Algeria and France: Historical & Experiential Layers of a Footballing Relationship

Abstract

This article examines the trajectories of Algerian-French belonging as they are exhibited within the world of playing and supporting football. I begin by tracing a broad history of football in France and Algeria and delineating the role of colonialism in the establishment of football associations and in the establishment of the Algerian Front de Libération National (FLN) national team. Engaging more directly in the trajectories themselves, I discuss the disconnect and alterity of French citizens of Algerian descent in the post-colony who participate in performances of national belonging—like supporting the Algerian national team or playing for it—and focus on the post-9/11 period as crucial to the shift from representations of Algeria as being Arab to being Muslim. I then consider the nexus of national sporting infrastructure, global capital in French football clubs, and the corporate social responsibility in footballing initiatives that accompanies such investment, which can at times unwittingly reproduce colonial discourses. Finally, considering the discursive shift from Arab to Muslim and the attendant meanings of being or feeling Algerian, I turn back to Karim Benzema and Riyad Mahrez and their individual club/national careers as exemplars of a new transnational Algerian generation.

Keywords:

• Football
• association
• belonging
• Algeria
• France
• Islam
• FLN

Introduction

The 60th anniversary of Algerian independence was celebrated during 2022. In mid-autumn 2022 of that year, Karim Benzema, a player born to working-class Algerian parents (Bejaia and Oran) in Bron-Terraillon (a neighbourhood peripheral to the city of Lyon), won the coveted Ballon d’Or for his prowess as captain and star striker of Real Madrid—one of Algerian fan’s favourite clubs. In his acceptance speech on 17 October, a date which coincided with the massacre of Algerian workers in Paris in 1961, Benzema said that his award was that ‘of the people’ (ballon d’or du peuple or ash-sh ‘ab in Arabic), referencing both his family’s humble background and the credo of the Algerian Liberation Front (FLN): un seul héro le peuple (only one hero: the people). Though never achieving the same degree of success as with Real Madrid, Benzema was, until the Qatar December 2022 World Cup (excepting his significant 2016–21 sidelining), one of the French national team’s key strikers. With much less pomp, in late spring of 2022 Riyad Mahrez, the captain of Algeria’s national football team and winger for Manchester City, inaugurated a stadium named after himself in Sarcelles, the neighbourhood just outside of central Paris in which he was born. The stadium, built for the youth of Sarcelles, is an emblem of Mahrez’s success. Alongside Benzema, Mahrez is perhaps the most popular footballer in Algeria today.

2022 also saw the opening of the exhibition ‘Jews and Muslims from Colonial France until Today’Museum for the History of Immigration in Paris.¹ The museum has been at the forefront of shifting institutional perspectives on education about immigration, racism, and colonialism in France, including an exhibition that considered many of these themes in a manner that linked them explicitly to football called ‘Come on France: Football and Immigration’.² The ‘Jews and Muslims’ exhibition of 2022 did, though, mark a new step forward in talking about parallel trajectories of different religious communities in France, something unparalleled elsewhere in French national museums. As part of a workshop held alongside the exhibition, sociologist Nonna Mayer led a panel, at which I was present, on Sarcelles, the neighbourhood some 15 kilometres north of central Paris where Mahrez was born. Mayer’s presentation focused on the attitudes between and towards multiple communities of Sarcelles: Antillean, Western African, North African Jewish and Muslim, Oriental Christian Orthodox, Comorian, and more. Two fellow panelists gave responses to Mayer: the lawyer and activist Arié Alimi, who was born into an Algerian Jewish family and grew up in Sarcelles, and Djamila Hamiani, a western Algerian émigré to Sarcelles who, after twenty years in the neighbourhood had recently become an elected councillor. Alimi spoke about local football clubs which, during his childhood in the late 1980s and 1990s, enabled Sarcelles-born children from different communities to come together. Meanwhile, Hamiani noted that today, children and young people in the neighbourhood refer to each other using their parents’ or grandparents’ country of origin: Malian, Senegalese, Algerian, etc. While Alimi and Hamiani spoke about different topics, we can see the overlap of their ideas in the example of the Coupe d’Afrique des nations locales in Sarcelles and similar football competitions in Ivry and Aulnay, including the Coupe Nationale Des Quartiers held in Créteil (another highly diverse Parisian periphery town to the south of the city centre). These are mini-Africa Cup of Nations competitions for which non-professional football players residing and/or born in France represent their country of origin.

Connected to both Algeria and France, Alimi, Hamiani, and Mahrez represent together at a local level some of Sarcelles’ diversity and at a national level the variety of Algerian postcolonial trajectories in France today. They showcase the differing ways in which individuals navigate a transnational belonging, even when, as in Alimi’s case, their country of origin only exists in familial memory. These trajectories are shaped by French national ideals of assimilation and egalitarianism on the one hand and by the Algerian revolution and socialism on the other, but in addition to these histories and discourses a particular significance lies in local lived experience of social injustice and intercommunal solidarity at the level of the neighbourhood.

This article aims to identify and present such trajectories in the world of football. Initially and to understand the historical resonances of these trajectories, I briefly trace a broad history of the ideal of assimilation and socialism in football in colonial France and Algeria. I pay particular attention to the founding of football associations and the establishment of the Algerian FLN national team. I then discuss the disconnect and alterity of French citizens of Algerian descent who participate in performances of Algerian national belonging, such as supporting the national team or wanting to play for it. To do this I first focus on the post-9/11 period as crucial to the representational shift of Algeria from Arab to Muslim. Secondly, I consider the nexus of national sporting infrastructure, global capital in French football clubs, and the corporate social responsibility in footballing initiatives that accompanies such investment, which can at times unwittingly reproduce colonial discourses. Finally, in light of the discursive shift from Arab to Muslim, and the attendant meaning of being or feeling Algerian, I return to Benzema and Mahrez and their club level and national careers as the most famous Algerian and French footballers since Zinedine Zidane and as exemplars of a new generation. Benzema and Mahrez are representatives of a post-1998 French World Cup victory generation who saw captain and talisman Zidane as the figurehead of diverse French social cohesion. Yet, in 1998, debates on binational Muslim patronymic footballers playing for France were, though politically salient, also less strident.³

Literature and Method

The literature used consists predominantly of secondary academic historical, sporting, and socio-anthropological academic texts—including contemporary digital material such as journalism, film extracts, and radio programmes available online. The sources are culled from the French mainstream media sphere, particularly sports journalism but also news journalism in which the discussion of French identity has often been linked with Muslim alterity.⁴ I have adopted a cultural and historical anthropological methodology developed by Hadj Miliani and others⁵ which combines a diachronic archaeology of Algerian footballing history and its representation in France⁶ with a synchronic genealogy of some Algerian and French Algerian footballing heroes, particularly since 2014. In Adi Bharat’s press-based study from 2001 to 2017, French Muslims were seen ‘as not fully integrated—or even as at odds with French society and its values—and their representation is, at best, ambiguous and, at worst, negative’⁷, in particular when it came to practices of veiling.⁸ As Philipe Dine has noted, Algeria’s imbricated history with France and its national symbols are also closely associated with contemporary Muslim and postcolonial politics in France.⁹ Reinforcing this, Mahfoud Amara has pointed out that the Algerian flag itself seems to raise more polemics than other national flags often present in the French public space.¹⁰

