Fela Yunga, better known in his neighbourhood by his rap name XV Venom, will tonight sit down with his two brothers on the worn sofa in his parents’ council flat in Paris’s run-down 19th arrondissement. With a prison record, no real educational qualifications, an eye for girls and a thriving business selling T-shirts, Yunga, raised in France but born in the Democratic Republic of Congo 24 years ago, is hardly the model French citizen. Yet he will be cheering the 11 men in the national colours on the pitch in Berlin like the vast proportion of his compatriots. It is not the nation he’ll be supporting, however. It is the players. ”I’ll be cheering for the team, for the individuals, not for the country.”
On Sunday night France, a nation of perpetual conversation, will stop talking and will watch. Around 22-million watched their team beat Portugal in the semifinal last week. Perhaps twice as many will watch Zinedine Zidane, the 34-year-old Marseille-born captain, lead the side against the Italians. After a slow start, World Cup fever has swept France. Semifinal night saw hundreds of thousands of revellers filling the Champs Elysees and town squares across the country, waving the tricolour and singing La Marseillaise. An estimated half-million shirts in national colours have been sold. One flag manufacturer has sold his annual production — 40 000 — in a week. Newspapers are devoting dozens of pages to individual players. Millions who have always spurned football are now converted to the new religion.
Yet this time everything is a lot more complicated than eight years ago when the French team, including Zidane and three others who will be playing on Sunday night, won the World Cup for France for the first time. Then the ethnic diversity of the French team, with its mix of players from African, ”French-French” and Arab descent, was held up as a magical example of how the French model of integration could work. Now, following last autumn’s violent rioting in the poor suburbs where many of the current players originate and the evident fact that racial discrimination in France remains a serious problem, few are as optimistic.
”Following the victory of 1998 there was very quickly a very strong sense of disappointment,” Geraldine Faes, author of a book on the black community in France, said. ”The riots were a result of the frustrations following the hopes of nearly a decade ago.”
”For most people the situation has not really changed,” said Boris Mendza, of the campaign group The Burden of Memory of which France defender Lilian Thuram is a member. ”There is no real integration into the Republic.” Others point out that the 17 players in the French squad from ethnic minorities outnumber the 11 black members of Parliament (out of 577) and that token efforts in recent years — such as the appointment of a black anchorman to a key national news bulletin — have done little to disturb the predominance of the white, middle class elites in the French media and the business world.
”In 1998, they said that France was united and that racism was dead, four years later [Jean-Marie] Le Pen [the leader of the extreme right-wing National Front] reached the second round of the presidential elections,” said Yunga. ”That’s how long the new spirit of tolerance and integration lasted.”
Yunga said he could not understand the many French children of immigrant parents — including his two brothers — who cheered on their nation. ”The government, with the support of half the population, is passing laws that mean our parents wouldn’t now be allowed in and our friends and relatives can be expelled,” he said.
Le Pen made his own intervention in the run-up to the World Cup, telling the daily sports newspaper L’Equipe that ”perhaps the coach [of the French team] exaggerated the proportion of coloured players”.
”The French don’t feel totally represented, which explains why the crowds are not as supportive as eight years ago,” he said. Thuram, who grew up on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe and is the most outspoken member of the France team, hit back sharply. ”Long live France — not the one he wants, the real one!” he said. ”Le Pen is not aware that there are black, blond and brown French people. He doesn’t know his history.”
Yet Le Pen was voicing what many people were thinking but not saying. The veteran politician’s poll ratings have soared in the last year. ”I’m not a racist,” Marc Sertour, a 42-year-old taxi driver, told The Observer as he sipped a beer in a Paris bistro on Wednesday night while ostentatiously not watching the semifinal, ”but I find it hard to support a team that I don’t recognise. It could at least be half-white”.
Sertour praised the selection of Franck Ribery, the white midfielder from a working-class background in Boulogne, until The Observer pointed out that the 23-year-old had converted to Islam to be of the same faith as his wife.
There are other reasons why some shun football. ”There is a tradition of intellectuals, above all on the extreme left, seeing football as the opium of the masses,” said Pascal Boniface, director of the Institute of International Relations in Paris and author of a book on football and globalisation. Criticism of the commercialisation of global soccer is a frequent theme in France.
