Easy to be cynical, certainly, but in this case you’d be largely wrong. While Laurent Dubois’ Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France as a whole can’t be considered a great book — for reasons I’ll delve into momentarily — it nevertheless contains passages of surpassing excellence which makes it well worth delving into.

The book is a bit of a mish-mash in that it is essentially three books in one. The first of these is an exploration of France’s colonial history through sport and in particular football. Since Dubois is a historian, it’s not surprising that this is by some distance the best of the three. In the space of about eighty pages, he manages to illuminate the long and tangled history of France’s long relationship with its colonies in Algeria, West Africa and the Caribbean. In doing so, he illuminates the role of sport in the evolution of anti-colonial and anti-racism movements in ways that few have ever rivaled.

Basically, sports – and especially team sports – have always had a strong egalitarian streak because within the timeframe and rules of a given sport or event, any larger oppression or social influence disappears. When a team of black players plays a team of white players at any sport, regardless of what other power relationships might exist off the pitch, “superiority” between the two is determined by sheer individual or team ability (which is precisely why Hitler tried to stop Jesse Owens competing and why the colour barrier in baseball took so long to fall). It’s partly for this reason that the agitation for racial equality has often had a sporting dimension; but it’s partly also because football clubs share with political parties the ability to act as both a focus and a channel for collective emotions and desires. Dubois’ exploration of this theme is nothing short of excellent.

Having made the general point about sport, equality and politics, he then goes on to describe the interplay between them in the course of the de-colonization of the French Empire. Especially poignant here is the biography of Felix Eboue, the black Guianan civil servant, who by one of those quirks of French history and politics rose so high in the colonial civil service that he became Governor of Martinique and then of Chad (though colonialism made a mockery of the words, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, they occasionally retained their meaning in some surprising ways, you see). History remembers him primarily as the man who rallied the French African colonies to the side of De Gaulle’s Free French in 1940 (for which he was rewarded with burial in the Pantheon), but he also spent much of his career organizing greater sporting opportunities for his subjects in the Caribbean and as a result left a sporting infrastructure which would nourish many athletes who would eventually come to be the heart of French sport.

The second book lurking within the covers of Soccer Empire is really the weakest, and that is the history of French football, with a major emphasis on the period between 1998 and 2006. This part of the book starts off well, performing a particularly valuable service in dispelling the idea that the 1998 Black, blanc, beur team was an unprecedented breakthrough in multiculturalism. Dubois shows adroitly that in fact les bleus have been accommodating players from outside metropolitan France for over seventy years. North Africans (or their children) have been a mainstay of the French national team since before World War II and the first black was capped for Les Bleus, Raoul Diagne (whose father Blaise was the National Assembly member from Senegal), got his call up in 1931. Indeed, the first genuinely multi-cultural French team was not the one that won in Paris in 1998 but the one that was so cruelly defeated in Sevilla in 1982.

However, the closer the book comes to the present day, the less interesting it becomes. The descriptions of public reactions to both the joyous World Cup victory of 1998 and the bemusing loss of 2006 (capped as it was by Zinedine Zidane’s iconic coup de boulle) are essentially collections of press clippings. The final chapter, an extended meditation of the possible meanings of Zidane’s head-butt, is a particularly tedious summation of much of the pseudo-intellectual masturbation that followed France’s defeat (for those genuinely interested in this subject, Ed Smith’s What Sports Tells Us About Life offers a more succinct and believable explanation about what happened on 9 July 2006).

Less forgivably, the book contains enough niggling factual errors about the sport of football itself that it puts Dubois’ credentials as an actual football fan in some question. The Heysel stadium disaster, for instance, occurred in 1985, not 1983; the famous France-Brazil match of 1986 was a quarter-final, not a semi-final, and so on and so forth. Though it’s not a hanging sin, the author is noticeably less comfortable with the actual sporting facts on the ground than he is with the nuances of colonial history.