The theoretical lens of this paper looks at Algerian football from France and attempts to engage with a translocal perspective that considers the individual and familial trajectories of travel, migration, and transit through multiple other countries. Therefore, the idea of multiple elsewheres/belongings is omnipresent within these trajectories. This is a hybrid lens that highlights both the transnational and the local in the production of narratives of belonging.¹¹ Increasing the focus on the micro-level, this study pays particular attention to familial memory as embodied by young French-born Franco-Algerian descendants of émigrés¹² and its psychological impact across generations.¹³

Although the article follows a chronological structure, its specific and original contribution is the joint analysis of three key themes which draw on the theoretical threads described above. The first theme is an Algerian historical consciousness in France among people of Algerian descent both during the war of independence and afterwards and the ways in which football plays a role in the construction of that consciousness. The second theme is a sense of belonging to and performance of Algerianness in France as a site of resistance to particularly complex post-colonial experiences of structural discrimination. The third theme is the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism in relation to Algerian alterity, so-called banlieue culture in France, and French sporting excellence. There is an important point to be made about juxtaposing these various psychic, physical, and material dynamics together. The switch between colonial history and its importance in Algerian-French relations and in Algerian families in France (in the first half of the article) and post-colonial structural issues in France of Algerian diaspora (in the second half of the article) is not an absolute one. In other words, there is no clean colonial/post-colonial break, and the Benzema and Mahrez families are structured, affected, and influenced as much by colonial as by post-colonial events. However, for the purposes of this article it was necessary to simplify and schematize this history along colonial/post-colonial lines.

Imperialism, Universalism, & Islam

Far from ‘universal’, French imperialism is based on ideas of racial-religious superiority which see tolerance and camaraderie as being achieved through assimilation and a trajectory of linear progression from colonial subjecthood to French citizenship. Likewise, national communism, likewise, although intended to level inequalities, maintains them by not recognizing the racial injustices of colonialism. Both ideologies are embedded within the foremost historical symbols of French football—the figure of Rimet, FIFA, Red Star, and the Fédération Française de Football Association (FFFA, precursor to the FFF)—and their relationship to colonial enterprise in Algeria. The importance of such ideologies sits uneasily with Franco-Algerian historiographies and the personal and collective experiences of post-colonial migration from Algeria to France.

It was during France’s imperial heyday at the turn of the twentieth century that French lawyer, Christian Democrat sports activist Jules Rimet played a key role in the mission to ‘civilize’ the world through sport. Rimet was a founder of the FFFA¹⁴ and the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) in Paris, and later went on to help organize the first World Cup.¹⁵ These organizations were what Philip Dine has called ‘authentically French contributions to the sporting invention of tradition’.¹⁶ The creation of FIFA in 1904 occurred in parallel to, and was no doubt impacted by, the process of secularization in France. The laïcité law, which subordinated church to state, was established just one year after FIFA. It drew on the earlier 1901 Law of Associations, which suppressed most religious orders, establishing the legal basis for civic organizations called ‘associations’. Perhaps serving as the backbone of French and, at the time, imperial civic life, associations remain the key institutional structure for the organization of sporting and leisure activities in France today.

In both the colonial periphery and the metropole, football linked French ideologies of secular universalism with imperialist expectations of social cohesion and mobility through cultural assimilation. Rimet’s early-twentieth-century views on sport and social cohesion underscored the beliefs of the time in a supposedly seamless progression from colonization to immigration to assimilation. Such views were bolstered by increasing class mobility in colonial France. Rimet’s own trajectory denotes this. Before founding FIFA, Rimet and his brother, sons of a farmer, established France’s first working man’s club, Red Star Athlétique Club.¹⁷ Through Red Star, Rimet sought to realize his ideals regarding the emancipation of the working classes and the subsequent improvement of French social cohesion through sports. From the 1920s onwards, he sought to further this project by making football a ‘means of understanding and friendship among peoples’.¹⁸ Though this may not have been Rimet’s intention, a blindness underpinned this philosophy which did not wish to see the racial hierarchies of imperial France. Subsequent years would see the imposition of a discourse on the civilizing value of sport upon indigenous subjects of the Empire wishing to play in the local leagues of Algeria and France. Philip Dine has shown ‘the harsh reality of colonial discrimination’, citing the memoires of Ahmed Ben Bella—who would go on to be Algeria’s first President (1962–65)—and his reflections on football and racial segregation as a young man.¹⁹

The universalist ideology embedded within French imperial domination culminated in the establishment of association football. The narrative of a supposed neat chronological trajectory of twentieth-century waves of immigration first from Poland, then Italy, and then Algeria, whose members move mechanically upwards in social class and become assimilated, has been drawn upon by journalists, pundits, and sometimes politicians in their analyzes of the shifting demography of players in the leagues and particularly the French national team over time.²⁰ This narrative couples a functionalist conception of mechanical working-class social mobility with a static nationalist idea of Frenchness based on values from patriotism, secularism, and civic duty to good sportsmanship. Whilst there can be different dynamics in comparing the trajectories of Italian and Algerian migration to France, Platini and Zidane are often held up as examples of this neat line from immigration to assimilation. Since becoming the biggest French football stars of their time, they have become fully assimilated into giant global footballing institutions: UEFA, FIFA, and Real Madrid.

As club football became popular in Algeria in the 1920s²¹, the universalist ethos underpinning French associations affected sporting and cultural life in French Algeria, particularly in the heavily populated urban capitals of Algiers and Oran. The secular universalist ideals of football and other civic organizations stood in tension with an incipient North African nahda (renaissance) and its anti-colonial politics, which built on and connected to wider late Ottoman and emergent Arab nationalist projects.²² Algerois Jews, too, experienced the influence of transnational Jewish associational life in the 1920s, particularly through the Maccabi sports club network—part of a broader international Jewish sports organization founded by Jewish athletes who had been refused membership from other social sport clubs.²³ One example is the Union Juive Sportive et Littéraire Macchabée (Maccabi Jewish Sports and Literary Union of Alexandria)²⁴, which combined sports and leisure and, in so doing, gave an impulse to a non-European, post-Ottoman, and Middle Eastern form of modernity and communal organization.

Notwithstanding these local and transnational links, young Algerian footballers found themselves on the front line of French psychological indoctrination. Frankiel and Bancel have pointed out that young Algerian football players ‘experienced the penetration of Western cultural schemes into the psychic economy of the dominant country’s language’, French. This adoption of ‘cultural schemes’ also happened in other parts of the public sphere, including at school, in the Muslim Scouts, in associations, and at the cinema.²⁵ Yet as Amara and Henry show, it was only French citizens and not Muslim ‘subjects’ who had the rights of free speech, of gathering together and founding associations.²⁶ Alongside the psychological mechanism, sports was another, physical tool of colonial assimilatory power by which the Arab male body could be policed via instruction and the indoctrination of western civility through sportsmanlike practice.

