This is a recently amended and updated version of a paper read at the Annual conference of

ASMCF, held at Leicester University, 31 August–2 September 2000, and later published in
C. Rolfe and Y. Rocheron, Shifting frontiers of France and Francophonie (Oxford/Bern: Peter
Lang, 2004), pp. 135–148.

Is French football still French?

Globalisation, national identity, and professional sport as spectacle
and commodity
Geoff Hare

Introduction
Philippe Sollers said recently: Je suis un admirateur inconditionnel de Zidane,
d “nelka, de Trezeguet. Je bondis quand la France gagne. Pas seulement au football,
mais partout et de plus en plus. Later in the same article, he says: Mon horoscope
me donne gagnant. Je suis l écrivain français qui gagne. ... Je suis le Zidane de la
prose, l “nelka de la phrase, le Trezeguet du paragraphe en or. (Sollers 2000: 27).
The latter may or may not be rather tongue in cheek, but the initial phrase is
interesting on two counts: whereas five years ago or even three years ago, French
intellectuals and politically correct public opinion dismissed playing or watching
football as a pointless occupation, or even a socially dangerous phenomenon (see for
instance Brohm 1992 and Brohm & Perelman 1998), now, following the 1998 World
Cup win and the 2000 European Nations Cup win, and the mediatisation of notions
of une équipe black-blanc-beur equating to a new vision of France at ease with itself
in its modern multi-ethnic, integrated, or multicultural identity, it is impossible to
avoid references to football or football metaphors. We see them in all sorts of contexts
from the une’ of Paris Match, the inside pages of Le Monde and Le Monde diplomatique
to all the TV channels and to articles by Philippe Sollers. And even President Chirac
and Prime Minister Jospin seem to feel the need to be seen to take an interest and
make informed comments on the merits of playing two or three milieux récupérateurs.
Indeed Jacques Attali commented on their TV interviews following the Euro victory:
Un président de la République et un Premier ministre rivalisant de banalités
joyeuses devant les caméras, le symbole est ravageur, parce qu il éclaire une terrible
vérité l homme politique n est plus qu un spectateur parmi d autres d une histoire
faite par d autres il ne peut plus faire parler de lui qu en assistant à leurs triomphes.
(Attali 2000: 92)
Football and nation in France
The wider popular impact of football is also clear for example from the result of the
Journal du Dimanche-IFOP opinion poll of the Top 50 French people qui comptent .1

Begun in 1988, the poll has been taken 34 times and on every occasion it has been topped by either l’Abbé
Pierre (13 times) or Commandant Jacques Cousteau (20 times  he died in 1997). Sondage IFOP for the
1
This year for the first time in 12 years since it was inaugurated, it was topped by a
footballer, Zinedine Zidane, beating l “bbé Pierre, who along with Jacques Cousteau,
had shared the top spot on every occasion since . Since l “bbé Pierre had made
his name in the 1950s and Cousteau in the 1960s and 1970s, one may interpret this
change as an indication that the French have at last escaped from an odd time-warp.
Equally, it indicates that a majority of the nation now identifies less closely with
values of solidarity (for the excluded and the homeless) or respect for the
environment, than with values of integration and ethnic diversity (however vaguely
and differently respondents to the poll may have interpreted the image of a French
footballer of Maghreb origins) or simply with values of une France qui gagne . (For a
discussion of the social values represented by the World Cup winners, see Mignon
1999: 95, and Hare & Dauncey 2000.)
The second reflection inspired by Sollers s phrase Je bondis quand la France
gagne. Pas seulement au football, mais partout et de plus en plus. is an example of
taking for granted the notion that when the French national football team wins this is
part of a wider idea of the whole nation winning. Indeed, we have seen this idea gain
currency in the immediate aftermath of France 1998 in the form of the transformation
of the French “stérix complex into the metaphor of une France qui gagne . In other
words, a belief in French effectiveness  a new national self-confidence  is replacing

an upsurge of general national self-belief, a recognition  a surprised and perhaps

a French national inferiority complex. Football has become a common metaphor for

still fragile recognition  that France is emerging from a long period of depression as
the nation has come painfully to terms with its war-time collaborationist past, with
decolonisation, with loss of status in a world now dominated by “nglo-Saxons and
the English language, and with an economy and society bedevilled by high
unemployment. Through football, the French have discovered they are not eternal
losers. French football history abounds with accounts of heroic defeats (1958 and
1982) and of national coaches basing tactics on the essential individualism of their

what I have called  after “lain Duhamel s use of the term in a wider social and
players. This recurrent national self-image purveyed through football equates to

political context (Duhamel 1985)  the Astérix complex. This refers to the expectation
of inevitable defeat for les petits Français , just like the Gauls led by “stérix against
the Roman legions, while, importantly, emerging with honour safe and some small
victories of clever and stylish individualism against overwhelming odds. This
Astérix complex has proved durable, especially since the 1982 and 1986 World Cup
semi-final defeats by Germany. The only way French football and its national history

Journal du Dimanche July 2000, a representative sample of French people over the age of 18, from a list of 50
names the respondents choose the 10 personalities ‘qui comptent le plus pour vous ou vous aimez le mieux’
(Journal du Dimanche, 6/8/2000, pp.1, 30).
2
could be celebrated  until 1998  was if style was considered more important than
effectiveness; if victories could not be expected on the European or world stage, then
at least France could play champagne football à la Kopa and Platini. The same
might have been said for other aspects of French life: or at least there was a time
when the received idea was that France enjoyed world renown in luxury goods,
perfume, fashion, wine, in culture, philosophy and the arts, but not in business and
industry or computing and manufacturing. The recent French footballing victories
have laid this ghost, certainly in the context of football and possibly, some people
would argue, more widely. Just as France now expects a leading part in European

winners  in industry, in culture and beyond. The organisation of the World Cup
politics and to play a world role, so most of the press of July 1998 talked of French

itself was an official, public expression of new-found national self-confidence, which

the French themselves belatedly started to realise. After the Final the respected (and
controversial) editor of the influential weekly magazine Marianne identified this new
and surprised realisation that France can be proud of its achievements and that the
world can admire France rather than just seeing the country as a nation of
râleurs whingers Kahn, . In the summer of 2000, following the European
Cup victory, several press reports, spoke of French successes in various domains. The
economic magazine Capital (no.107, August 2000) devoted half of the issue to a
special report Pourquoi la France retrouve la pêche . The two football victories by
France s national team are not the only victories of note recently: At Junior level
(under 18s) France is currently World champions in rugby, and European champions
in football and basketball. (See L’Equipe 2000: 1-3.)
From Anderson s notion of imagined communities and Hobsbawm s
invention of tradition , we know that sport and national identities have been
intertwined. Male sport and its mediation through national press and television play
a crucial role in the construction and representation of national identity. In Britain
too, defeats suffered by the English Test team on the cricket field in the 19980s and
s have been represented as litmus tests for the nation s decline Maguire,
177), just as French football victories have been seen as confirmation of the opposite.
The World Cup and European Cup victories were all the more welcome
opportunities to celebrate Frenchness at a time when national culture and identity
are under pressure from political and economic Europeanisation and globalisation.
Sport is in this way an anchor of meaning , to use Joseph Maguire s phrase
(Maguire, 1999: 204).
Now, even intellectuals like Sollers equate football and nation. This begs a lot
of questions of course in terms of the equation of a football team and a nation, one of
which is: in what sense, if any, is French football still French? Jean-Marie Le Pen, in
1996, challenged the artificiality of the French team, saying that some players had
3
chosen French nationality as a matter of convenience (Marks, 1999: 50), pointing the
finger at Desailly for example, born in Ghana. The 1998 and 2000 squads are all
undoubtedly of French nationality; they are nonetheless of very diverse geographical
and ethnic origins. The national team has, since 1998, often been described as
reflecting the cultural mosaic of contemporary France. Some players were born
outside metropolitan France: French Guyana, New Caledonia, Guadeloupe, but only
two outside of French territory: in Senegal and Ghana. Several were born in France of
parents born outside of metropolitan France (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Algeria,
Armenia, Argentina, and Portugal). Others had post-war family roots in Italy, Spain
and the Spanish Basque country. Others were of longer-standing French origin (from
Brittany and Normandy to Bordeaux and Marseille). Given this ethnic mix, the only
way the national team s achievement could be celebrated, the only way the nation
could identify with the victory, was by equating the nation with the same diverse
ethnic mix as the team. Whereas Le Pen had protested in 1996 that the team was not
representative of the nation, even he had relatively little to say on this matter
following the recent victories. “nd one of the key outcomes of the French team s
success was precisely the widespread acceptance of the equation of the team and the
cultural and ethnic mosaic of the modern French nation.
Globalisation and the importing and exporting of footballers
A more interesting area of the debate is the one that situates recent trends within the
context of the globalisation debate, and the trend that has made fewer headlines is
that a large majority of French international players play their club football outside
France. Of the current international squad, 18 out of 24 of them earn their living and
hone their talents in the four other major European Leagues. Of the Euro 2000 squad,
at the time of writing, 8 now ply their trade in England, 6 in Italy, 2 in Spain, 2 in
Germany. Of the four now playing in the French championship, one (Lama) tried
unsuccessfully to leave for South America, two others (Anelka and Dugarry have
come back to French clubs after playing abroad. The only one not to have been linked
with a foreign club is the third choice goalkeeper, Ramé.2

2
Members of the French national squad who play outside France (as at August 2000):
In England (8): Henry (Arsenal), Vieira (Arsenal), Pires (transferred from Marseille to Arsenal), Wiltord
(Bordeaux to Arsenal), Desailly (Chelsea), Leboeuf (Chelsea), Barthez (Monaco to Manchester United),
Karembeu (Real Madrid to Middlesbrough);
In Italy (6): Blanc (Inter Milan), Candela (Roma), Zidane (Juventus); Trezeguet (Monaco to Juventus), Thuram
(Parma), Micoud (Bordeaux to Parma).
In Spain (2): Deschamps (Chelsea to Valencia), Petit (Arsenal to Barcelona);
In Germany (2): Lizarazu (Bayern Munich), Djorkaeff (Kaiserslautern);
Those who play in France (4): Lama (Paris Saint Germain to Rennes, after seeking a move to South America),
Ramé (Bordeaux), Dugarry (Bordeaux), Anelka (Real Madrid to PSG).

4
 This sporting brain-drain is not typical of the strong European footballing
nations, but is more typical of the smaller nations. There are significant differences
between French club football and the other major footballing nations in terms of
whether or not their best (international) players play in their domestic league, or
whether they are lost to clubs in the richer footballing nations. As an indicator of this,
when the national squads of 22 players were picked for the European Nations Cup,

league (Spain all 22; Italy all 22; England 21; Germany 18  arguably, historically, the
few national squads were composed entirely of players from clubs in the national

four major European footballing nations). All other national squads (with the sole
exception of Turkey) were composed of players at least half of whom were playing

 at the start of the competition only 7 out of 22 were playing for French clubs (and
for clubs abroad, with Denmark having only three players from Danish clubs. France

following the competition only 4). 3 Top French players had occasionally played
abroad in the past: Raymond Kopa famously for Real Madrid in the 1960s, Michel
Platini in Turin (Juventus) in the 1980s. Didier Six, only slightly less famously, in the
Midlands at least, played for Aston Villa in the 1980s. So, Eric Cantona s departure
for England in 1991 followed by David Ginola in 1995 were still relatively rare
events. By 1998 a statistical guide to French football listed five French players in

10 others elsewhere  a total of 75 top French professionals playing abroad. The 2000
Germany, 18 in England, 5 in Scotland, 12 in Spain, 17 in Italy, 8 in Switzerland, and

Rocheteau & Chaumier Guide to French Football puts the 1999–2000 season s figure
at 684.
France, then, has recently become an exporting nation in terms of players. This
has not always been so, but the change happened before the World Cup win.
However, if we look at French club football, we see that France is also a huge importer
of players (and always has been). Since the inauguration of professionalization in
France in 1932, 2500 foreign players have played for French clubs (15% of total
number of professional players), according to a recent study (Barreaud 1997, cited in
Domenighetti 2000: 3). Football itself as a sport was imported into France from the
British Isles in the late 19th century and up to and including the period of
professionalization of the sport in 1932 significant numbers of English, Scottish and

3
Of the 22-player national squads declared for Euro 2000, numbers playing in their own national domestic
league: Italy: 22; Spain: 22; England: 21; Turkey: 20; Germany: 18; Portugal: 11; Romania: 11; Belgium: 10;
Czech Republic: 8; France: 7; Norway: 7; Sweden: 5; Slovenia: 6; Holland: 5; Yugoslavia: 4; Denmark: 3;
(counts from lists given in Observer Sport supplement, 11 June 2000, p.16.)

4
Three players in Germany, 24 in England (plus two managers), 7 in Scotland, 13 in Spain (plus one manager),
16 in Italy, 4 in Switzerland, and 1 in Belgium, a total of 68 (Rocheteau & Chaumier 1999: 569-618). They
include Stéphane Adam (Hearts), Grégory Campi (Bari), Richard Dutruel (Celta Vigo), Cédric Anselin
(Norwich City), Matthieu Louis-Jean (Notts Forest), Pegguy Arphexad (Leicester City) – none are
internationals, and not all regular first-team players.
5
Eastern European players were brought in to strengthen the league. In the 1970s a

Argentina, and Uruguay  all World Cup winners in their time). The 1980s saw a
first wave of South Americans were bought (the game was of course strong in Brazil,

change of regulation allowing clubs to field a third non-French player and in this
period 36 Yugoslavs and 56 Africans played for D1 clubs.
Currently, according to L’Equipe s list of registered players for the 2000–2001
season in the 18 Division 1 clubs (27 July 2000, p.12), of the 483 registered players, 378
are of French nationality, and are foreign. So % of the effectifs are non-French
 this rises to 25% if we look at the composition of the first teams (as given by
l’Equipe). The origin of these foreign players are: 27 from South America, 26 from
Western Europe, 24 from sub-Saharan Africa, 19 from Eastern Europe, 8 from North
Africa, and one other (Régis, the French speaking member of the USA national team).

Spaniard (a Toulouse reserve  and one Italian  Marco Simone of Monaco 

Of the Western Europeans, there is no Englishman, no Dutchman, no German, one

probably the most famous foreign import currently playing in the French league and
one of the best paid). The others are a mixture of Portuguese, Norwegian, Belgian,

French league  as is also the case in England (where, of all registered players about
Swiss etc. So there have never before been as many foreign imports playing in the

30% are foreigners, even without counting Irish, Welsh and Scottish. However,
English imports are mainly from top footballing nations: France, Italy, and
Germany.5
Globalisation, dependency theory and French football as an exception
In terms of professional football then, some nations are exporting nations and some
are importing nations. This general statement fits various theories associated with
the globalisation debate. By globalisation I mean that global interconnectedness has
increased. In a borderless global economy, economic and cultural flows have
increased. Dependency theory would offer the following explanation: in a given
sphere of the global market, core states dominate and control the exploitation of
resources and production. The most talented workers/players of semi-peripheral and
peripheral states, in whom the latter have invested time and resources, are lured
away to the core states. Non-core states are in a position of dependent trading, their

5
Numbers of foreign players in English Premier League clubs: According to a list of squad players (Observer
Sport, 13 August 2000), there were at the beginning of the 2000–01 season at least 198 foreign players out of
670 (= approx. 30%). By foreign I mean here those not eligible to play for England, Scotland, Wales, Northern
Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. This is a pragmatic choice, since Irish players and others from the Home
Countries have played in the English League for the whole of the 20th century and before. The policy of the
Irish Football Association since the 1970s has also been to register as eligible for international duty players
born in England or Scotland who have a parent or grandparent with Irish connections, which complicates the
count. There are very few English players playing professionally in major leagues in Europe: Steve
McManaman (Real Madrid) being the best known, and the only current international.
6
sporting labour being the equivalent of cash crops they sell in other sectors of the
economy (Maguire, 1999: 19). The idea is that there is a global system at work rather
than bilateral relations of cause and effect. The usual explanation goes on to declare
that there is not only an international rank order of nations within the global sports
figuration, but that these nations can be grouped, more or less along political
economic and cultural lines, into core nations, semi-peripheral nations, and

and individual-based sports lie the countries of western Europe, North America 
peripheral blocks of nations. As Maguire affirms (p. 91): At the core of most team

excluding Mexico  and the former white commonwealth countries, such as

Australia and New Zealand. Non-core leagues remain in a dependent relationship
with the dominant European core. There is a political economy at work in the
production and consumption of global sports leisure products that can lead to a
relative ascendancy of a narrow selection of capitalist and western sports cultures (p.
93).
However, French club football quite obviously does not fit the general picture.
France, as seen through specialist labour migration patterns of professional
footballers, is a semi-peripheral nation, losing its skilled labour to the core states of
the global football market and replacing it with labour from the peripheral states of
black and Islamic Africa and South America. This may seem curiously at odds with
the strength of France s national team. “s World and European Cup winners they are
classed with the major footballing nations. France is also economically and
demographically roughly on a par with or ranked above Germany, Italy, Britain, and
Spain. How do we explain this French exception, and its difference from the United
Kingdom, for example?
There are three sets of reasons: firstly, to establish differences between
England and France, we can point to their different socio-economic development in
the 19th and 20th centuries and the later, more fragile implantation of football in the
working class consciousness in France; secondly, the slower evolution of professional
football in France in the direction of commercialisation is also to do with a more
general French attachment to public service values, community control, and rejection
of liberal economic solutions; finally, any large scale migration of labour is driven by
economic forces (and encouraged or discouraged by regulation or legislation).
1. Football and identity. In the first half of the 20th century, in both England and
France, club football was closely associated with a sense of identity. Originally,
across western Europe, new, working class urban communities founded identities
around the local football club. While football s early development in both France and
England had much in common with the creation of a shared sense of place in
emerging urban working class communities, this happened on a smaller scale in

7
France than in England, reflecting the smaller scale of the French industrial
revolution and the smaller scale of its urbanisation. From the late conversion to
professionalism in 1932, French football carried values of community and local
identity. While the entertainment value of football as spectacle grew in importance as
professionalism, a national league and a transfer system developed and there were
pressures to attract crowds and gate income, the game retained strong links with
municipalities and grass-roots amateur sport. It is still the case (in 2000) that only one
D1 club owns its own stadium. Clubs generally use municipally owned stadiums
and have benefited from municipal subsidies. The state reinforced a spirit of public
service and community involvement through local voluntary community work ( le
bénévolat ) in the organisation and regulation of football and other sports. Sports

of 1901)  meaning they were run democratically (at least in principle): their
clubs existed as non-profit-making associations (governed by the law of Association

directors were elected by club members, gave their time freely, and indeed could not

other comparative footballing countries  to the point that one influential study of
be remunerated. These values have been retained much longer in France than in

French football by Faure and Suaud (1994) describes the professionalization of

French football as incomplete . Even today the French government, in the new sports
reform bill, is refusing to allow shares in clubs to be sold on the Stock Exchange.

football (and other sports) with national identity  across the world  notably from
Alongside the local identity offered by football, there grew up an association of

the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games onwards  sport as war without the shooting, as

sporting spectacle for the nation  at least for matches presented as of national
Orwell put it. In France, public service television became the natural mediator of the

importance. In the Gaullist era (the 1960s and early 1970s), when French league
football was never seen live on TV, it was the exploits in European competitions of A.
S. Saint-Etienne that became a national spectacle feeding a sense of national identity,
and in the 1980s, with the live televising of international competitions like the World
Cup, this function was relayed by the national team. French league football has never
attracted the same size of audience as in England or Italy. It is the national team that
has converted more fans to football than professional club teams, as argued by
Mignon (1999: 79).
2. Football clubs, commerce and commodification. In the 1980s and 1990s these traditional
values associated with club sport came under increasing pressure from global and
commercial forces. By the mid-1990s professional football was becoming part of a

particular from the sale of TV rights) mainly to the elite clubs  see the result of the
global market economy. There are now increasing pressures to distribute income (in

2000 election as President of the French National League of Gérard Bourgouin, who,

8
backed by the financially stronger clubs, intends (he says) to align the structures of
French football with those of England, Italy and Spain within two years (see Caffin
2000: 17, and Psenny 2000, Brochen 2000, Le Graët 2000). There have been pressures –
more widely expressed across top western European clubs – to remove control of
European football from the governing body UEFA and to dismantle the national
leagues as the main organisational structures of top-flight football – the attempt by
media interests backed by Silvio Berlusconi to form a European Super League, for
example, and the current rumours of an Atlantic League. This would have cut away
the elite clubs from the rest of football, isolating the lower leagues and amateur
football by doing away with automatic promotion and relegation into the elite ranks.
This would be an alignment of Europe s elite sport with the way American sports are
organised. There have also been moves by club marketing managers to replace
spectators mainly geographical identification with clubs by commercial brand
loyalty: top clubs like Manchester United are being rebranded to catch a national and
international audience of consumers of a life style associated with the club.
Olympique de Marseille has promoted itself as OM deliberately separating its new
brand image from its original geographical reality and identity. What has happened
recently, as market solutions and economic liberalisation have been adopted in many
areas of society including broadcasting, is the increasing commodification of football
through the tool of sponsorship, subscription TV and pay-per-view TV. In the era of

has become a sphere of commodity production  the commodity being linked to

globalisation of markets, commodity value is squeezing out community. Once sport

media rights and marketing, French football has been removed from local
community control: clubs are divesting themselves of the Association 1901 structures
and professional football is becoming a corporate sport owned by the sports media
complex. We have seen in France in the 1990s increasing cross-ownership of sport
and media – Canal+-Vivendi owning PSG, M6-Lyonnaise controlling Bordeaux,
Pathé controlling Olympique Lyonnais  all these are companies with international
presence. (Maguire 1999: 145)
3. Europeanisation and deregulation (Bosman). Changes in labour rights of professional
sports players have affected football migration, especially since the mid-1990s.
Restrictive regulation of football contracts meant that clubs for a long time held the
upper hand as employers. Among the measures that put a brake on cross-national
labour migration, were a maximum wage, a transfer system (that should have been
called a retention system) whereby an out-of-contract player could be retained by his
club or sold on rather than being allowed the freedom to sell his own services
elsewhere; limits were set by FIFA and UEFA (the world and European football
governing bodies) on the number of foreign players that could be fielded in domestic
league games and in European Cup games. The spread of Europeanisation and its
9
concomitant free market philosophy to more and more domains of business and
social life, and especially the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 (free movement of goods,
services, capital and people), eventually led to the now famous Bosman ruling by the
European Court of Justice of December 1995.
The Bosman Ruling was a ruling on the legality of the football labour contract
system under European law, on two counts: (a) the transfer rules and (b) the rules
about the restriction on the number of non-nationals playing for a club in domestic
and European competitions. Community Law on free circulation of people, goods,
and services, and the mutual recognition of qualifications were found to apply to
professional sport in so far as it is an economic activity, i.e. regarding the freedom of
circulation and residence of professional sportsmen who are European Union
nationals. This outlaws discrimination on the grounds of nationality. (Miège 1993:
111-114, Miège 1996: 68-69; Késenne 1997: 6-8.) The ruling found that the transfer fee
system for out-of-contract players and the limitation on the number of EU players in
teams were both in contravention of article 48 of the Treaty of Rome on the free
movement of workers and with article 85 on the freedom of competition. The

investment, low income and high charges sociales  social/employment tax costs
consequence of the ruling for French clubs was that their economic weakness (low

(see Profession football 1996) – became a particular problem within the framework of
the free movement of workers within the Single European Market, since it destroyed
clubs' protectionist contracts and the transfer/retention system. Initially, individual
national football authorities could however still decide to impose a transfer fee for
movement between clubs within the same national Football Association, and so in
effect the ruling encouraged movement between European nations rather than
between clubs in the same country and therefore encouraged the import and export
of foreign players. (Miège1996: 75-79) The end of the 1996 season, following the
shop-window for international players provided by the European Nations
championship in England, saw a large number of top players moving between clubs.
Either they were out of contract and were able to offer their services free of transfer
fee and therefore were able to negotiate far higher wages from a new club, or clubs
were more inclined to sell players while still under contract and so claim a transfer
fee before the contract ran out. In view of the unequal bargaining power and
remunerating power of French clubs (their low gates, lower turn-over and higher
social costs), it is not surprising that many top French players left for Italy (initially),
Spain, England and Germany. Estimates of players' contracts in 1997 showed that
(with salaries, bonuses and advertising contracts included) of the 19 top French
earners only five were playing in the French league (four at the richest club PSG
owned by the TV channel Canal Plus and one at Monaco, heavily subsidised by the
Principality and the Rainier family). The top PSG earner was international

10
goalkeeper Bernard Lama on 4–6 MF, compared to Cantona's 12–15 MF at
Manchester United or Desailly's 8–9 MF at Juventus (Perrot 1997: 46).
So, European Union legislation has equated professional sport with normal
business activity, subject to commercial competition rules, therefore cutting off clubs
from municipal sponsorship (seen as unfair competition), and has equated
professional sportsmen and women with ordinary workers able to move freely from
one European Union country to another. In England this has led, for the first time in
the history of English football, to one club (Chelsea) fielding, on one occasion in the
1999–2000 season, a team with no player eligible to play for the English national
team.
National styles of play and cultural homogenisation
Other issues relevant to whether French football is still French might include the
notion of national styles of play. Some globalisation theorists put forward the idea
that as globalisation proceeds, it is inevitably followed by cultural homogenisation.
The McDonald s franchise is often the target of those resisting what they see as
American- (or global-capitalist-) inspired homogenisation of the local and national
gastronomic cultures. Within the context of French football, there were those such as
the journalists of L’Equipe in 1998 who criticised the manager Aimé Jacquet for
dropping what they saw as the traditional French attacking game of champagne
football as practised by the successful 1958 and 1980s teams. However this notion
may be regarded as a cultural construction that may have dominated at certain
historical moments, but was not the only way the French national team had played. I
have shown elsewhere (Dauncey & Hare 1999: 209-211 ) that the dominant styles
adopted by successive French managers oscillated between attacking play designed
to give free expression to spontaneous individual skill and a rigorous systematic
defensive teamwork designed to repress individual impulses. The 1998 manager
Jacquet not only based his tactics on the analysis of his opponents as consigned to his
little black book, but also excluded from his squad the two supreme French
individualists of recent times, Ginola and Cantona. Reliance on notions of national
footballing styles is to fall into the trap of the Romantic pathetic fallacy (or the
athletic fallacy , to coin a phrase .
Conclusion

nationalistic values  at least these days. Footballing nationalism is a cultural

So, in conclusion, one may be rather sceptical about notions of football carrying

construction, and France has always been a great importer of foreign players to its
professional league, and at least in terms of second generation immigrants, to its
national team, just as the nation as a whole has, with more or less difficulty, tried to
assimilate immigrants. Since the 1990s, as national sporting protectionism has been
11
broken down by the Europeanisation and liberalisation of more and more domains
of social life, France s position within the global economy of professional football has
been brought face to face with it semi-peripheral position and has seen its best
players poached by core European footballing nations.
This deskilling of French football has been most keenly felt by the loss of the
most talented products of the famous French footballing academies, whether the
national INF coaching centre at Clairefontaine or the Centres de formation that all

be poached  from PSG by Arsenal for half a million pounds  to be sold on two and
professional clubs are forced by law to finance. Nicolas Anelka was one of the first to

a half years later to Real Madrid for £22 million (!). The fact that PSG have this
summer (2000) bought back Anelka from Spain for nearly 220 million francs is not
only ironic, but also suggests that the economic power of the top French clubs is
starting to catch up with those of their neighbours. The fact that PSG were helped to
pay the fee by Canal+ and Nike (M.D, 2000) is further evidence that French football is
being increasingly removed from community control to become corporate sport
owned by the sports-media complex.
Europeanisation (the Bosman ruling) and globalisation have meant a growing
liberalisation and commercialisation of football that has gone a long way to breaking
the links between community and sporting spectacle. Commodity values have begun
to replace the sporting ethos at the heart of football. If French football is still in some
sense French, it is in the sense that the governing bodies and the French Ministry of
Sport (and Youth) have tried harder than elsewhere in Europe to put the brakes on
this fuite en avant that is the commercialisation of sport as it is more and more
taken over by television as a key programming and audience-gathering tool. Despite
their resistance to globalisation by the French authorities, this change of culture may
well correspond to the move from the modern era to the post-modern in football s
relation to society and culture.

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