Tying these two books together is a third book, which follows Zidane and Lilian Thuram in their life journey from the cites to the historic French teams of 1996-2006. From a narrative point of view, this makes a certain amount of sense: in the Black, blanc beur squad, Zidane was the only beur and Thurman was arguably the most talented and certainly the most outspoken of the black players. Both scored two crucial goals on the road to the 1998 triumph (Thuram in the semi-final and Zidane in the final), and both retired briefly before being coaxed back into the fold for the 2006 World Cup. And both spent at least part of their childhood in the cites, Thuram in Paris and Zidane in Marseilles. Dubois can therefore use their childhoods to look at the condition of blacks and Arabs in modern France, while at the same time looking at how their sporting careers have helped to change perceptions about what constitutes Frenchness.

The problem with this last book is that it is uneven. While Thuram has gradually transcended his role as a footballer to taken on the mantle of a political figure, Zidane’s greater status as a footballing icon has never translated into a social role because he has never shown much interest in being political. Because of Zidane’s silence, this third book is really just a long love letter to Thuram. In itself, that’s not a bad thing: Thuram is genuinely one of the most intelligent and eloquent men alive on the subject of race and tolerance, and his repeated showdowns with Jean-Marie LePen, Nicolas Sarkozy and other law-and-order politicians in France are a joy to read.

But the imbalance within the third book unbalances the book as a whole. Having set up Thuram and Zidane as the twin ethnic pillars on which to make a narrative bridge between France’s colonial history and the remarkable story of the French national team between 1998 and 2006, he has to give them equal time. When it comes to Thuram, it works well because he personally contributed not only to les bleus success but was also a major actor in the country’s political evolution as well. But when it comes to Zidane…well, there was that headbutt, wasn’t there? And right there, the narrative comes crashing down as Dubois gets pushed on to, as it were, his weaker foot and has to talk about the football rather than the politics.

This book is worth reading for its first couple of chapters on sport and politics and on France’s complicated colonial history and its present-day reverberations, which are undoubtedly superb. And it’s worth reading for a greater understanding of the brilliance and eloquence of Lilian Thuram (and pray the man enters electoral politics one day). The football bits, admittedly, are a weak point. But if you followed Les bleus in 1998, you know that the football was only part of the story; it was also but about the joyous, beautiful way that so many people from so many backgrounds could, briefly, transcend their differences to become united in support of a team that seemed to embody the best of a troubled country. On this vital topic, Dubois nails it. Even in a year which is crowded with football books, Soccer Empire stands out as one of the best.

But, in fact, there does appear to be an official narrative film made earlier than that, from the 1938 World Cup. Curiously, there is no mention anywhere on FIFA’s films site or elsewhere as far as I can tell in the English-language of a roughly 30 minute long film made at and released shortly after the 1938 World Cup held in France. Yet I believe that 1938 film, by young French director René Lucot, was an officially sanctioned product. The introduction to the film lists the committee of FIFA in its credits. The film has even been forgotten by chroniclers of Lucot’s long film career, and it may indeed have been his first: Lucot’s IMDB filmography does not list it, giving his 1942 film Rodin as his cinematic debut instead.

I’m not particularly sure why this film has apparently been forgotten (I suppose it doesn’t help that the narration is only in French), and only stumbled upon its existence myself when reading through a detailed academic article on the culture of that World Cup by Joan Tumblety, entitled The Soccer World Cup of 1938: Politics, Spectacles, and la Culture Physique in Interwar France [PDF] and well worth reading itself. According to Tumblety, Lucot’s film was part of a “multigenre publicity campaign designed to extend the event’s audience far beyond the stadium.”

I was able to find a full-version of Lucot’s 1938 film at a French site (you can view the full-length version below, too). Even though the narration is in French, anyone interested in the history of the World Cup should give it a look. One thing that strikes one immediately is the visibility of  the uncomfortable politics that surrounded the 1938 World Cup, with the Germans prominently offering the Hitler salute several times in the film, along with what appear to be broadcasters and other prominent officials on the sidelines and in the stands.

Maybe this footage isn’t what FIFA wants the 1938 event to be associated with at a World Cup that ended with the triumph of Mussolini-era Italy, and just perhaps, that’s actually the reason why this film is lost in the archives.

