The Mbappés of Cronenbourg

It isn’t always easy being a father. For example, in moments when your child is in distress, when you sense that fear is about to overwhelm him and helplessness will prevail. When the football team your ten-year-old son plays for is losing nil–three at half-time to those show-offs in the dark blue shirts of Racing, Strasbourg’s top-flight club. In the imagination of every local kid, and many of their parents, this club is the first step and an obligatory stop in dreams of a successful career that will eventually take them to Barcelona, Liverpool, Bayern or PSG. Every year Racing holds a kind of audition at which hundreds of boys and girls aged eight to twelve from every club in Alsace chase desperately after the ball in indescribable chaos, trying to show off their football skills under the bored gaze of Racing’s club coaches. Whether anyone has ever actually been picked at this fair, I don’t know; perhaps it is more a PR operation than a serious attempt to find new talent. Tristan didn’t go last year or the year before, not, of course, because I as his father wasn’t convinced he was more than good enough, but mainly because he didn’t want to. Otherwise, we at home are very happy with the club he plays for, because of the coaches’ attitude to the children and the attention they pay to mutual respect, fair play, responsibility to the team and all the other values and qualities we attribute to team sports but in the real world most often forget because of uncompromising and heartless competitiveness and the chase for money. After all, even Mbappé didn’t start his career at Monaco but at AS Bondy, a club from the Paris suburbs.

Uncompromising and heartless competitiveness or not, a match against those snotty, stuck-up kids in Racing’s dark blue shirts is still a special challenge. Tristan’s team had been preparing for it since the start of the season. And then came that Saturday when we drove our budding stars to the training center and talent incubator meant to have them playing in a few years’ time against the stars of Marseille, Lyon and PSG. There, of course, they have real grass, and a covered pitch when it rains, not the artificial turf on which our boys and girls from ASS scrape their knees in snow, sun and rain. The match has a special significance because the two clubs share a long history. ASS, the Association Sportive de Strasbourg, is one of the oldest football clubs in France. It was founded in 1890 as the Strassburger Fussball Club, since Alsace was then part of the German Empire. Racing was put together only a good fifteen years later. When a professional league was established in France in the 1930s, Racing joined it, while ASS, as Jacques, the club president, often and very loudly explains, chose to remain amateur. “Le foot,” says Jacques, “has never been a business for us, but a mission. If you don’t have a decent school report at the end of the year, you don’t play.”

That Saturday it was raining, as befits a proper derby. On the touchline there was a crowd of supporters, mostly parents of the home team’s stars, arrogantly and rowdily predicting that the match was decided in advance. A small group of ASS parents, much more calmly and with the dignity befitting a club for which football is not a business but a mission, quietly and fearfully expected a similar result.

And then came that terrible first half, in which dark blue shirts were everywhere and red-and-white ones nowhere. You could feel the nervousness and fear. The ball wouldn’t move, there was no game; Salimu, Tristan’s rival for the striker’s spot, first tormented every ball he got with forced dribbling and then lost it. Three goals, in very quick succession, like a burst of gunfire. These are the moments when you try to explain to your child that defeats are part of life, that without them we cannot, and do not know how to, truly appreciate future victories. That real strength of character shows in the moments when we must admit that this time we won’t succeed. I looked in my son’s eyes for a spark of understanding, perhaps of anger, which, once he got over his disappointment, would help him overcome despair and kindle new hope. At my words, Tristan rolled his eyes and went off to the coach instead, from whom he evidently expected more useful advice for the second half.

Salimu was angrily twitching his ears, looking alternately at the ground and at his father, who stood scowling on the touchline. Salimu was born in France; his father is from Senegal. Tristan’s team is very diverse. Although all of them except Tristan are French citizens, most come from the nearby Strasbourg district of Cronenbourg, dominated by immigrants from France’s former colonies and many other parts of the world. It is not so much a demographic reflection of today’s France. Tristan’s team, with a few exceptions, reflects above all the most forgotten, most marginalized and most unheard part of French society. Salimu, Gaddiel, Aziz, Sabri, Mathis, Issham and Teva come from second- or third-generation immigrant families who are formally all French, but in the eyes of most people they are not. My friend Ridha, whose parents immigrated to France from Tunisia, graduated years ago from a prestigious business school in Strasbourg. All his classmates found jobs within a few weeks of graduating, while Ridha was still unemployed a year and a half later. Send your application as Claude Martin, I once advised him, as a joke. He didn’t find it funny. In the end he had had enough of equality, fraternity and liberty and went to Switzerland, where he immediately found a job. The French don’t count themselves by ethnicity or religion, because they are nominally and formally all equal. This has led to a hidden segregation that very much exists, even though official statistics don’t register it. These are topics people prefer not to mention. When, four years ago, the then prime minister, the Socialist Manuel Valls, spoke of fellow citizens living “in ghettos… in territorial, social and ethnic apartheid,” he was attacked from all sides, especially from the right. Eking out a living in the suburbs is not a theme of the social protests against President Macron either. The fate of Tristan’s teammates and their families is of little interest to the yellow vests, which are above all a revolt of the white lower middle class from the provinces against Paris, or to the striking railway workers, doctors, lawyers and ballet dancers of the Paris Opera fighting to preserve special statuses in jobs to which immigrants from the suburbs mostly have no access. Their fellow citizens are prepared to accept and respect them only if they bring them victory at the football World Cup. Only in those moments of euphoria and celebration on the Champs-Élysées is a certain Zinedine no longer just an Algerian from Marseille but a true Frenchman, a national hero.

And in this sad truth lies the reason for Salimu’s father’s scowl. For him, his son’s sport is not just a healthy way to spend free time and hang out with friends, along with more or less serious dreams of breaking through to stardom. It is a serious, planned attempt to escape social marginality and hopelessness. After every training session, when Tristan and I head home, Salimu is still on the pitch, listening to his father’s stern analysis of missed chances and mistakes. Of course he knows that the chances of success are extremely small, but at least there are some.

That Saturday, in the match against Racing, the coach’s advice worked much better than mine. The boys threw themselves onto the pitch with incredible energy and soon silenced those little show-offs in Racing shirts and their parents. They pushed the game forward, squeezed Racing in its own half and completely confused their opponents. Spoiled stars are not used to anyone resisting them. In very quick succession, like a burst of gunfire, Tristan managed to put the ball in the net three times. In the excitement at their own efficiency, attention slipped for a moment and Racing took the lead again. Right at the end of the match, Salimu got the ball. This time he didn’t get flustered, didn’t try to imitate Messi’s feints, but passed to Sabri, who had no trouble beating Racing’s helpless goalkeeper. A draw, sweeter than any victory. Uncompromising and heartless competitiveness or not, the feeling was divine. While I was jumping up and down and shouting undignifiedly, a small smile appeared on the face of Salimu’s father for the first time since I have known him. It isn’t always easy being a father, but sometimes it is really very nice.