Details are still emerging about a race-quota scandal which has hit French soccer. It appears that senior officials in the French Soccer Association hatched a scheme to limit the number of non-white players who are allowed to progress from youth training centers, thus attempting to limit the amount of non-white players on the French national team. Debates over the makeup of the French national team have raged for many years in France with ultra-nationalists opposed to the number of non-white and non-French born players who have appeared in the team.
James Horncastle who writes for soccer magazine Four Four Two has more incite into the scandal:
On walking through the streets of Paris this spring, it was hard not to be confronted by Nike’s landmark agreement to sponsor the French national team. The glossy posters showing Florent Malouda, Yann M’vila, Abou Diaby and Alou Diarra standing, arms crossed with steely determination, gave off the sense that a changing of the guard had taken place. Fifty-seven years with Adidas had been consigned to history, the coveted rights prised away with the promise of an annual cheque worth €42.6m until 2018.
Nike didn’t just set about marking a new era by redesigning the kits – and quite radically too, with the sailor-inspired Mariniére away shirt – but also perhaps more importantly by drastically rebranding a team in desperate need of a new direction.
During last summer’s fiasco in South Africa, the players infamously went on strike following the decision by the French Football Federation [FFF] to send Nicolas Anelka home for allegedly telling Raymond Domenech to “Go f**k yourself, you dirty son of a whore”. That put paid to 2010’s hopes, but more importantly it also indicated that the Black, Blanc and Beur element, so often mythologised as 1998’s great social legacy, no longer rang true – especially amid claims of bullying and the formation of clans divided over an apparent lack of “national identity.”
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