Unlike local Algerian Jews, Muslims were excluded from political citizenship and denied any rights of free speech and assembly, including the right to create associations (ibid). Nonetheless, many local Algerian Muslim dignitaries and sports enthusiasts pushed back against the exclusion of ‘indigenous’ Algerians from French republican freedoms and formed their own sporting clubs. These often used the epitaphs ‘club musulman’ or ‘union sportive musulmane’.²⁷ While it seems that the first Muslim football club in Algeria was the Musulman Club Tlemcénien, founded in 1912²⁸, it was during the interwar period that football really expanded within both France and Algeria. Therefore, Mouloudia Club Algerois (MCA), formed in 1921, which still exists and is considered Algeria’s most popular club²⁹, namely that of le peuple (the people), has in fact been memorialized as the indigenous and anticolonial club par excellence.³⁰ Just as the Islamic clerics (Ulema) took Algerian cultural dynamics into their hands via self-representation in theatre³¹, MCA was a club whose principles reposed on an Islamic ethics tied to specific local customs and language, rejecting French secularism and subverting the intended French universalism of the associational vehicle by utilizing the form of the association but adapting it to local, Muslim communal ends.

By the 1940s, as the Algerian autochthonous football scene had grown significantly, so too had the economic immigration of Algerian footballers to France, which by the 1950s was common enough to have been normalized.³² Freedom of circulation between Algeria and France ended as late as 1963, but France would continue to be the most obvious destination for movement outside of Algeria for Algerians until the late 1970s—at precisely the moment when French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing ended regroupement familiale (family unification). It was during these years that Algerian club football grew, in the late 1950s, that Karim Benzema’s grandparents moved from Kabylia and western Algeria to Lyon. From there, they moved to the peri-urban district Bron-Terraillon (76) in greater Lyon. Similarly, when the outflow migration of Algerian footballing talent to France picked up pace in the 1970s³³, it was Riyad Mahrez’s parents who moved from Tlemcen to Sarcelles in the Val d’Oise (95). Whilst the trajectories of their families’ migration to France followed differing chronologies, corresponding to different periods in Algerian history, Benzema and Mahrez nevertheless formed part of the same sporting generation at both the club level—where they played against each other in Real Madrid’s successful 2021–22 Champions League campaign—and the national level.

Immigration & Nationalism

Just as they do today, the youth of Algiers adulated the great Algerian players of the 1950s who moved across the Mediterranean, such as Moustapha Zitouni who transferred to AS Monaco in 1954, and Rachid Mekhloufi who transferred to Saint-Étienne in 1954. Yet as Frenkiel and Bancel point out, prior to this migration there was a necessary interim move to be made by Algerian players within French colonial Algeria from ‘Muslim’ clubs to ‘European’ ones. The latter provided the conditions to adapt to a French lifestyle and the competitive values that French club structuring offered³⁴, differing in their capitalist logic from those values upheld within Muslim clubs. Such a move was also seen to be shifting players away from a ‘community’ logic to a ‘universalistic’ one. Nevertheless, the French power that permeated educational, civic, and social life also pervaded the relationship between European and indigenous football in French colonial Algeria; as Philip Dine has observed, ‘violence’, both symbolic and real, ‘was endemic’ and the logic of communities and segregation was key to this.³⁵ The ongoing colonial context was founded on a firm belief in the largesse of apparent universal equality which belied the colonial dynamics of moving subjects like goods across the seas.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, having realized after the 1954 victory of a pan-North African team over France³⁶ that there was great talent in the region and eager to counter the movement of Algerian footballers to France, the Algerian FLN led an effort during the height of the war of independence between 1958 and 1962 to bring many Algerian football players back to Algeria.³⁷ On 14 April 1958, responding to the call of the FLN, ten professional Algerian football players, including star striker Rachid Mekhloufi and defender Mustapha Zitouni who had both played—and in Mekhloufi’s case scored—for the French national team, slipped out of France to convene in Tunis.³⁸ These players formed the core of the team, which, in a communiqué on 15 April 1958, the FLN proclaimed would further the emergence of an ‘Algerian national identity’.³⁹ The FLN team played over one hundred exhibition matches between 1958 and 1962 against nations favorable to Algerian self-determination, such as China, Vietnam, the former Soviet Union, Cuba, and many decolonized African countries. Any national team hosting the FLN team agreed to fly the Algerian flag and play the anthem. This incredible effort to legitimize and popularize the Algerian struggle through ‘the beautiful game’ (football) was masterminded by the provisional government of the Algerian Republic⁴⁰, symbolizing the ‘inevitable ultimate victory’ of the FLN.⁴¹

France pushed back against these symbolic matches, vetoing FIFA recognition of the FLN team and even threatening economic sanctions against nations that hosted the FLN in matches.⁴² This raised the curtain on Rimet’s supposed universalist ideals of betterment through sport, shared by his colleagues, and unveiled that France’s real priority was to save the French-Algerian imperial project by making the French team look cohesive on the international stage with players like Mekhloufi, hence presenting France as a beacon of universalistic largesse. The French press was by and large hostile to the establishment of the Algerian team.⁴³ The French government threatened to sanction those nations that did host Algeria, but to little avail⁴⁴, while the FFF withheld the wages of those players based in France.⁴⁵ Through the FLN team the Algerian anti-colonial movement was retooling French universalist ideas of sports to assert national sovereignty. Organizing their own indigenous Algerian civic associations through sports—whether the FLN team of 1958 or the Mouloudia Club d’Alger of 1921—was a step towards self-determination by subverting the structural order of the FFF and FIFA. When France and Algeria would eventually meet on the field in 1975 it was none other than Mekhloufi that would be their coach.⁴⁶

With this historical context in mind, it is perhaps of little surprise that history sits heavy on the shoulders of players like Mahrez and Benzema, whose familial trajectories are rooted in a past of conflict and subversion. The families of the two greatest contemporary Algerian players since Zinedine Zidane, Karim Benzema and Riyad Mahrez exemplify Algerian-French transnational complexity, mapping neither onto the initial enthusiasm around the FLN’s vision of a collective return after Algerian independence, nor onto a flat, unidimensional model of assimilation. Mahrez’s subversion, which lies in his simultaneous representation of Sarcelles and Algeria, calls to mind Makhloufi’s symbolic position between French footballing professionalism and the Algerian Revolution.⁴⁷ On the other hand, Benzema’s popularity in Algeria, his uncompromising pride in his neighbourhood, in being Algerian, and in playing for the French national team, and Mahrez’s decision to represent the Algerian national team when he could have played for France, managed to subvert the French system, once more adding plurality and complexity to an often very Manichean national footballing picture.

Given the history of colonialism and its ongoing intergenerational and transnational dynamics in the so-called post-colonial era, it is perhaps unsurprising that the most highly regarded among the French-born players of Algerian descent tend to leave French club football. They may do so partly for the prestige of the Spanish (as in the case of Benzema), English (as in the case of Mahrez), Italian, or even German football leagues, but also perhaps in an attempt to escape the strictures and continued political imaginaries around colonialism in France today.

Post-colony Capital

Tensions around football continue to exist in France and are especially prevalent among supporters of the Algerian national team who live in France and among footballers who are French citizens of Algerian descent. Two factors inform this contemporary tension. First, the conflictual historical relationship between Algeria and France outlined above lives within both familial memory and the national and community narratives of present-day Algeria and France. Second, in France, the lived experience of Algerian émigrés who face poor treatment in France⁴⁸ and the transmission of these experiences of colonial violence and post-colonial discrimination across generations which crystallize around debates on citizenship and national identity⁴⁹ shape their experience. These factors create a complex dynamic of belonging and alterity in France. This is not uni-dimensional by any means, and for French-born generations, alterity is also felt when in Algeria, where these generations are seen as not-quite-Algerians or as French Algerians.⁵⁰ This multiple disconnect of French citizens of Algerian descent can be seen in performances of national belonging, French and Algerian alike, such as cheering on the national team, or aspiring to play for les fennecs (the Algerian national team’s nickname).

