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Fighting the same battle every four years: the racial makeup of national football teams
This is one of my favourite/least favourite culture war topics. It’s such an equal parts fun and frustrating topic because being the World Cup, it draws commentary from absolutely everywhere and everyone: for people normally stuck inside their social media bubbles, you get exposed to all kinds of rare and exotic retardation. Intense mestizo racism, pan-African nationalism, Maghrebi anxiety, intentionally obtuse western progressives, bitter blood-and-soil Europeans; you get a little bit of everything!
The basic thing at issue is something that everybody will see if they tune in to the semifinal starting in 30 minutes: uh, these European teams aren’t very European, are they?
It is funny, isn’t it?
There’s this sort-of intentionally obtuse reaction that seems to be the Anglo progressive default. Oh, wow, sure, I guess there’s a few ethnic minorities on the French team. I actually hadn’t noticed. Kind of weird you did. Not that it’s a bad thing, of course; actually it’s a good thing. Which is obviously so silly. Come on guys, don’t pretend we haven’t all got eyes. If this is your defence it’s a fucking terrible one because it makes you look like an idiot and worse, makes it look you like you think the rest of us are idiots too.
And come on, this is funny! Of course it’s funny, both in the ha-ha sense and the sort of amusingly-interesting sense. There’s a reason everyone wants to get their two cents of opinion on it because it’s natural fodder for jokes that the French team be so visibly un-French in background. Even among the handful of Europeans on the team half of them are the obviously-not-French Hernandez brothers, and the only French French players might be the two worst players on the squad (Digne and Rabiot). If it was the reverse scenario where a bunch of white guys were dominating the roster of some foreign team, the same people professing to be colour-blind would obviously be the first to point this out.
And we know this because there are instances of this happening! This year we had the World Baseball Classic where the majority of the “British” and “Italian” and “Israeli” teams were guys from Iowa and Kansas. For Canadians, it’s an endless source of amusement whenever a non-hockey nation hosts the Olympics to see how many Canucks end up on the host hockey team.
It’s an uncomfortable situation for people
The hesitation to acknowledge the reality of the situation and the inherent humour of it by progressives is some cocktail of unwillingness to cede rhetorical ground to bigots, and a certain unease or doubt about the nature of demographic change in the West and whether it is really bringing us closer towards utopia. And obviously the salience of the issue for others is equally political in nature. I don’t need to explain why some people in western countries would want to make a big deal of this; that is self-evident, especially here of all places. But there are many more people across the world who want to make hay of it. If you go to /r/soccer over the course of the World Cup you will see an endless series of different permutations of “Team France is really Team Africa” from different perspectives.
Some pan-African or Afrocentrists interpret it as another form of neo-colonialism: they see predatory European powers literally stealing the best athletes from their pseudo-colonies, and draping them in the flag of some foreign country. There is an inverse race-focused gripe to “Team France is really Team Africa” that sees it as a sort of neo-slavery where Africans have been taken from their ancestral homelands and brainwashed into supporting their masters. This is an awkward thing for some European ethnic minorities who would really prefer if their “woke” (less in the contemporary social justice sense, more in the original Afrocentric sense) compatriots would not insist that they are fundamentally not their adopted European nationality.
In Algeria and Tunisia meanwhile, there is endless handwringing that their teams are too French, with their squads almost exclusively being made up of players born and bred in metropolitan France. These players may pretend to be citizens by descent but are culturally alien, barely Muslim, and don’t even speak Arabic! Say what you will about the makeup of the England or French or German squads, but at least they speak the national language together. The level of identity crisis that blood-and-soil European nationalists have over football pales in comparison to the Algerian right-wing.
There is also the reality that many of the more outspoken nationalist critics of European teams are obviously motivated in part by crude bigotry. When people talk about too much “diversity” in the German team they’re not talking about the Slavs in the squad. No Spaniard is drawing the line over having Frenchman Aymeric Laporte in the squad. The criticism falls much more squarely on sub-Saharan Africans.
But what would you do differently?
However fiercely the ethnic nationalists would protest, something you do not see in any large number are claims that this is all some harebrained DEI scheme. People by and large acknowledge that the makeup of these teams is not decided by politics, but for the most part trying to field the best squad possible. Take the blood-and-soil types and ask them to pick a starting XI for their national football team and they’d probably return something not much different than what it is already. People still want their country to win, and the reality is there is no ethnically pure replacement for Mbappé or Lamal or Bellingham.
The representation isn’t naturally indicative of the demographic swings, either. Yes, France is genuinely becoming more African, but not nearly so much as the national football team would suggest; not for the next generation, or probably not even the next generation after that. While the shift in the ethnic makeup of the squads is in part due to immigration, it has much more to do with the economic and social dynamics at play in these countries.
