At each Soccer World Cup and another main soccer match, it isn’t solely Les Bleus performances on the pitch that come beneath scrutiny, but in addition the gamers’ identities, their migrant backgrounds and the extent to which they symbolize France and French society. This recurrent query speaks to unresolved points and questions on France’s collective nationwide id, long-standing debates about immigration, and the way France views itself. Above and past the crew’s line-up, the unresolved query of the nation’s postcolonial id and what it means to be French within the twenty first century is replayed at each match.
When head coach Didier Deschamps unveiled the beginning XI for France’s 2026 World Cup marketing campaign, one of many first questions he was requested involved the inclusion of gamers from France’s abroad territories within the official squad. In response, Deschamps emphasised that the nationwide crew mirrored each French society and its historical past. This assertion shortly sparked widespread debate, notably on social media, the place it turned obvious that, for a lot of, the crew’s composition didn’t match their imaginative and prescient of France. Like a lot of his predecessors, Didier Deschamps had, in actual fact, simply introduced a squad predominantly made up of gamers from immigrant backgrounds. And, like his predecessors, he discovered himself confronted with a query that has lengthy dogged the French nationwide crew: do Les Bleus actually symbolize France and French society?
When France received its first World Cup in 1998, the celebrations have been broadly interpreted by way of the prism of nationwide id. The slogan “Black-Blanc-Beur” (“Black, White, Arab”) emerged as an emblem of a multicultural France. Conversely, when issues went fallacious for Les Bleus, as an example, in the course of the 2010 World Cup scandal in South Africa, marked by a gamers’ strike, criticism was additionally framed in phrases of id, French values and what constitutes an genuine illustration of the nation.
The explanation this query resurfaces at each World Cup is that it goes far past soccer. Why does a crew, most of whose gamers have been born in France, proceed to be questioned about its potential to symbolize the nation? To reply this query, we should look again at France’s lengthy historical past, from its colonial empire to the mannequin behind its broader sports activities coaching programme.
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A crew formed by historical past
Why do Les Bleus have so many gamers from migrant backgrounds? The reply lies, particularly, by a number of intertwining historic tendencies.
Waves of migration from France’s former colonies have tended to kind clusters in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
On the similar time, the French authorities and the French Soccer Federation developed, notably from the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties onwards, sports activities services in these areas to supply younger folks with structured actions and fight marginalisation, which typically took the type of youth crime in these neighbourhoods. Soccer subsequently turned an reasonably priced pastime for youngsters from working-class areas, a lot of whom got here from immigrant households from former French colonies.
Greater than only a interest, for a lot of it turned a path to empowerment, providing an opportunity to flee poverty, social exclusion and marginalisation. For a lot of younger folks, it offered an area for social integration, but in addition a possibility for financial mobility and a method out of poverty.
It’s subsequently not stunning that French soccer’s major expertise pool is now largely concentrated in these areas.
This actuality is mirrored within the line-ups of the nationwide crew and lots of different European nations with a colonial previous, akin to England and the Netherlands.
Nevertheless, inside the French nationwide crew, points regarding id and illustration seem to stay unresolved. France is at present producing an distinctive variety of world-class gamers throughout France’s suburbs.
With 99 gamers born and skilled on French soil among the many 1,248 gamers collaborating within the 2026 World Cup, France is the match’s main exporter of expertise. Whereas 23 of them put on the Les Bleus’ shirt, the opposite 76 symbolize different nationwide groups, together with Haiti, Senegal, Morocco and Algeria.
The affect of the nationwide creativeness
Taken collectively, France’s colonial legacy, migration patterns and the coaching insurance policies carried out by the French Soccer Federation for the reason that Nineteen Nineties have helped to create one of many world’s most profitable incubators for creating soccer expertise.
These elements assist to clarify why the French nationwide crew appears to be like the way in which it does right this moment. They don’t, nonetheless, clarify why its composition continues to be contested. To reply this query, we should shift our focus from the pitch to representations of the nation.
Colonisation didn’t merely rework the id of colonised peoples; it additionally profoundly reshaped the id of the colonising societies, which right this moment proceed to grapple with their legacies and contradictions. In France’s case, ingrained tensions stay over what actually represents France.
On the one hand, there stays a pre-colonial or nostalgic view of the nation, in accordance with which a symbolically “appropriate” illustration of France can be that of a rustic that’s primarily ethnically white. However, there’s the view that France’s imperial historical past has helped form a multicultural nation, diversified by migration, whereas remaining based on the universalist ideas of the Republic. These two standpoints proceed to coexist and are typically at odds with each other. This rigidity, which stays largely unresolved, pops up once more throughout occasions just like the World Cup, with the recurrent and delicate query of who can actually declare to symbolize France.
Understanding modern identities requires recognising the types of cultural hybridity which might be a results of the colonial expertise. France is a hybrid society: a nation formed by its colonial historical past, however which stays, at occasions, uncomfortable with portrayals of the nation that deviate from a historically white picture of France.
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Thus, the issue appears to lie much less with the French crew than with the nationwide psyche. This mindset typically seems to be caught in a pre-colonial picture of a “white France”, with out totally recognising that modern France is the product of a fancy, multicultural historical past.
Are Les Bleus French? Definitely. Do they symbolize a France formed by its colonial historical past? Sure. However do they symbolize the idealised picture that some proceed to affiliate with the French nation? Most likely not.
In the end, the recurring debate over whether or not Les Bleus actually symbolize France maybe says much less about those that put on the French nationwide crew’s shirt than it does in regards to the persistent tensions between France’s colonial legacy and the enduring nationwide narrative primarily based on a white id.
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Tapiwa Seremani, Affiliate Professor in Enterprise Ethics, IÉSEG Faculty of Administration