The example of France’s football players

For all that was made of the ‘diversity’ of the French World Cup side, what was truly striking about the team that took to the field to face Italy in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium was its very lack of diversity. For all but three of the players who thundered on to the pitch to do battle with the Italians were black Frenchmen.

Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira, the Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines of the beautiful game (along with its now disgraced Algerian maestro, Zinedine Zidane), fought the good fight for France in a contest that ultimately favoured Italy — and that says as much about the changing face of modern Europe as it does about the game of football. For what we saw on the pitch on 9 July was a French side which showcased the true global ideal of integration, not so much through its representation of that ideal, as through its very subversion of it.