Laurent Blanc
Embattled team manager of the French national football team
Two days ago, the French e-zine Mediapart--edited by Edwy Plenel, erstwhile editor-in-chief of the influential daily Le Monde--revealed that senior members of the French national football federation, including the newly-appointed national team manager Laurent Blanc, held a secret powwow in January that bears the hallmarks of a nefarious racist conspiracy.
According to Mediapart report, the gist of the powwow was a project to stealthily introduce an illegal and racist protocol for enrolling new trainees in French government- and team-funded football schools: in point of fact, a quota system that would set a ceiling of 30% on French Black and North African freshmen holding a dual nationality!
Mediapart report caused--and is causing--a hoo-ha whose din now reverberates throughout the echo chamber of the political class, especially as the presidential election is looming on the 2012 horizon.
At first, senior members of the football federation denied the report outright, calling it a web of lies, though Laurent Blanc acknowledged having had a 'reflection' that couldn't possibly be construed as racist or as hinting at a racial quota system.
Laurent Blanc's 'reflection' runs something like this...
Firstly, the French government and teams spend a lot of money training young footballers in those academies. While individual teams could still recoup their investments by trading their players to, say, the English Premier League, the French national team wouldn't necessarily get something out of the bargain, given the new FIFA rules.
FIFA rules allow players holding dual nationality to switch from the national team for which they played as juniors to the other national team when they turn professionals. What's more, even as professionals, they can still switch teams, if they only play 2 friendlies top in the national team they plan on quitting. As playing for African national teams is less competitive for French-trained players than playing in the French national team, ambitious young players holding dual nationality are often mesmerized by the sirene song coming out of Africa. It's thus estimated that for the past 2 years France has lost to African national teams close to 16% of the generation of players it has trained in the last 10 years. It's therefore imperative to find ways for blocking this kind of talent drain.
Secondly, argues Laurent Blanc in the second strand of his 'reflection' that's strangely reminiscent of the anecdotal traditional selection of Canadian junior hockey players in Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, French academies more and more tend to recruit 'athletic' freshmen to the detriment of 'non-athletic' but skillful players. This biased selection has resulted in the dramatic change of the past signature French style.
Embroiled in this perilous line of 'reflection', Laurent Blanc now realizes that his argument is in fact untenable. Small wonder then that he apologized today and Francois Blaquart, his assistant, was suspended by the French football federation...
At any rate, the controversy isn't showing any sign of abating any time soon...
0 comments:
Post a Comment