After 17 horrendous months of jihadist attacks, advances by the far right, strikes, economic stagnation and floods, a victory over Portugal would bring joyous relief to France.
theguardian.com
The hosts’ squad, whose 1998 World Cup winning team was feted for its “black, blanc, beur” composition, features 11 players with African roots (not including Réunion’s Dimitri Payet), compared with six in Fernando Santos’s Portugal squad.
That makes 37% of the two finalists’ squads, while the fact that exactly half of the 24 competing countries at Euro 2016 went into the tournament with at least one player of African descent shows the extent of migration across Europe in recent years.
Of course, those statistics have not been well received in all quarters. Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front National party used Karim Benzema’s exclusion from the France squad as an excuse to reignite the debate over race first used by her father, Jean-Marie, before the 1998 World Cup. In 2011 the French Football Federation and then France manager, Laurent Blanc, faced accusations that they had discussed limiting the number of places for players from ethnic minorities at their headquarters in Clairefontaine that would have seen players as young as 12 passed over in order to make room for their white counterparts.
theguardian.com