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.
The setting couldn’t have been more dramatic — or poignant. Berlin’s Olympischer Platz once reverberated to the Sieg heils of the Third Reich and, as the venue in which Nazi Germany staged the 1936 Olympics, was the place in which an important piece of political history was made when the black American sprinter Jesse Owens exploded the myth of Aryan genetic superiority with his four gold-medal-winning performance before an annoyed Adolf Hitler. Hitler despised black men as much as he did French men, and nothing stuck in his craw quite like the post-first world war decision to station African troops in the demilitarised Rhineland as part of the French entente occupation of the territory mandated by the Treaty of Versailles. Even more intolerable for ol’ Schickelgruber must have been the mulatto offspring that sprouted so abundantly from contacts between those same troops and local German women.
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