Football is a sport where there is effectively no barrier to those without money. Many of the game’s biggest stars come from dizzying, grinding poverty that has no genuine parallel in western countries. The academy system incentivizes teams to find and nurture potential stars from a young age. If you are good enough, there are no obstacles in your way. This tilts the balance decisively to those areas where kids play lots and lots of unorganized and semi-organized football without a large focus on academics or other distractions. In most western countries, that is generally the children of economically worse-off ethnic minority groups. The Paris suburbs produced more players than any other single country for this World Cup.
The alternative, seen in capable teams like Norway or Croatia that manage to field teams that punch above their weight while maintaining a more accurate demographic makeup, is to create a society that values and funds participation in youth sports as part of a healthy outlet for children. Treating athletics as meaningless, or worse, primarily an opportunity for profit, is a way to handicap your national sports teams for decades into the future.
As a Canadian, it’s been very strange to experience the reverse of this trend: as hockey has become more and more exclusive and expensive, the diverse and dominant national teams of my childhood have instead become whiter, richer, and weaker. In the most recent Olympics the single token minority on the team was a guy who is quarter-Japanese (I think?). Again, you might expect this would draw a chorus of think pieces about white supremacy or something, but the reality is that no one could plausibly come up with better alternatives.
Pope John Paul famously said that “Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.” There are things to be learned even from this culture war issue, despite most of the conversation about it being worthless. A national team is a reflection of the nation that produced it. Take that as you will.
Doesn't France use a definition of "French" that looks more like the American self-definition? I suppose I can't speak to how widespread the view is within the country, but at least from here it has a reputation, far more than the rest of Europe, of considering France to be a meme, and its adherents to be French.
I guess I'd be interested in hearing a real French perspective on this, if someone is willing to volunteer one.
I'm not French but I lived in France for four years. Speak the language, regularly read French news/social media, so I would probably have as good an insight here as anyone.
Historically France had a much more "expansionist" sense of nationalism. France at the time of the revolution was not a deeply cohesive nation-state, with probably just some 20-25% of the population speaking what we would register as French with a variety of minority languages and cultures proliferating. French nationalists saw the French project as one defined by culture that inferior peoples could (and would) integrate into. You can see that by 1812 France had directly annexed Catalonia, the Low Countries, a strip of northern Germany, the left bank of the Rhine, much of Italy, as well as modern Croatia and Slovenia; these were all deemed to be peoples who, if not French now, could be French in the future. As late as 1919 French nationalists were still arguing that all the people on the left side of the Rhine were more French than German. France, unlike most other European countries, have integrated some colonies directly into the structure of the metropole: French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, and Réunion are not separate overseas territories or dependencies but rather integral regions of France.
The big changes to this mentality came after the 1960s. France lost the war in Algeria, and with it the Algerian provinces that had been annexed into France. Over a million pied-noirs (white settlers) and Algerian Jews left Algeria for France. Around the same time, France turned to the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa for low-income labour. The state also increased offers of education in France for those areas of Africa in the French cultural/colonial sphere (where France still wields considerable influence). Over time the non-European population of France has increased significantly.
So people are basically of three minds. Many right-wingers (and perhaps less openly, people aligned in the center and left) think French identity is primarily racial. You have to have a majority, if not pure (for the more extreme), ethnic connection to the French nation. There's a certain hypocrisy here as people would not say this of the various other waves of European immigrants to France (particularly there has always been a historical connection with Poland), and a not-insignificant number of the most hardline of these are somewhat lacking on this count (like Éric Zemmour, who is a Sephardic Jew). Also from my experience this rhetoric is oriented rather squarely at sub-Saharan Africans, somewhat lesser at Maghrebis, and almost not at all against southeast Asians.
There are other people, probably still the plurality, that consider Frenchness a matter of culture and that anyone can become French. This still involves a lot of snootiness about what that means (French culture of course being manifestly superior in all ways), despite proclamations of laïcité an intense (and not undeserved) skepticism of Islam, and again some extent of double standards with respect to who is "French enough." (No one ever questions whether someone named Nowak or Kowalski is French).
The third group of people are the smallest and mostly left-aligned, particularly with the political party La France Insoumise (communists, basically) who believe the French identity to be completely flexible and not worth all that much to begin with.
How does this work vis-a-vis the Algerians when they held explicit racial pogroms against European French and yet they're happy to be part of greater France when it suits them?
You mean from the perspective of the French, or the Algerians?
It's water under the bridge except for the most bitter nationalists at this point. It's definitely sore for the pieds-noirs but they're dying off. For most French people their issues with Algerians living in France would be much more pointedly about crime or Islam or terrorism, not a conflict barely anyone can remember anymore.
Likewise Algerians are quite happy to come to a more prosperous, stable country; nevermind that once they conquered and tried to colonize you. It's not like contemporary Vietnamese have much gripes with the French either; in fact quite the opposite.
Most of the French people I meet are through martial arts, so I'm way overindexing for Algerians and Tunisians, but there does still seem to be a lot of complaining from those groups. Which is particularly ironic since the ones I tend to meet tend to be of the upper classes in French North Africa who have parents or grandparents that bear the majority of the blame for pillaging the areas
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