Ved Sen takes on International Football, and asks it the question it fears the most.
I remember a time, when I was growing up and resenting International football. Back then, I didn’t quite understand as I do now, the enforced sense of pseudo nationality and misplaced bravura it imposes; but it was merely, the annoyance of not getting to see my club side play at the weekend, for two straight weekends. There was always a knock or two, that some of the best players used to pick up, returning from their international duties. Back then, I saw it as an impediment, today, I see it suffer from an unprecedented existential crisis, that it tries best to ignore.
The French football team which won the 1998 world cup was feted and described as the Black Blanc Beur team in French media. “Black, White, Arab”. It was seen as a wonderful confluence of footballing cultures, epitomised by Zinedine Zidane, the working class hero of Algerian descent; and Lilian Thuram, who grew up in the in banlieue [a typical French suburb, not as picturesque, as you’d imagine, but embroiled in stigma and discrimination] having moved from Guadaloupe. Yet, when French football lurched from crisis to crisis, ten years later, the same racial and multi-ethnic mix of players was seen as part of the problem. In fact, in a meeting which was to have long reaching reverberations through the French Footballing and broader sporting hierarchy, a group of managers discussed the possibility of issuing quotas for the national team. Taken out of context, it implied that they were mooting racial quotas to limit the number of non-white players in the team. However, Laurent Blanc a distinguished footballer and coach, who was at the meeting has always maintained he was talking about protecting the national team from the risk of having too many players having dual nationalities. A proactive step to reduce the number of youth players who play for France, but later, tend to choose to play for another country that offered them more regular starts in the National team.
