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Football alone is not enough


When the multicultural French national team won the World Cup in 1998, praise was heaped upon France's integration model.

Yet the World Cup triumph cannot be globally transferred to the situation encountered by immigrants in the suburbs of large French towns, as was demonstrated by the riots that happened there in 2005. Even the French World Cup winner Lilian Thuram, who grew up in Guadeloupe, acknowledged that rash actions such as these do not come about by chance, if you consider the neglect of young people there. And when interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy goes on to call these people 'scum' and 'crooks' and talks of cleansing the suburbs with water cannon, one thing can lead to another. "I was also told once that I belong to the trash", countered Thuram. "But I am not scum. What I wanted to do was work."

Thuram's opinion carries quite a lot of weight. In 2001 he took receipt of the UEFA Charity Cheque on behalf of Football Against Racism in Europe, he is an active member of the French High Council of Integration and has long taken a stance on racism in football: "Until 100 years ago", says Thuram, "renowned intellectuals argued that blacks were inferior to whites. European countries built their industrial and economic power on the backs of black people. The monkey chants made by fans today are the logical consequence of this culture."

Many football clubs attempt to cater for the social needs of immigrant children while keeping an eye out for new talent. Foot Citoyen sees itself as a social project that focuses on raising the awareness of coaches for the problem. Yet as the sole means of integration, football projects are of no help to the suburbs when many people have nothing outside of sport - no work, no exam certificates and little motivation. A view confirmed by Thierry Dodeman, chairman of the largest club in one of the suburbs affected by the riots, Clichy-sous-Bois: "It's a vicious circle that keeps on turning, and football can't stop it either, only in exceptional cases."

"Ali Benouna, a Muslim from Algeria, was able to play for France in 1935, while in 1938 the star of the French team was Larbi Ben Barek, who came from Casablanca. He played alongside Raoul Diagne from Senegal, whose father was a member of parliament and had studied law. By this I am not trying to say that there was less racism in French football than in Austria, for example, where there was not a single black player at the time, or in Germany, Italy or Spain. In fact it shows something else: it shows that football was never an element of national identity in France. An interesting point, when you consider that football became part of the national heritage of many European countries in the 1930s."
(Pierre Lanfranchi)