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A sideways look at the politics & passions of an iconic summer…
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Just like politics, a World Cup can make for strange bedfellows, even if it’s only on social media. When France swept to a resounding 4–2 victory over Croatia in the final of the 2018 tournament in Russia, two bitter political opponents in France went capital with their joy on Twitter. The president, Emmanuel Macron, who was present and jumping around uproariously during the final in Moscow, simply tweeted: “MERCI”. Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right opposition party Rassemblement National signed off her missive with “HISTORIQUE!” Prior to that emphasis, she’d expressed thanks to the manager Didier Deschamps and all his players. Lessons from history, perhaps, passed down through the family; twenty years earlier, before France’s brilliant young forward Kylian Mbappé had even been born, her father had taken a swipe at a team who took it and hit back harder.
Jean-Marie Le Pen founded Rassemblement National, the forerunner of the Front National party, in 1972. By the mid-nineties, he had secured 15% of the vote in the first round of the French presidential elections, as his ugly ideology sought to stoke intolerance in society around issues of race, identity, and terrorism. Emboldened by his increasing support, Le Pen, not for the last time, took aim at the increasingly multicultural make-up of the national side while they were competing in Euro 96. “It’s a bit artificial to bring players from abroad and call it the French team,” he said. It was a loaded comment, frothing with wilful ignorance and deliberately incendiary. Amid an increasingly turbulent social backdrop, France was scheduled to host the World Cup two years later.
When it did arrive, France 98 contained beaming rays of light. At the tail end of football’s most vibrant and in-flux decade, this was the tournament where international football really cranked up a gear. In the country where the World Cup was originally conceived, 32 countries took part for the first time ever and provided an abnormally high volume of top-quality teams. For fans of narrative, it was packed with standout career moments, high and low, for a Rolodex of nineties greats like Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo, Dennis Bergkamp, David Beckham, Davor Šuker, and Roberto Baggio. As a visual spectacular, it was stunning, and not solely because of the aching drama of the football; the whole thing took place during a glorious, sun-kissed French summer, which created glowing days and humid nights as a canvas for the players to work on.
It had its spectres, like all World Cups. The pre-millennial tension of the commercial war between Nike and adidas for global domination of football was evident and overbearing. It was then later revealed by tournament organiser Michel Platini that the path to what would eventually be the final in Paris between France and Brazil had been laid deliberately. While the final might have had a degree of engineering, its finale was beautifully organic and, given the fractious social atmosphere in France, timed to perfection. Le Pen had called it on with the nations’ footballers, and in the closing seconds at the Stade de France on 12 July 1998, Emmanuel Petit and the French team put the but in the rebuttal.
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