Getting on the Good Foot and Showing True Colors: Football, Diversity, and Nation-Building in France and Germany, 1950–2018

In Germany and France, football federations and clubs have now affirmed for decades their determination to fight racism and social or ethnic discrimination. Doing so, they persistently proclaim their faith in football’s integrative virtues, in its capacity to transform diversity into a force and its considerable contribution to nation-building. Yet, for most sports historians and sociologists, the number of studies required to draw robust conclusions on such a complex issue has not yet been produced. The present paper aims to question a few prevailing representations and sheds light on the advantages of a French-German comparative socio-historical approach considering a chronogical period going from 1950 to 2018. Its initial part is dedicated to a necessary liminary step: the definition of a conceptual tool-box. Then, it will focus on professional football. This is certainly the aspect of football retaining most of the attention of both the general public and the scholars when refering to the neighboring country. The final part of this article breaks down specific participation modalities of ethnic and national minorities in the system of football as a popular leisure sport in France and Germany. It thus explores to what extent one may mention a crucial influence of national integration and citizenship models in this context.