Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Global sporting competitions like the World Cup provide an opportunity for global sportsmanship, but increasingly, they also provide a complicated field on which narratives of immigration and national identity are contested. Of the twenty-three players in the 2018 World Cup champion French squad, seventeen were the children of first generation migrants. Their breakout star, and the tournament’s most valuable player, Kylian Mbappe, is the son of a Cameroonian father and an Algerian mother who grew up in the banlieues, the immigrant-heavy suburbs outside of Paris. Some French found pride in the immigration narrative, hailing the squad as a revival of the 1998 squad led by the great Zinedine Zidane, who inspired the chant “black, blanc, beur” (black, white, and a term for Arabs of North African descent) to celebrate their champions’ integrated team dynamic. Others found a more complicated narrative in the French squad. In America, there was controversy over the idea of France as the “last African team in the tournament.” On social media, the hashtag #ColonizerCup gained traction. In the wake of the tournament, global superstars Mesut Ozil of Germany and Romelu Lukaku of Belgium expressed frustration at fans’ criticism they perceived as based on their immigrant identities. This paper will examine France’s 2018 World Cup victory through contested, mediated narratives about immigration and national identity in traditional and social medias.