Courtesy of 1980BOBBYG on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Irish Daily Star, published in Dublin, Ireland

Irish Examiner, published in Cork, Ireland

[Images courtesy of newseum.org]

[Front page image via Press Display]

A little buried under World Cup hype and Robbie Findley hysteria is the fact that UEFA will be selecting the host for Euro 2016 this Friday at its Executive Committee meeting in Nyon, choosing between Italy, France and Turkey.

We can rule out Italy from the three final bidders, with UEFA already having offered serious reservations about ticketing, transportation and stadia infrastructure plans in their bid. France might seem an obvious favourite with Michel Platini heading UEFA, but Platini cannot vote or take part in the final debate (and nor can his Turkish or Italian counterparts, of course).

Turkey would be a bold choice and would better match, in fact, Platini’s own efforts to  reach out more away from the traditional western European strongholds of UEFA.

And remember, from 2016, the European Championship will expand to a slightly absurd 24 teams, increasing the demands on the host considerably. This piece gives us a good overview of the financial states of each bid, and it’s perhaps surprising to learn that Turkey “only” needs to spend 920 million Euros to prepare for the finals, compared to 1.7 billion Euros for the French, who hosted a World Cup just twelve years ago.

Despite this, the general consensus appears to be that Turkey is the riskier choice, but with much greater upside for European football than choosing France to host their third UEFA championship. The biggest event Turkey has hosted is the 2005 UEFA Champions League final.

World Football Insider has a good overview of Turkey’s bid, concluding that:

Expansion of UEFA’s flagship tournament into a new territory and the chance to grow the game in Turkey makes this the most attractive bid. But it’s also the most risky, with seven stadiums planned and massive infrastructure projects to complete. Turkey would be up against the clock if it were awarded the championships. But the government’s guarantees to provide 100% of the estimated total investment are an important and persuasive element of the bid. However, the Ukraine factor may ultimately count against them. The 2012 co-host’s trouble-hit preparations have been a major headache for UEFA and the governing body might look for a safer option this time around.

Concerns over Turkey because of Ukraine’s rather unique problems are harsh, however.  Giving Euro 2016 to Turkey would be a major spur for the sport in that country. France has hosted two World Cups and two European championships already; little is to be gained for football’s development by going there again.

Back in October of 2009 when Egypt was hosting the U-20 World Cup I wrote a somewhat esoteric preview of the countries in the competition oriented by one of my favorite soccer quotes (from Eric Hobsbawn): “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.” It was the start of the ‘Year of African Soccer,’ to be followed closely by the U-17 World Cup in Nigeria, the African Cup of Nations in Angola, and soon the mega event of them all: the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.  Drawing inspiration from my all-time favorite World Cup preview, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey’s excellent edited collection of essays and miscellany related to the participants in the 2006 World Cup, the shared goal was “to use soccer as a lens and an excuse to learn something about the wider world.”

To my great disappointment, Weiland and Wilsey seem to have not produced a new Thinking Fans Guide to the World Cup for 2010, leaving me feeling a bit adrift.  Sure I can look up many a preview opining about whether Serbia’s defensive pairing of Nemanja Vidić and Branislav Ivanović is strong enough to get them through the group stage—but where else could I learn that Serbia had the highest proportion of tractors per capita of any country in the 2006 World Cup (at least when they were combined with Montenegro)?  Combining that absence in my soul with the fact that the daily ‘Sweeper’ series here on Pitch Invasion is on a hiatus, I thought I’d try to offer some content over the next few weeks in the form of moderately esoteric World Cup group previews.  The mostly light-hearted intention is simply to both provoke and satisfy curiosities.  Take these group previews, which I’m planning to drop sporadically over the next few weeks, for what they are worth.  And feel free to add the many odd and interesting facts about these places I’m sure I’ll miss….

Group A: The Group of _______________

The provocative debate about which quartet to label as the “Group of Death” has always seemed to me to have so much more potential—why can’t we have enough catchy labels to distribute through all the groups?  Why not the “Group of Death Warmed Over,” or the “Group of Death be not Proud,” or the group of “Death Anxiety”?  Why does everyone have to fight for just one silly name?