From Arab to Muslim

In this section, I discuss this disconnect by focusing on the post-9/11 period which signified the shift from thinking of Algeria as Arab to thinking of Algeria as Muslim. I then consider the interplay of private investment and corporate social responsibility (CSR) towards civil society in French sporting infrastructure and how CSR initiatives shape perspectives on belonging among individuals with dual-heritage trajectories. Finally, in light of the shifting perspectives around North Africans becoming homogeneously equated with Muslims, I return to the careers of Benzema and Mahrez and appraise these dynamics in their professional trajectories.

Algeria became independent on 5 July 1962. From that moment onwards, France was obliged to play Algeria under the set of legal codes that were defined under its own auspices by the FIFA body. The proximity of France and Algeria was not severed by the war and subsequent independence. If anything, the initial freedom of circulation of people and the regroupement (reunification) of families following decolonization further imbricated the destinies of Algeria and France and created new, inextricable hybridities. This was particularly true in urban peripheries in France where shantytowns—which would become banlieues—were built adjacent to factories in which Maghrebi immigrant labourers worked and lived. Nanterre, to the west of Paris, was perhaps the most flagrant example.⁵¹ The populist, nativist politician Eric Zemmour, whose parents came to France from Algeria, is himself a product of colonial history and banlieue culture.⁵² Though Zemmour was not successful in the 2022 French Presidential elections, he shaped the debate on race, nation, and Islam. Zemmour takes France’s celebration of multiculturalism through the World Cup victory in Paris in 1998 as the last moment that presented the possibility of uniform assimilation of national ‘groups’.⁵³ In an interview with football journalist Pierre Menes (Pierrot le foot), Zemmour attached this possibility to the trajectories of great footballing figures who exemplify the social mobility and assimilation of a range of different migrant populations, such as Raymond Kopa, born into a Polish family; Michel Platini, an Italian family; and Zinedine Zidane, an Algerian family.⁵⁴

The interruption in this neat line of progression, Zemmour considers, though having commenced in the early 1980s with the emergence of a French Arab/Berber second-generation presence and their ‘marche pour l’égalité’⁵⁵, was compounded by 9/11. That event has connected, in popular and political imagination, the Indigenous life of Algerian autochthonous subjects struggling under French colonial rule to Islamic absolutist terrorism. Such a link has been drawn by intellectuals such as Bernard Henri Levy.⁵⁶ This representational shift from the Algerian as a dishonest back-alley Arab migrant to a dangerous and duplicitous Euro-Muslim has divided France along ethnic lines.⁵⁷ I want to argue against Zemmour’s apparent desire for everybody to assimilate to a static French-Christian national type and its attendant Islamophobia. Once on the fringe, this Islamophobia has now seeped into the political mainstream.⁵⁸ It is my contention and that of many others⁵⁹ that postcolonial France owes much of the success of its entertainment and sporting worlds to the Maghreb, and to Algeria, and that Algerian and African cultures more broadly are integral to French patterns of identification. Tastes and ways of living in France, and, increasingly, a national self-representation have been deeply influenced by northern and western African as well as hybridised suburban Franco-African cultural contributions.

The events of 9/11 were of course of major international significance. Since then the question of Islam, its representational politics, and anti-Muslim racism have entered the French game of football. In that same year France played Algeria in the Stade de France (on the periphery of central Paris in St Denis). France was up 4–1 when in the 76th minute hundreds of young men invaded the pitch with Algerian flags and stopped the game. One of the best depictions of the game and the events leading up to it (by people that decided to treat the match as a celebration, from those wearing jerseys to those that used supernatural charms to weaken Zidane) can be found in the film Beur, blanc, rouge.⁶⁰ The match showed a significant degree of French Algerian youth alienation. Contrary to what Éric Zemmour suggests, it is perhaps the events at the end of October and beginning of November 2005 that matter more in the French context. In the summer of 2005, when the police chased Bouna Traoré and Zyed Benna, two teenagers who were on their way home from a football game, into an electricity terminal, resulting in the death of both young men, major attempts to disrupt the ruling political power ensued.⁶¹ It was following these events that then Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy made his now infamous comments about la racaille (scum, riffraff, or thugs).⁶² In addressing a crowd of residents in la Courneuve—part of the frequently stigmatised Seine-Saint-Denis region (post-coded 93, and thus shorthand for this region in France) immediately north of central Paris—Sarkozy said that he would clean up their peripheral neighbourhood with a Kärcher high pressure hose.⁶³

Full of rage for both past colonial injustices and contemporary racial ones as revealed in Sarkozy’s words, as well as fed up with the quotidian struggle against contrôle de faciès (racial profiling in stop and search), structural discrimination around employment, and access to living accommodations, young French citizens of northern and western African descent mobilised in full force. Protests moved progressively from the banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois and, more specifically, Zyed and Bouna’s neighbourhood Chêne Pointu to peripheral urban areas across France and then into Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands. Over the course of those months, political disruption and youth-led demonstrations led to several deaths, several thousand cars burnt, and hundreds of arrests. The deaths of Bouna and Zyed, as they have become known, are commemorated by youth groups from Chêne Pointu each year on 27 October in the form of a 5-a-side competition in memory of the deceased teenagers’ love of football.

The implosion of infrastructure in France due to chronic underinvestment since the 1980s, including in housing, transport, schooling, and employment, appear to have been at the core of these suburban mobilizations, sparked by outrage against police brutality.⁶⁴ However, their sensational form—burning and looting—became politically instrumentalised to create a narrative that dichotomised the violence of a racialised periphery-based protest and the civilised centre at threat.⁶⁵ This discourse has starkly colonial undertones, and it was arguably at this moment that the existence of an imperial continuum became clear in France’s urban peripheries.⁶⁶ It became clear, too, that to confront the issues of colonial injustice and structural disadvantage it was necessary not just to pay lip service to the beauty and creativity of urban diversity and mixité, for example, in the so-called black, blanc, beur (Black, White, Arab) Zidane generation⁶⁷, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to educate people about ideas around race that stem from the French imperial past and continue to prevail in France today.

The lip-service of black, blanc, beur and a desire to educate about colonial history and the construction of race is where the events of 2005 connect to France’s World Cup victory in 1998. There were two diverging political responses to the events of 2005. One of these was expressed in the 2011 exhibition at the National Museum of the History of Immigration. The exhibition provided a sports perspective on discrimination through the individual trajectories of different football players and their families, and the structural dynamics and disequilibrium of international relations and their former colonial underpinnings, in this case specifically between France and Algeria. Moving beyond representation in the wake of 2005, Lilian Thuram, the 1998 World Cup Semi-Final hero, declared in a press conference the day before France–Costa Rica played in Martinique that ‘before speaking about a lack of safety, maybe we should speak about social justice’.⁶⁸ That is to say that the sensational media coverage of the demonstrations paled in significance to the structural reform necessary to address the social problems at their root. The other political response can be seen through the shift of right discourse towards security⁶⁹, a shift that is in part due to then Minister of the Interior Nicholas Sarkozy.

