The Language of the Game by Laurent Dubois

Author:Laurent Dubois
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

5

THE MANAGER

In early 1958, Mohamed Boumezrag, a retired professional soccer player, began traveling around France to recruit players for a new team. He met in secret with top professional players throughout the country. One after another, the players agreed to quit their current teams, including the national team, and join his. They were to disappear, all at the same time, and travel to Tunisia. There, they would announce that they were forming a soccer team to represent the nation of Algeria. Boumezrag had convinced the players, all of whom had been born in that French colony, that they could use their soccer talent as a weapon in the war for their country’s independence.

Boumezrag was born in Algiers in 1921. His family was very politically active: his grandfather was an imam from the town of El Asnam, in the interior of the country, and had spent decades in prison because of his resistance to French colonization. During the time Boumezrag was growing up, a vibrant set of political movements in Algeria had criticized the colonial order and demanded more political rights for Algerians. He was interested in politics, but he also had a passion for soccer, playing with teams in Algiers and elsewhere. As a teenager, like many other players from North Africa, he moved to France and began playing for some of the country’s best professional teams. He was recruited by the Girondins de Bordeaux, and during World War II played for L’Union Sportive de Mans, where he also served as the team’s manager, before retiring from soccer in 1946. When, in the early 1950s, a new and more militant anticolonial movement developed in Algeria, led by an organization called the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), Boumezrag joined the underground.1

In 1956, Boumezrag began to dream about creating a team for Algeria. There were many players from Algeria at the top levels of French soccer, a number of whom were supporters of the FLN. Among those he successfully recruited, the biggest stars were Mustapha Zitouni, who played for Monaco, and Rachid Mekhloufi, who had helped his team, Saint-Étienne, become champions of France the preceding year. Mekhloufi and Zitouni had been recruited to play on the French national team in the 1958 World Cup: as colonial subjects, they could represent the French empire on the international stage, as many players, including Raoul Diagne, had since the 1920s.2

Boumezrag’s pitch to Mekhloufi, Zitouni, and other players was simple. For four years, Algerian insurgents had been fighting for independence. The war had become increasingly brutal, and countries around the world were interested in its outcome. In a time of rising movements for independence throughout the globe, the FLN was seeking recognition from foreign governments. But most nations still viewed the group as an internal rebel movement that France had the right to repress. What could legitimize the FLN’s claim to represent a nation? Boumezrag thought he knew: a soccer team. Therefore, he was asking his recruits to do more than just play. He was asking

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