In that regard, Group A is as good a place to start as any—since my sources tell me that the origins of the “Group of Death” as a moniker lie with a combined effort of Mexican journalists and Uruguay’s manager in the 1986 World Cup—two nations whose teams will meet in Group A (along with France and South Africa).  In this tournament, however, Group A probably has little claim on being the actual “Group of Death.”  In fact, with France ranked 10^th in the world by FIFA, South Africa as 90^th, Mexico as 17^th, and Uruguay as 18^th, it’s the only of eight groups in the tournament without one team ranked in the top eight.

So I had to look outside the soccer world to find high rankings, and here’s the best I could come up with: what Group A does have is land mass and, believe it or not, relative wealth.  In terms of land mass, of 223 ranked nations Mexico is 15^th, South Africa 25^th, France 43^rd, and Uruguay 90^th—which, on average, is the lowest (ie, most land) in the tournament.  In terms of relative wealth, Group A is the only one in the tournament where Gross Domestic Product per capita (a standard global measure of wealth) is above $10,000 for all four countries—all the other groups have to factor in a Nigeria ($2250 per person), a Paraguay ($4500), or the like.

Finally, and probably most significant to soccer fans, Group A is the only group in the tournament comprised entirely of World Cup host nations—in addition to South Africa, Uruguay hosted the first World Cup in 1930, Mexico hosted in 1970 and 1986, and France hosted in 1998.  That can’t happen too often (though it is also interesting to note that it almost also happened this year in Group H with Spain—1982 hosts, Switzerland—1954 hosts, and Chile—1962 hosts, missing only Honduras).  So I’ll label Group A ‘The Group of Gracious Hosts (with little chance of actually winning the tournament).’

Who would advance if there were any justice in the world?

This segment is my admittedly subjective ranking of the two teams most deserving of making it out of the group stages—based on a secret formula combining soccer history and global politics.  In the case of Group A one team is easy to eliminate: France has only a tenuous claim on deserving to have qualified at all for the World Cup based on the kerfuffle with Ireland, and one often gets a sense that the French themselves are too debonair to really worry about silly things like soccer.  So in my mind they are out.

I also have a soft spot in my heart for South Africa, which is partially defensiveness about all the criticism they are getting as hosts from a lot of people who know almost nothing about the place.  South Africa doing well also seems to mean a lot to Nelson Mandela, and I’d argue that Mandiba has earned the right to get whatever he wants.  So in my mind they are in.

The second spot gets more difficult.  For Uruguay to be ranked 18^th in the world with a population of only 3.4 million people is a mighty impressive feat.  But beyond any TV watcher’s familiarity with Diego  Forlán’s abdominal muscles, I just don’t know enough about the place.  In contrast, I know enough about Mexico to realize that it really, really matters to the nation if they do well in the World Cup.  Further, the fact that my own USA has a rising tendency to scapegoat and stereotype our neighbors to the South makes me want to offer some sort of conciliatory gesture.  As a US fan I do still harbor bitterness about Rafael Márquez’s attempt to maim Cobi Jones in 2002, but in the spirit of South Africa I’m trying to offer forgiveness.

So from my completely subjective standpoint, if there were any justice in the world South Africa and Mexico would advance from Group A.  But keep in mind, there is rarely any justice in the world.

Group A – Some Stats

From the left...Platini, uh....help? (Edit: thanks to ursus and neeskens in the comments, the mystery is gradually being solved, though a full list is still missing).

Photo credit: bluerondo on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

But boy, look at what at could have been if Balladur had gone with the other design by Jean Nouvel (perhaps France’s most celebrated architect, who later initiated and won legal action against the government for flouting European free competition laws in their selection process). Here’s his design:

Looks straightforward enough, right?  Look again. And again. And again. Below, the renderings show that Nouvel had come up with what he called

a radical solution that resolves the problem of the angle of view onto the playing fields and ensures optimal field lighting. The stadium is not partially modifiable- it is 100% flexible. A complementary flexibility is included: the sliding roof maximizes sunshine on the field and shades the stands in summertime. The underside of the grandstands is lined with retractable awnings that hang from the level of the stands. The stadium will be for between 25 and 80,000 spectators.

So, you know, just in case you ever need a stadium where the stands, roof and pretty much everything else moves, you know who to call.

Tifo by Marseille supporters in the Virage Nord end of the Stade Vélodrome.

Photo credit: Yogi_OM on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.