Considering World Cup:

Tracing 20 Years of France National Football Team

Abstract

　Football today can be seen as a cultural phenomenon ruled by the power of sponsors in every domain such as game schedules and activities players. However, it also reflects and highlights social problems of each time. This essay traces French representative teams for the past 20 years considering how they reflect issues of French society, and proposes the possibility of interpreting FIFA World Cup in some affirmative ways. In 1998, while regulation of immigration was increasing in France, the French team, an ensemble of players from different social and racial backgrounds, winning chanpionship produced social moods of ‘unification’. The World Cup then could be seen as generating a dream of social unification, however transitory it was. French teams after 2000, however, highlight division of French society. The commonality of the process of aiming to be a national player from relatively poor environment in the time of Zinedine Zidan dissapeared in the time of Vikash Dhorasoo. The crack between players from ‘Cité’, a particularly unsafe area in the suburbs, and players from upper class was a symbol of the social division. This problem was awfully manifested in South Africa in 2010, the World Cup being an event that disclose such social problems. Apart from the issues of inclusion/exclusion of races and devision of social classes, World Cup for France can be a site in which colonial/post colonial issues are to be negotiated. A game of France and Algeria might be realized in Brazil in 2014. The World Cup exposes complicated histories between ex-colonizer and ex-colonized. However, it is also the World Cup that can realize the football match without considering such all.