The events of 2005 and the changes in attitude that they produced contributed strongly to the refusal to be only French (que français) that lies at the centre of Zemmour’s view. These changes also raised the question of which national football team to support and which one to play for. A post-Algerian-civil-war generation of Algerians born on either side of the Mediterranean saw les fennecs as the embodiment of Algerian resistance. In France, descendants of Algerian émigré families experienced this sentiment against the only noticeable political consequence of Zidane’s 1998 French footballing ‘Benneton moment’, that is, the so-called black, blanc, beur World Cup victory⁷⁰: Le Pen senior reaching the second round of the presidential elections in 2002 and Sarkozy’s racializing discourse of 2005. Rather than opening up pathways of recognition around the remnants of colonial stigma, both episodes brought a far-right perspective further into mainstream politics. Le Pen’s entire political discourse was shaped by his militant military experience of l’Algérie française (colonial French-Algeria), while Sarkozy wished to legislate that French colonialism had had positive effects (his then party, the UMP, passed article 4 of the law on 23 February 2005 stipulating ‘the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in North Africa’).

The Dynamics of French Sporting Infrastructure

Ironically, the building blocks for this resistance were constructed by the French State itself. Preparations for the 1998 World Cup marked a shift in the state’s investment strategy that dovetailed with an understanding that les quartiers (the self-ascribed term for peri-urban neighbourhoods as opposed to the ultra-stigmatised term banlieue)⁷¹ provide a reservoir of French footballing talent. The shift occurred after the state realized that peri-urban enclaves were producing talent that often saw ‘the beautiful game’ as a way to escape the ghetto⁷² despite the lack of investment in 1980s French peri-urban sporting infrastructure. In order to ‘problem manage’ French urban periphery youth, the FFF and its home-brand, les bleus, set up perhaps the world’s most efficient youth academy system. This system speaks directly to the associational dynamics of French civil society life. Civil society groups, football scouts, and private corporate social responsibility (CSR) representatives funded by global capital jointly organize sports summer camps for French youth from les quartiers, who, as Paul Silverstein puts it, are seen as ‘a problem to be managed’, particularly in the long summer months when school is out.⁷³

Meanwhile, in French club football at the local level, three clubs—Olympique Marseille (OM), Olympique Lyonnais (OL), and Paris Saint German (PSG)—each of them tied to transnational French and global capital, came to dominate the domestic scene. These business interests also continue to be entangled with French colonial perspectives that internalise the notion that good citizens can be produced through educating the mind and by policing the body through sport. However, the shift from the imperial flow of capital and people to global capitalism is subtle. In this shift, indexing colonially-inflected perspectives overlap with the outsourcing of solutions to neighbourhood-based structural issues—such as, maintaining social peace through sports—to civil society initiatives via big business CSR. These postcolonial business interests have been instrumental in financing and marketing individual football players and football clubs, and, by corollary, have had an impact on the results and the image of the national team. They have also been instrumental in the state’s outsourcing of political responsibility for the structural issues faced by les quartiers, where professional football is seen as one of the few ways out of poverty, marginalization, and a lack of resources.

The origins of this football–business connection can be traced back to the French business tycoon Bernard Tapie, who represented Adidas and was president of Olympique Marseille from 1986 to 1993. Under Tapie’s directorship, the club was the notable victor of the first Champions League final (1992–1993) but also at the forefront of multiple financial corruption scandals. Tapie invested in international players but defunded local footballing OM academies.⁷⁴ These scandals allowed its Lyon-based counterpart, Olympique Lyonnais, to rise to the top of French national football under Jean-Michel Aulas, who served as the association’s president from 1987 to 2009. Unlike OM, OL shrewdly invested locally, particularly in places such as Bron-Terraillon, where Karim Benzema grew up and was initially scouted by OL. Finally, since 2011, Paris Saint Germain (PSG), a club founded in 1970, has dominated French football. The club’s level of investment in players’ salaries and transfers has never been seen before in Europe, the world’s most lucrative footballing market. PSG is owned by Nasser Al-Khalaïfi via the national sovereign wealth fund, Qatar Sports Investments group (QSI), the group that is also behind the 2022 Qatar World Cup. Al-Khelaifi is also the chairman of beIN Media Group, one of the world’s largest sports broadcasters with a global reach in multiple languages across France, Spain, Turkey, North Africa, and the Middle East.

OL and PSG have each invested in enabling and supporting postcolonial footballing youth. The injection of capital into these clubs and the sponsorship and creation of the image of individual football players is not coincidental. France, with its impressive post-1998 national infrastructure, provides an excellent base for football, a game from which a range of products can be created, whether they are for clubs or individuals. The cities of Paris, Lyon, and Marseille and their peripheries are good examples of potential markets for high profile football matches, their ticket sales, derivative football products such as merchandise, and, above all, lucrative television rights. The more transnational these products and matches are, the better.

With the growth of the movement for good ethical practice in big business dating back to the 1990s⁷⁵, these for the most part privately-funded football clubs have had to engage with civil society for their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) agendas. PSG finances multiple CSR projects through its foundation programme and, of course, notably those that centre on football. One of the civil society groups that PSG’s CSR agenda engaged through its 2019 foundation programme was Allez les filles, via ALMA, a federation of predominantly non-White peri-urban women’s associations based in Pantin. Allez les Filles seeks to deconstruct clichéd representations that draw comparisons between peripheral neighbourhoods, criminality, and youth of immigrant descent. Pantin is part of the same 93 district as Clichy-sous-Bois, home to the late Zyed and Bouna, and La Courneuve, immediately south of Sarcelles, where Sarkozy made his remarks. ALMA, in addition to its workshops for public speaking and conferences dedicated to debunking inaccuracies levelled at Islam, has great purchase in building ties through football competitions. Using the Women’s World Cup in 2019 as a hook, eight women’s football teams of semi- and pro-11-a-side teams from the 93 district competed in a tournament, Parcours Foot & Co. Alongside the tournament, there were also ateliers citoyens (citizenship workshops) and a concours d’éloquence (speech contests). While these efforts replicated some of the discourse levelled at postcolonial communities, such as sexism, incivility, and an inability to speak well⁷⁶, they also tried to counteract them.

The far-right imaginary has since 9/11 constructed a narrative in which places such as La Courneuve, Pantin, and Sarcelles need to be civilised.⁷⁷ Without providing the necessary resources to solve the existing social problems, the state has instead focused on sporting infra-structure to solve major structural inequality. This has been to the benefit of the corporations that have come to run French club football. Often informed by the same colonial discourses of a civilizing mission, the infrastructural investment and global capital trickles down into the almost insignificant CSR agenda as it is applied to footballing initiatives in French peri-urban civil society. This agenda has created something of a deadlock around French national culture and belonging, as it opens up debates about race, Islam, and sport, but simultaneously reinforces the originally colonial idea of ‘good citizenship practice’. This is particularly felt in the periphery and, specifically, among French men of Algerian Muslim descent who are only too aware of how the French nexus of power through football networks that the FLN team stars of the 1950s were brought into came to subvert. Meanwhile, the National Centre for Football in Clairefontaine (initially called the Centre Technique National du Football, CTNF), known in the vernacular as Clairefontaine, is at the heart of the impressive machinery for the promotion of footballing excellence. Its existence serves as a testimony to the deep relationship between modernity and sport, displacing the imperial notion of French civilizational brilliance (often instrumentalized in the organization of federations, competitions, and committees of international football) in favour of a postcolonial relationship to French-born generations of footballers whose parents and forefathers stem from former French colonies. Karim Benzema and Riyad Mahrez, both of whom play outside France today, were both trained in Clairefontaine.

