What is France’s most successful industry and most prolific export? Wine? Cheese? Posh leather handbags?
No, France’s most impressive achievement in 2026 is the quality and quantity of its football. Its greatest export is footballers.
France’s third successive appearance in a World Cup semi-final tonight confirms something that has been evident for a while. Great footballers used to come from the cobbled streets of England or Scotland or from the favelas of Brazil. They now breed on the playing fields of French provincial towns and pour off the artificial grass pitches of the multi-racial banlieues (inner suburbs) of French cities.
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There are 99 French-born players at the World Cup, including 23 in the French squad. There were 242 French players last year in the English Premier League, the toughest football competition in the world. Only England provided more players to its own leading clubs.
A French victory over Spain in Dallas tonight would be the best possible response to the newest of many racist slurs against Les Bleus. The former Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said earlier this week that the French team was “of a very high level…without French players”.
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This was a judgement based entirely on race. In terms of birth-place, the 26 players in the France squad are more French than the team that won the World Cup in 1998. All but three were born in France; all 26 have French nationality.
The obsession with the skin colour of Les Bleus is not new. Before the 1998 triumph, Jean-Marie Le Pen complained that the team had been “imported” and did not know the words of La Marseillaise. He changed his tune when they won the World Cup for the first time.
A couple of weeks ago, after France beat Paraguay in the Round of 32, a Paraguayan senator, Celeste Amarilla called the French striker Kylian Mbappé, a “colonised Cameroonian” who was “pretending to be French” but was brought up “around chimpanzees and coconuts”.
Fact-check: Mbappé was born in Paris and attended private school where, among other things, he learned to play the flute.
The Senegal parliament speaker Ousmane Sonku made a similarly obtuse point, without the racist language, before the France-Senegal match on June 16th. “If you want to look at the match politically, then whoever wins, Africa will have beaten Africa.”
How many French people think that way? Some do. When my children attended bourgeois Catholic schools in Paris, some of their class-mates – not all - said that they no longer supported the France football team because it was “too black”.
On the other hand, in rural Normandy this summer I have lost count of the number of small white boys and girls wearing shirts which proclaim them to be “Mbappé 10” or “Dembélé 7”.
I don’t want to dwell on these arguments about the skin colour or ethnic background of Les Bleus. There was much talk in 1998 of the positive impact on race relations of the White Brown and Black team which beat Brazil 3-0 in the final at the Stade de France.
Within four years, Jean-Marie Le Pen, more frankly racist than his daughter, had reached the second round of the French presidential election. Within seven years, the multi-racial French suburbs had exploded into two weeks of riots, which have been repeated at roughly five-year intervals since.
Instead, I would like to ask another question. What is French football doing right which the rest of France might observe and imitate?
In the 1990s, the French football federation was criticised for picking players who were born outside France. Now France is producing so many good players that they populate the squads of other counties.
No less than 76 French-born players at this World Cup play for the countries of their families’ origin, including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Senegal. Some are not good enough for the France team. Others might easily have played for Les Bleus.
That has provoked another argument. Why are these young men so disloyal to the country of their birth? The same criticism has been made in England of the wonderful play-maker Michael Olise, a French national born in London who chooses to play for France.
I don’t want to explore those arguments either. I would much rather make another point.
The multi-racial inner suburbs and people of African and North African origin are seldom discussed in a positive way in France. The problems of the banlieue are real – poverty, violence, poor housing, drug-trafficking and Islamic extremism. The resurrected Marine Le Pen will make much of these problems in the next nine months.
But the banlieues, from my experience, are also places of great energy, courage, enterprise and creativity. The success of the France team, heavily drawn from the greater Paris area and other inner suburbs, represents the positive side of “France beyond the Boulevard Périphérique”.
The success of French football has been achieved by good and cheap sports facilities and the hard work of amateur coaches for children’s teams. It has also been achieved by encouraging, rather than denigrating the diverse qualities offered to France by migrants and their children and their children’s children.
If that has produced a “surplus” of talent which France can export back to the players’ countries of origin, all the better.
The problems of the banlieues remain. They cannot be solved by sport alone. Hence my question. What is French football doing right which the rest of France should copy?
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