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French Football Reportedly Setting Racial Quotas On Prospects From Training Centers

We haven’t written a whole lot about French soccer/football since the national team was embarrassing itself at the World Cup last year. And unfortunately for Les Bleus, if a report released yesterday is true, the embarrassment will continue in a big way. This time, though, the potential controversy isn’t so much about results on the field as it is who’s on the field to begin with. Mediapart reports:

Members of the French Football Federation’s National Technical Board, including the France team coach Laurent Blanc, have secretly approved a quota selection process to reduce the number of young black players, and those of North African origin, emerging from the country’s youth training centres as potential candidates for the national team, Mediapart can reveal.

The plan, presented in November 2010, involves limiting the number of youngsters from black and Meghrebi African origin entering the selection process from training centres and academies as early as 12 and 13 years of age.

If true, this is an open-and-shut case of racial discrimination – there’s nothing else to call it. Limiting the number of potential black players on the national team is a serious accusation – and if the national team coach, Laurent Blanc, actually said what Mediaprt attributes to him, it gets worse:

Mediapart has also learnt that, during the November [National Technical Board] meeting, France national team coach Laurent Blanc said he was “favourable” for a change in the selection criteria for youth talent as of the age of 12 to 13 years in order to favour those who sources said he described as having “our culture, our history”. The sources added that Blanc cited the current would football champions Spain, reportedly saying: “The Spanish, they say ‘we don’t have a problem. We have no blacks’”.

If that went down as reported, just…wow. (And it doesn’t make Spain sound too much better.) For the record, here’s what Blanc had to say about the story:

“It really bothers me because it’s against my values,” he said. “To me, this is totally false – there is no draft quota – and it’s a lie to say that the coach of the France team participated, so I cannot tell you about something that does not exist.”

French Football Federation president Fernand Duchaussoy, whose organization is conducting an investigation in the wake of Mediapart’s report, said:

“I heard about this on Thursday with a great deal of surprise. I was taken aback. I thought it was a joke in bad taste. These are terrible accusations.”

And then there’s technical director François Blaquart – who, if Mediapart is correct, was one of the masterminds of the alleged discrimination plan. He said:

“Our only problem is to do with dual nationality,” he said. “This involves players of all origins – it’s got nothing to do with skin colour.”

All this, of course, is what one would expect the accused parties to say regardless of whether or not the allegations raised against them are accurate. So we’re left to trust the accuracy of Mediapart’s reporting, and also pass along this link from SB Nation’s Spencer Hall, which cites poll numbers from last year in which a full 15 percent of the French population admitted to being racist.

That alone, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean anything vis-a-vis the allegations in Mediapart’s report. But like just about everything that’s gone on with French football over the past year or so, it doesn’t look good.

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