And though a significant segment of the French middle class now watches and enjoys football — ”certain football values, such as a positive view of globalisation, are totally ‘bourgeois bohemian”’, said Jean-Michel Thenard of the newspaper Liberation — there is still significant resistance to what is seen as a ”popular” game among some conservative elites. Though some have been bought off by the ”jet-set” side of football and some of the new French economic liberals are attracted to the commercial side of the sport, there are still those who, out of both snobbery and an entrenched French disdain for the mucky business of making money, simply detest the whole idea of soccer, as a sport, as popular culture and as a global phenomenon.
Instead, Thenard said, it is better to look to the new solidarity created by the unexpected success of the much-derided national team for an explanation of what is happening. ”France is undergoing a major period of doubt in the face of a globalisation dominated by the American-style individualist capitalism,” he said. ”The French team started winning when they started playing as a collective. And that makes us believe that our nation and our long traditions of social solidarity can win too.” The footballing success certainly comes after a period of great doubt. ”There was the footballing Hiroshima of the first-round World Cup exit in 2002 and then we saw the ‘no’ at the European referendum, the rioting in the suburbs, the loss of the Olympic Games to London, recent corruption scandals, a host of depressing news,” said Boniface. ”This is something positive at last.”
Other analysts point out that ”at last” the French have something that they can be ”for” not just against. ”We are not always so negative. Sometimes we are grumpy in spite of ourselves. So this time everyone is enjoying rallying round a big ‘oui’, not just another big ‘non’,” said Guy Faure, a 30-year-old Paris businessman.
For Yunga and many others in his quartier, it is the players that are important. In the area of Belleville, where he has lived since arriving from the DRC aged one, unemployment and public housing levels are among the highest in the city. Few of his friends have succeeded in leaving what is, for some local inhabitants, effectively a ghetto. Yunga himself played football before injury ended a promising career, then he turned to crime until going to prison and is now trying rap. ”Sport, crime or music,” he told The Observer. ”Not very original but the options are limited. I’ve got good friends with decent educational qualifications who are sweeping up in supermarkets.”
Yunga is not the only Frenchman inspired by the players’ individual success stories. Paris St Germain, the capital’s major club, is inundated with young players hoping to emulate heroes such as Zidane, who was raised by Algerian parents on a rough council estate in Marseille, or striker Thierry Henry, whose parents came from Guadeloupe and Martinique and who grew up in tough suburbs north of Paris. Alain Roche, PSG’s director of youth recruitment and a former top-flight professional player, said that the city’s cultural diversity was one of the main reasons for the large number of gifted youngsters. ”The players are simple, honest, hard-working, hugely talented men who have succeeded at the highest level and that touches people,” said Roche. ”Zidane is everything a man and a sportsman should be.”
Another factor is the massive public investment in public sports facilities in France over the past two decades. The town hall of Paris has recently launched a huge programme of building and renovation that will create four new swimming pools, seven new gyms and four new climbing walls. Belleville will see an €26-million sports centre opening next year. The 185 000 inhabitants of the 19th arrondissement currently share 11 tennis courts, 12 mini-sports centres and one stadium with four pitches.Though Roche complains about the ability of hugely rich British clubs to harvest the best young French players, for Pascal Boniface, the success of the French team owes much to their international experience. ”There are very few English players who play overseas, but half the French side don’t play in France,” he said.
The semifinal victory and the subsequent collective frenzy has sparked a belated rush by French politicians to don national colours. Flagging President Jacques Chirac, who gained 15 poll points after the 1998 win, will be in Berlin on Sunday evening. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, a relatively popular figure among the left-leaning France team after taking the time to spend an hour talking to Thierry Henry, Lilian Thuram and Sylvain Wiltord about social problems during a visit to their training camp last month, will, however, remain in Paris. The maverick conservative Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who controversially dubbed last autumn’s rioters racaille (”scum”), is reported to have been told that he would not be welcome in the dressing rooms, despite his own personal interest in football. His controversial words were ironically picked up by those celebrating in the streets last week. ”Say thanks to the ‘scum’ for getting us to the final,” said one banner waved on the Champs Elysees on Wednesday night.
Yet despite all the infighting and the doubt and the self-questioning and politicisation, the fact remains that France has cast off the gloom that has shrouded the nation for months and is basking in an unexpected outburst of solidarity, patriotism and pride, perhaps all the more powerful for being, depending on what happens this evening, transient. – Guardian Unlimited Â