The Differing Trajectories of Benzema and Mahrez

At the club level, Benzema and Mahrez have both played the majority of their football outside of France. Yet the evolution of their respective careers has not been the same. Benzema was transferred from Lyon to Real Madrid in 2009 for a significant sum upon an established reputation within the French Ligue 1.⁷⁸ This is unlike Mahrez, who left the same league in 2014 from lowly Le Havre to join a then not-top-premier league team Leicester City. In other words, he was not especially well-known when he left France. Due to the relative modesty of both of these clubs—Le Havre and Leicester City—his move was little commented on. The meteoric rise of Leicester City and Mahrez’s subsequent high-profile transfer to Manchester City, then a club record⁷⁹ bring him, however, into the stratospheric club football heights of Benzema. The differences in the two players’ club football trajectories do not detract from their affective proximity to Algeria, and it is, above all, at the national level that these dynamics play out.

Relative to 1998, between 2006 and 2016 France underperformed in the World Cups, reinforcing the perspective that French national football should not mix with politics. French National team coach Didier Deschamps in 2022, nicknamed ‘the water carrier’ (for his hard graft in midfield), acting on behalf of the FFF like Aimé Jacquet in 1998, consolidated an apolitical culture of ‘cohesion’, what he terms examplarité. During the course of the post-Zidane period and, in particular, during the 2010 South Africa World Cup, French national team players were blamed for putting their personal and political identities above their dedication to the greater national good. For example, they were criticized for fasting during Ramadan, or, as in the case of Patrice Evra, for publicly accusing the French Football Federation of institutional racism. They were rewarded for presenting themselves as visibly secular (e.g., for not seen fasting during Ramadan,)⁸⁰ and for not making accusations of institutional racism, for example in response to then national team coach Laurent Blanc’s comments about the strength of Black players and the discussion on binational quotas had by the direction technique nationale (the technical head of French national football that heads the CTNF) in November 2010.⁸¹

This tendency towards rewarding subservience coincides with the Algerian national team moving into FIFA’s top 20 (men’s) ranking of international teams under the captaincy of Riyad Mahrez. The team lost narrowly to Germany in the second round of the 2014 World Cup tournament. A good proportion of les fennecs were born in France and had gone through the French youth programs of Clairefontaine, including systematic training at the CTNF. Many of les fennecs demonstrate huge visible pride in their national symbols, such as the kassaman (the national anthem) and the flag. An attendant set of performative practices that some players in the Algerian team demonstrate are those of Islamic rigour. When some of the players score a goal, such as Feghouli against Belgium in the 2014 World Cup, they, along with some of their teammates, prostrate themselves and kiss the ground, emulating prayer. Some team members fast during Ramadhan, and their open discussions about this form of religious observance serves as a source of bonding and shows collective strength.⁸²

Riyad Mahrez has led this competitive new Algerian national side and found a place and a voice in the process. Karim Benzema, however, has not been allowed to do the same within les bleus. Since being taken to court for a sex-tape scandal involving his then national teammate Mathieu Valbuena, he was blacklisted by the institution of the FFF. He was accused of (in 2015) and eventually condemned (in 2021) for complicity in the blackmailing of Valbuena with a tape that showed Valbuena having sexual intercourse with a prostitute. While his blacklisting can be understood as a moral stance, allegations of sexual impropriety against elite male footballers are strikingly frequent, so much so that the English Premier League has introduced obligatory training on sexual consent in 2022–23 for all players due in particular to the high profile cases of Benjamin Mendy of Manchester City and Mason Greenwood of Manchester United for charges of rape and suspected rape, respectively. Didier Deschamps implicitly justified Benzema’s non-selection by publicly stating that he saw commitment and a clear team ethic—exemplarité—as a prerequisite for playing for the national team. The accusations of Benzema’s corruption, bribery, and extortion during the so-called sex-tape scandal, though at the time not confirmed, made Benzema a persona non grata for the national team between 2015 and 2021; he made a brief return before retiring altogether from les bleus after getting injured just before the Qatar 2022 World Cup. Benzema has since come under perpetual scrutiny, in particular by those who are on the right of the French political spectrum.

Eric Zemmour’s taking exception with Benzema’s lack of enthusiasm for the French national anthem, the Marseillaise, in his interview with football journalist Pierre Menes was a rehashing of the National Front’s critique from 2014. Ever since then, there has been a growing phobia of Muslims in France. However, many, including the 1998 French World Cup winner Vikash Dhorasso, believe that the standards to which Benzema was held by the FFF—but that were not being applied to other players—were a result of Benzema’s being non-White, but also, and importantly, for being visibly Muslim.⁸³ It is important to note, too, that Benzema had his own agency in these debates when appearing in the mainstream Spanish press, as well as his own social media platforms to voice his mind about instances of racism in the institution. Yet these reactions seem to have prolonged his ban from the national team. Those who go against the institution, it would seem, tend to get penalised. Mohamed Belkacemi, a football coach and amateur youth mentor, who blew the whistle on the direction technique nationale (the national technical board of French football) by recording what became known as the race quota conversation in which Laurent Blanc made profoundly racist remarks that sparked a national scandal found himself to be the only person punished by the board and the federation.⁸⁴

While Algeria did not qualify for the 2022 Qatar World Cup, and while Mahrez appears to be slowly becoming less of a beacon for the Algerian national team and Benzema’s injury just prior to the finals kept him from playing, the different choices that Benzema and Mahrez have made against the backdrop of parallel Algerian familial histories and a tough suburban upbringing show the degree of complexity that traverses national football as a political battleground.

Conclusion

The Algerian author Kateb Yacine called the French legacy in Algeria a ‘butin de guerre’ (war booty) (1999). It is often thought that Kateb Yacine was referring specifically to the French language in which he wrote, though he may have been referring to a broader, hybrid cultural legacy in which Algerian expression in French can be understood not as a bequeathal but as autochthonous. Such a legacy remains alive in the transnational transferral to and re-appropriation of footballing structures between France and Algeria, dating back to the history of the early twentieth century association described at the beginning of this essay and going all the way to the 1990s big-business production of Franco-Algerian football stars and Clairefontaine. The success story of les fennecs since 2010 as partially residing in the use of these sporting structures, and Clairefontaine in particular, tells us that the complex interplay of colony and post-colony remain alive. As we have seen, these affective and historical dynamics are the result of an imperial mindset embedded within the very idea of association that set out to shape autochthonous Algerian Muslim subjects through good citizenship, which included policing and moulding the body into a sportsmanlike way of being. These ideas are also bound up with a structural story of exporting the model of association which was particularly salient for sport and a localised indigenous sporting model that drew on the French European, Islamic, Arab, Jewish, and post-Ottoman networks of sports and leisure that were shaping a Middle Eastern modernity during the interwar period. Finally, the story of the FLN national team and the solidarity and sacrifice made by its players to separate themselves from the tentacles of imperial France traverses the stories of contemporary French-born football players of Algerian descent, such as Benzema and Mahrez. In some ways, the new golden generation of Clairefontaine-trained players who choose to represent Algeria and were successful on the field echo the exploits of Zitouni and Mekhloufi three quarters of a century after the FLN team came together, differentiating them from the Benneton moment of Zidane’s 1998 World Cup.

The colonial legacy of the association and the way in which it shapes ideas of good citizenship and civic values with colonial undertones continues today in France, but in the realm of football it has undergone a significant transformation in light of the big business interests that have come to dominate the game in France and elsewhere. The outsourcing of significant structural issues that result from chronic underfunding in peri-urban neighbourhoods to the CSR agendas of major investment groups shifts the onus of associational life from a public universalist agenda to a private self-interested one. A CSR that is channeled through big business footballing foundations perpetuates the imperially derived ideals of the association and can include vestiges of the mission to civilise. In parallel, the capitalist logic guiding CSR seeks to create markets and products that connect with the transnational trajectories of football in urban areas, where the sport is seen as a way out of poor living conditions and a stark lack of resources.

A sense of belonging for the one in every ten people in France with a direct familial connection to Algeria is not simply national or bi-national, it is also strongly bound up with the local. This sense of the local is often indexed against the houma (neighbourhood), those Algerian neighbourhoods that were such an important site of cultural and armed resistance against the French in cities like Algiers. But the quartier (neighbourhood) in France has also become a moniker for post-colonial peri-urban decay and state de-investment and disinterest, perhaps in particular for men from working-class peri-urban areas who have these parallel histories and experiences, and for whom these can give rise to a strong identification towards local community and are also often connected to descent (i.e. from northern or western African). For Karim Benzema this ongoing sense of belonging to a quartier can be seen in his investment in a local mosque building in Bron, while for Riyad Mahrez the local Sarcelles stadium now carries his name. These quartiers, their Algerian vestiges, and French peri-urban locations are neither France nor Algeria. Rather, they are local sites where belonging to one team or another is less important than a shared collective, and where there is an understanding that a coexistence of multiple belongings is perfectly natural.

Acknowledgements

This article is a version of a paper that I gave at the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations (ISMC) in London, 28–30 April 2022. Many thanks to those who were present for my presentation and who gave feedback. The article also draws on a general public (non-academic) piece that I wrote for MERIP Online (Everett 2022) and a chapter that I have submitted for an edited volume, ‘Praying on the Pitch’ (Everett, forthcoming). Particular thanks go to Mahfoud Amara for his critical readings of this article and the two reviewers whose remarks helped strengthen the article a great deal. Very special thanks go to Jessica Binks for research and editorial assistance and Susanne Unger for her editorial work.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sami Everett

Sami EVERETT is a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. He holds a PhD in Politics from SOAS, University of London and a BA in North African Language and Culture from INALCO, Paris. His research focuses on the historical-colonial and spatial-political dimensions of interreligious (Jewish and Muslim) identification to North Africa.

Notes

1 The Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration (Museum for the History of Immigration) is hosted in the Palais de la porte dorée in Paris. Between April 5 and July 17 2022 the exhibition Juifs et musulmans de la France colonial à nos jours (Jews and Muslims from Colonial France until Today) was held there. See: https://www.histoire-immigration.fr/programmation/expositions/juifs-et-musulmans-de-la-france-coloniale-a-nos-jours for more information.

2 Museum for the History of Immigration exhibition, Paris: Allez la France ! Football et immigration, histoires croisées (Come on France! Football and immigration, comparative histories), May 2010–January 2011 for more information see https://www.histoire-immigration.fr/agenda/2010-06/allez-la-france-football-et-immigration-histoires-croisees

3 Philip Dine, ‘The End of an Idyll? Sport and Society in France, 1998–2002’, Modern & Contemporary France 11, no. 1 (1 February 2003): 33–43; Paul A. Silverstein, Postcolonial France: Race, Islam, and the Future of the Republic (London: Pluto Press, 2018). Nacira Guénif-Souilamas. ‘Zidane: Portrait of the Artist as Politics Avatar’ in Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France, ed. Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Yasmin Jiwani. ‘Sports as a Civilizing Mission: Zinedine Zidane and the Infamous Head-Butt’, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 19 (May 2008): 11–33.

4 Mahfoud Amara, ‘Sport and the “Question” of Islam in Europe’ in Sport, Welfare and Social Policy in the European Union (London: Routledge, 2020), 29–35.

5 Hadj Miliani, Des louangeurs au home cinéma en Algérie: Etudes de socio-anthropologie culturelle (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2010).

6 Paul A. Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

7 Adi Saleem Bharat, ‘Jews and Muslims in contemporary French newspaper discourse (2000–2017)’, French Cultural Studies 32, no. 1 (2021): 26–41, 17.

8 John R. Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

9 Philip Dine, ‘France, Algeria and Sport: From Colonisation to Globalisation’, Modern & Contemporary France 10, no. 4 (1 November 2002): 495–505; Philip Dine, ‘Sport in Algeria – from National Self-Assertion to Anti-State Contestation’, in Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism: 1988-2015, ed. Patrick Crowley (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 203–21.

10 Mahfoud Amara, Football, Diplomacy and Identity Politics in the Middle East and North Africa Sport and Geopolitics Programme, (June 2020. Geostrategic Sports Observatory, Interview with Dr Mahfoud Amara conducted by Estelle Brun), 20.

11 Paul A. Silverstein, ‘World Cup Summer in Postcolonial France.’ Pluto Press (blog), July 3, 2018. https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/world-cup-postcolonial-france-football/.; Paul A. Silverstein Global Maghreb: Crossroads, Borderlands, Frontiers and Beyond, (forthcoming).

12 Stéphane Beaud, La France des Belhoumi. Portraits de famille (1977-2017), (France: La Découverte, 2018), 352.

13 Karima Lazali, Le trauma colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2019).

14 Julien Sorez, Football dans Paris et ses banlieues : Un sport devenu spectacle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 76.

15 Dine, ‘Sport in Algeria – from National Self-Assertion to Anti-State Contestation’, 203.

16 Dine, Sport in Algeria – from National Self-Assertion to Anti-State Contestation’, 204.

17 Sorez, Football dans Paris et ses banlieues : Un sport devenu spectacle, 30.

18 Claire Destacamp and Thomas Dutter, ‘Jules Rimet, du Red Star FC à la Coupe du monde - Ép. 4/4 - Histoire du football.’ France Culture, April 25, 2019. https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-fabrique-de-lhistoire/histoire-du-football-44-jules-rimet-du-red-star-fc-a-la-coupe-du-monde.

19 Dine, ‘France, Algeria and Sport: From Colonisation to Globalisation’, 498.

20 See Pierre, Lanfranchi and Alfred Wahl, ‘The Immigrant as Hero: Kopa, Mekloufi and French Football’, in European Heroes (London: Routledge, 1996).

21 Stanislas Frenkiel, Le football des immigrés: France-Algérie, l’histoire en partage. (Arras: Presses Universitaires Artois, 2021).

