France may be the host of the European Cup in 2016, but football is not per se the beautiful game in the way that it’s perceived in staunch football-loving nations like England and Germany, where the profound sentiment the game evokes has allotted the sport a spot at the heart of society.

The French are somewhat different: football is the number one sport in spite of the popularity of both handball and basketball, but society still has an uneasy relationship with the game. In plenty of European countries, the urban working classes endorsed football as a favorite sport and pastime, but France never became truly industrialised.

The working class remained small and in the rural hinterland clubs rarely united the local community. Lens, Marseille and Saint-Etienne, all proletarian cities, were hotspots of the game. Workers supported the local clubs. They wanted to belong.

Then France’s Big Bang moment came. In July 1998, France won the World Cup on home soil. Zinedine Zidane’s headers, either side of halftime, and Emmanuel Petit’s last-minute angled strike despatched with a mundane finality, crowned Les Bleus world champions. The mighty Brazilians had been humiliated.

Later that night, Zidane’s image was projected on the iconic Arc de Triomphe. France and one million delirious fans reveled on the Champs-Élysées in footballing ecstasy. Zidane had kissed the world cup trophy, a potent image that immediately granted him the status of both national megastar and “metastar.”

Immigrant talent

French fans had not particularly taken to the Juventus player earlier, but when Les Bleus won the World Cup, France embraced its new son as a demi-god. Suddenly, the ethnic diversity of the team received praise. Zidane was part Kabyle from Algeria. Patrick Vieira was born in Senegal, with his grandfather having served in the French army. Marcel Desailly was of the Ga-Dangme ethnical group in Ghana. More than 50 per cent of the squad’s players had foreign ancestors.

The national team was a “cultural mosaic” and a beacon for multiculturalism, representing a new France with assimilated and uniformly French citizens. According to Dutch professor Ian Buruma, the victory of multi-ethnic and Pan African nature was construed as national superiority born from the tolerance of the French Enlightenment and the fraternity of the French Revolution, and not as a mark of a long and bloody colonial history.

Faint hopes of a rainbow nation – “black, blanc, beur a la francaise” (“beur” is a French term to describe persons, like Zidane, with a North African background) – were born, but within days of the victory, cynical commentators tore that mythology apart.

Lilian Thuram, who had played so exquisitely against Croatia in the semi-finals, made the most astute remark, pointing out that the team was not a symbol of what was, but rather, a hint of what could be. In his opinion, the intense mass celebrations were the consequence of a state of exception – more precisely, of the promise of a different France, one of confrontation with, and acceptance of, its colonial past.

Edging out non-whites

Both Thuram and Zidane became icons, courtesy of the sumptuous goals they had scored in the semi-final and final. But when the quota scandal surfaced in France they both reacted very differently, albeit in line with the personal image they had crafted since that final in Saint-Denis. In the spring of 2011, Mohamed Belkacemi, a mid-level football official at the French football federation FFF, leaked the verbatim record of a conversation between French coach Laurent Blanc and his federation’s top officials.

They discussed the introduction of quotas to limit dual-nationality players at youth training academies. Blanc favored the idea of quotas and called black players “big, strong, powerful.” The transcript revealed that he preferred players with “our culture, our history.”

The question of double nationality was, however, justified, given the nebulous FIFA rules. Consider this: a boy of Guadeloupean parents born in Paris is selected for a youth academy, but there is an equally talented player born to French parents. Whom should the FFF select, knowing that the first boy may still choose to play for Guadeloupe later?

In his typically laconic and aloof manner, Zidane, loyal to his 1998 captain and conscious of his own carefully curated image, defended Blanc, who, he declared, was not a racist, and that player development at academies is part of a wider debate. “His wife is Algerian!” exclaimed Zidane.

Thuram reacted very differently. He highlighted the insularity and danger of reason distorted by racial thoughts. After the banlieue riots in 2005, Thuram had a public feud with Nicolas Sarkozy over the standard to which public figures and officials should be held and the intolerance for any xenophobic or racist language. In 1998, Thuram had asked a photo to be taken with all the black players gathered around the World Cup trophy.

The FFF’s proclaimed outrage over the quota scandal quickly watered down to self-exoneration, but the political dimension a year before the presidential elections, was tangible. Then came France’s 2010 World Cup fiasco, when Nicholas Anelka was sent home, and the players refused to train under manager Raymond Domenech after Patrick Viera had a hostile argument with him. The anti-immigration proponents of French society argued that the Black and Muslim players behind the mutiny were not compatible with France and the country’s culture. Football had again fanned the debate about French nationhood and identity.

As diverse as ever

France was indeed one of the very first countries to embrace the idea of nationhood, so strongly formulated in the early days of the Republic, but, like many former imperial powers, that nation is now groping with a new sense of identity.

“Le Sextape” is a pertinent example of France’s struggle in this area. A court charged Real Madrid striker Karim Benzema, a feeble performer in the Champions League final, with conspiracy to blackmail over an alleged attempt to extort funds from French teammate Mathieu Valbuena using a sex tape. In a poll in the leading French daily Le Parisien, the French public backed French coach Didier Deschamps for omitting the player, a “beur,” from the Euro2016 squad – 82 percent of respondents believed “DD” had taken the correct decision.

Benzema and gifted enfant terrible Eric Cantona hit back at Deschamps, stating that the coach had given in to pressure from racists. Deschamps’s house was vandalised, with the word “racist” appearing on the wall.

Above all, Les Bleus are a vehicle for France to discuss and dissect immigration. The team is inevitably a group of eclectic players who don’t conform with the French mainstream. They often come from immigrant families living in the desolate and poor banlieues. Then, if blessed with talent and fortune, they grow rich playing for major clubs, often abroad. The entire process is cleansed of any “Frenchness”.

Going into Euro 2016, Deschamps has selected a very deep squad with, again, a pronounced foreign footprint: ten out of 23 players have an African heritage. Midfielder Yohan Cabaye has Vietnamese ancestors in the paternal line, while striker Andre-Pierre Gignac identifies as a “Manouche”. This racial richness, like in 1998, is the result of French football’s longstanding open approach to players of all origins. In the footsteps of Zidane and Thuram, the generation of Paul Pogba and Blaise Matuidi, of Guinean and Angolan descent respectively, will seek glory on home soil, even as they represent the notion of a brittle nation.

The opening game against Romania will be a first test. On a rambunctious night in Paris, the Stade de France will be lit up in blue with a partisan crowd of 90-minute patriots. At least in football, even with its many flaws, the idea of a united France may be tangible. Or, as one French politician put it, the French team has only one colour and that’s blue.