former socialist mayor of the Breton town of Guingamp – has consistently turned a blind eye towards issues as serious as racism. “When a black [sic] scores a goal, the whole stadium is on its feet,” he told the French channel BFM Business in 2020. “The racist phenomenon in sport, and in football in particular, does not exist, or not much.” Interviewed last year by French magazine So Foot, when he was questioned about why the issue of racism was given little attention by the French football authorities, Le Graët replied: “Even here, my secretary, go and see the colour of her skin. And the director who I’ve just hired, a Diallo!”.
A new generation of players pull out the red card
Le Graët, 80, who has another three years to run on his contract, has been similarly dismissive about the problem of homophobia. He publicly opposed a move for French football referees to interrupt matches when homophobic chants are heard from supporters. “The halting of matches doesn’t interest me,” he told public radio station France Info. “It’s an error. To consider that football is homophobic, that’s a bit much. That some spectators exaggerate, yes.” Meanwhile, French sports minister, Amelie Oudea-Castera in September ordered an investigation into sexual harassment claims levelled against Le Graët by female employees of his federation, and which were first revealed by So Foot.
While France’s football authorities appear to have their heads in the sand, change is driven by the sport’s younger generation, which have already begun shaking the edifice. This autumn, France’s star player Kylian Mbappé, who will turn 24 next week, successfully led other players and national team staff in a revolt over image rights. Until then, the FFF was allowed to sell pictures of players and the national team to private sponsors of its choosing, including betting websites and soft drinks manufacturers, activities and products which Mbappé and his team mates disagreed with. The FFF was forced to back down in the dispute.
“Football has changed,” said Mbappé, who at club level plays for Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), after the showdown. “There is a new wave which has arrived. What we want is just the right of say over what our name is associated with. I wish to manage my career as I want to, with the values that I want to promote.” The striker had previously taken to Twitter to denounce the “danger of online betting”, indirectly referring to the aggressive marketing of such websites directed towards youngsters from low-income neighbourhoods.
Running counter to the statements of Noël Le Graët, the members of the France team are increasingly outspoken about racism in football. One of them is 27-year-old defender Presnel Kimpembe who, like Mbappé, plays for PSG. During a Champions League match in December 2020 between the French club and Turkish side Basaksehir, he called on his teammates to leave the pitch along with the Basaksehir players following what they deemed to be racist comments made by a Romanian match official. Kimpembe’s team mate Mbappé backed the move, saying “We can’t play with this guy,” and the match ended with the walkout of both teams after just 13 minutes of play.
France right-back Jules Koundé, who plays at club level for Barcelona, has regularly posted comments on Twitter on issues he feels strongly about. After phone video emerged of white police officers beating up a black music producer in his Paris studio in November 2020, Koundé wrote: Against this fringe of police who largely overstep their rights by beating [people], even sometimes killing [people], our cameras are our best weapons.”
In an interview on YouTube in October this year, the 24-year-old gave his thoughts on the subject of political engagement. “We have a duty,” he said. “We have the luck to be able to stir people. There should be no barriers around that, even if some people want to bring us back to our status of footballer. It’s in the process of evolving, we can talk freely, without being afraid to express our opinions.”
France midfielder Aurélien Tchouameni, 22, met with monkey impersonations during a 2021 Champions League match when playing for his then club, AS Monaco, against Czech side Sparta Prague. “To take up a position against racism is easy. To take action is something else,” he wrote then on Twitter. “Why aren’t we, we players who are the target of racist insults, associated with the creation of the [UEFA] protocol? Why can one halt a match for five minutes to check whether a player was offside by one centimetre, and not do the same for racist chants in the stadium? Everything was clear and audible. We heard it. Now its our turn to be heard.”
This new generation of France players are ready to stand up for themselves whoever and whatever their opponents. Before the dispute between the players and the FFF over image rights, Mbappé was involved in a quite different row with Le Graët. This was about the online abuse targeting the striker after he missed a penalty during the Euro tournament in 2021 during a match which saw France eliminated. In an interview with French weekly Le JDD, Le Graët declared that after the event Mbappé “didn’t want to play again” because he thought “the Federation had not stood up for him”. Replying in a Tweet, Mbappé wrote: “Well, I above all properly explained to him that it was because of the racism and NOT the penalty. But he considers that there was no racism.”
Blowing the whistle on an obsolete vision
French football will, as a whole, inevitably have to face up over the coming years to the challenge of greater social awareness and action. Le Graët’s view that football is somehow isolated from the movements of society around it has become obsolete, and ever more rejected by the players.
He also faces testing times ahead from French sports minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra who is in open conflict with the FFF boss. As the federation’s supervisory authority, her ministry has ordered an investigation into its practices and operations, prompted by the accusations of sexual harassment against Le Graët, who Oudéa-Castéra, appointed sports minister after Emmanuel Macron’s re-election this year, has been sharply critical of. “This federation must be exemplary,” she said recently, when slamming the number of complaints recorded over sexual and sexist violence in the game. “When you are France’s largest federation, one must be exemplary.”
Following Sunday’s World Cup final, France team captain Hugo Lloris, who will turn 36 at the end of December, is expected to progressively step down from the national squad. His expected successor as goalkeeper, Mike Maignan, who plays for AC Milan, is someone who believes people should “speak up in order to change things”, as he wrote on Twitter in September 2021 after he was the target of racist abuse during a match in Italy. In that post, Maignan, born to a Haitian mother and Guadeloupian father, wrote a long open letter to those “who decide” among football’s governing authorities. “For as long as we treat these events as isolated incidents and that we have no global response, history is led to repeat itself, again and again.”
“[…] What is being done to combat racism in the stadiums?” he asked. “We must be more numerous, and all united, in this battle for society that goes beyond football.” In conclusion he wrote: “I am not a victim of racism. I am Mike, black, upright and proud.”
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse