Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France Book

In Soccer Empire, Laurent Dubois' aim is to contextualize the multifarious reactions and meanings ascribed to Zinedine Zidane's head-butt of Marco Materazzi at the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Claiming that football is often coopted for political ends, both positive and negative, the author describes the multicultural nature of the French football team as a symbolic pillar for a unified national identity in the face of a society plagued by problems of immigration and questions about integration. Consisting largely of players from former colonies, the squad both represents the reality of society and challenges its perceptions of the immigrant banlieue community. In France, the success or failure of the squad at major international events, particularly the World Cup, could not fail to be interpreted through a political lens.

Dubois' narrative begins with a brief description of the founding of the International Federation of Association Football and then delves into football's role in the French colonial experience. Similar to the British case, football was used a tool of social control, although the more integrated nature of France's imperialism meant that its territories were involved with the national team at an earlier phase. Although they were chosen solely on the basis of talent, these recruits came to symbolize unity and equality in France. Nonetheless, sports organizations became loci of political organization and were used as a means of coalescing national identity for the independence of states that had been constructed artificially by the colonial enterprise. After earning their freedom, many inhabitants of these new nations immigrated to mainland France in the 1960s and 1970s, following the nation's call for workers to repair its damaged economy. Finding their opportunities limited, however, many of these immigrants settled into communities known as banlieues, which became impoverished. A significant proportion of France's footballers emerged from these communities, primarily because sport was (and remains) one of their only options for escape. Furthermore, a heavy amount of state funding for sport was directed to the banlieues with the idea that it might alleviate some of their social problems.

The remainder of Dubois' narrative focuses on questions surrounding French national identity that are raised due to the troubles of the banlieues and public consternation about whether France's former colonies could integrate into "French" society. A key figure in this debate was Jean-Marie Le Pen of the Front National, whose incendiary racism led people to rally around the French national team as a symbolism of multiculturalism. Also noted is the problem of racism for footballers: if they respond to it, they "confirm" the stereotypes and garner a reputation for being violent, so they must get "their revenge on the field". The author highlights France's 1998 World Cup victory as a turning point, which was "tied to a powerful, even utopian sense that the victory represented and promised a profound social and political transformation, one that would release France from inequality and racism".

The political movements of the day, however, failed to take advantage of these sentiments, and some footballers questioned whether their victory should be coopted for integration or assimilation, when what they really wanted to highlight was a celebration of difference. Le Pen, for example, twisted the win into an example of what the French empire achieved through its "civilizing" efforts. These uncertainties led to a more muted celebration after the team's victory at the 2000 European Football Championship, and the field rush at a match between France and its former colony of Algeria in 2001 swung the pendulum the other way. This game was the first between the two nations since Algeria's independence nearly forty years prior, and was meant to build reconciliation, even as it raised questions about how to reconcile allegiances and identities. The reaction to the pitch invasion was one of despair and hopelessness for integration on both ends of the political spectrum. Le Pen and the right highlighted the event as demonstrating the inability of former colonies to integrate into French society, while many on the left argued that it showed how much these youth had assimilated, because they possessed no awareness of how their actions damaged the cause of the immigrant communities, who were subsequently maligned. The survival of Le Pen to the second round of the presidential elections and the early French exit at the 2002 World Cup became symbolic of the lost hope for multiculturalism.

The mostly non-violent banlieue youth riots of 2005 exacerbated these tensions and left France hungry for a World Cup victory in 2006 to reaffirm faith in national unity. Thus Zidane's head-butt, which led to his ejection from the final and, as many speculated, France's eventual loss, became a magnet for interpretation and questions began to emerge around the incident. Did Zidane ruin what could have been the meaning of a French victory? Was he standing up for himself? How should the banlieues respond to the similar insults that they experience on a daily basis? Do his actions justify violence? Although he has no definite answer to these questions, Dubois concludes his work by arguing that the French football team remains a resonant symbol for a unified identity because it demonstrates that the best path to victory over issues of racism is proving oneself indispensable to France.

A summary of Dubois' work cannot do justice to its level of detail, information, and analysis that never descends into the realm of the dry or inaccessible. The author does an excellent job of weaving in the broader societal and political meanings into his narrative and, despite his tale straying from a strictly chronological form at times, the book is easy to follow and understand. Overall, Soccer Empire is nothing less than sports history and theory done right: intelligible to the uninformed reader, but sufficiently theoretical and cognizant of complexity to be of scholarly merit. Although its limited focus may incline one to regard it as a specialist publication, I would highly recommend it to anyone seeking to understand how sports history should be written, or hoping to pen a work of their own.