22 Peter Hill, Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

23 Murat C. Yıldız, ‘Sports and the Making of the Modern Middle East.’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 51, no. 3 (August 2019): 468–71.

24 Murat C. Yıldiz, ‘Muscular Judaism Alla Turca’ AJS Perspectives (Fall 2019).

25 Stanislas Frenkiel and Nicolas Bancel, ‘The Migration of Professional Algerian Footballers to the French Championship, 1956–82: The ‘Desire for France’ and the Prevailing National Contexts’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 25, no. 8 (July 1, 2008): 1031–50,1035.

26 Mahfoud Amara and Ian Henry. ‘Between Globalization and Local “Modernity”: The Diffusion and Modernization of Football in Algeria.’ Soccer & Society 5, no. 1 (January 1, 2004): 1–26, 5.

27 Amara and Henry, ‘Between Globalization and Local “Modernity”: The Diffusion and Modernization of Football in Algeria.’, 6.

28 Frenkiel, Le football des immigrés: France-Algérie, l’histoire en partage.

29 Mickaël Correia, ‘En Algérie, les stades contre le pouvoir’. Le Monde diplomatique, May 2019. https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2019/05/CORREIA/59835.

30 Dine, ‘France, Algeria and Sport: From Colonisation to Globalisation’, 496.

31 Jane E. Goodman, ‘The Man behind the Curtain: Theatrics of the State in Algeria’, The Journal of North African Studies 18, no. 5 (2013): 779–95.

32 Frenkiel, Le football des immigrés: France-Algérie, l’histoire en partage, 36.

33 Stanislas Frenkiel, ‘The Nationalization of Algerian Football Following Independence, 1962–1982’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 38, no. 9 (June 13, 2021b): 972–87.

34 Frenkiel and Bancel, ‘The Migration of Professional Algerian Footballers to the French Championship, 1956–82: The ‘Desire for France’ and the Prevailing National Contexts’, 1036.

35 Dine, ‘France, Algeria and Sport: From Colonisation to Globalisation’, 498.

36 Frenkiel, Le football des immigrés: France-Algérie, l’histoire en partage, 44.

37 Philip Dine and Didier Rey, ‘Le football en Guerre d’Algérie’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 106, no. 2 (2012): 27–32; Stanislas, Frenkiel. ‘Les footballeurs du FLN: des patriotes entre deux rives’, Migrations Société 110/2 (2007).

38 Dine, ‘France, Algeria and Sport: From Colonisation to Globalisation’, 500.

39 Mohamed Amine Azouz, ‘La Glorieuse équipe de football du FLN : fierté de tout un peuple’ El Moudhahid November, 2017.

40 Léa Masseguin, ‘Equipe d’Algérie: «On jouait les matchs presque en cachette».’ Libération, sec. International. Accessed March 17, 2022. https://www.liberation.fr/planete/2019/07/19/equipe-d-algerie-on-jouait-les-matchs-presque-en-cachette_1740770/.

41 Pierre Lanfranchi, ‘Mekloufi, un footballeur français dans la guerre d’Algérie’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 103, no. 1 (1994): 70–4, 71.

42 Josh Sippie, ‘Algeria’s Équipe FLN: The Movement That Used Football to Fight for Freedom.’ These Football Times (blog), November 21, 2017. https://thesefootballtimes.co/2017/11/21/algerias-equipe-fln-the-movement-that-used-football-to-fight-for-freedom/.

43 Vincent Jacquet, ‘D’instrument de propagande à miroir de la guerre d’Algérie : l’équipe de football du Front de Libération Nationale, 1954-1962’, Bulletin de l’Institut Pierre Renouvin 47, no. 1 (2018): 121–31, 126.

44 Sippie, ‘Algeria’s Équipe FLN: The Movement That Used Football to Fight for Freedom.’

45 Jacquet, ‘D’instrument de propagande à miroir de la guerre d’Algérie: l’équipe de football du Front de Libération Nationale, 1954–1962’, 128.

46 The first post-colonial meeting of the two teams was at the Mediterranean Games organized and hosted by Algeria, which the Algerian national team won (Bouandel and Amara 2019, 1087)

47 Lanfranchi, ‘Mekloufi, un footballeur français dans la guerre d’Algérie’, 70.

48 Erik Bleich, Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policymaking since the 1960s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Alec G. Hargreaves ‘Empty Promises?: Public Policy against Racial and Ethnic Discrimination in France’. French Politics, Culture & Society 33, no. 3 (2015): 95–115.

49 John R. Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Mahfoud Amara. ‘Sport and muslims or muslims in sport, post-9/11’, in The Routledge Handbook of Sport, Race and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 2016).

50 Jennifer Bidet, Vacances au bled. La double présence des enfants d’immigrés (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2021).

51 Françoise Soulignac, and Cynthia Ghorra-Ghobin, ‘La banlieue parisienne: cent cinquante ans de transformations’, Town Planning Review 66, no. 1 (1995): 120–21.

52 Eric Zemmour is currently a French populist far-right politician. He has vulgarised historical content in a series of contentious books about various periods of French history, and above all he has been present on French television as an expert/intellectual/pundit for more than a decade where he made his name as an expert in live debate.

53 For a less polemical but somewhat idealistic take on football and French immigration until 1998 see Didier Braun. ‘L’équipe de France de football, c’est l’histoire en raccourci d’un siècle d’immigration’. Hommes et Migrations 1226, no. 1 (2000): 50–56.

54 See Pierre Menes, ‘Éric Zemmour: ‘Benzema a évolué, peut-être se sent-il plus français…’, April 11, 2021. https://www.pierrotlefoot.com/lentretien-de-pierrot/eric-zemmour-benzema-se-sent-francais-3549.html, also Lanfranchi and Wahl (1996) for a discussion on the footballing immigrant as hero.

55 See Abdellali Hajjat, La Marche Pour l’Egalite et Contre le Racisme (Paris: Amsterdam, 2013).

56 See Samuel S. Everett, ‘The Many (Im)Possibilities of Contemporary Algerian Judaïtés’, in Algeria Nation, Culture and Transnationalism: 1988-2015 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017).

57 Jean-Loup Amselle, L’ethnicisation de La France (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Lignes, 2011).

58 Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, Antisémitisme et islamophobie. Une histoire croisée (Paris: Editions Amsterdam 2021).

59 Didier Fassin, ‘Riots in France and Silence Anthropologists’ Anthropology Today 22, no. 1 (February 2005); Majid Hannoum. ‘Memory at the Surface: Colonial Forgetting in Postcolonial France’, Interventions 21, no. 3 (March 2019): 367–91.

60 Mahmoud Zemmouri wrote and directed the film which was released in 2006.

61 Chantal Tetreault, Transcultural Teens: Performing Youth Identities in French Cites (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2015).

62 Sarkozy was Minister of the Interior May 2002–March 2004 and then again June 2005–March 2007, after which he because President May 2007–May 2012.

63 The term ‘scum’ perhaps most aptly captures how racaille is subverted and used on the street itself.

64 Sylvie Tissot, L’Etat et les quartiers. Genèse d’une catégorie de l’action publique (Paris: Média Diffusion, 2013).

65 Tetreault. Transcultural Teens: Performing Youth Identities in French Cites.

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