The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer by David Goldblatt

Author:David Goldblatt [Goldblatt, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Soccer Players, Sports & Recreation, Soccer - History, Soccer Players - History, Soccer, History
ISBN: 9781594482960
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2006-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Not having enough to do and receiving high wages, . . . [they] very quickly show in Brazzaville an innate laziness, and acquire intemperate habits and a dissipated lifestyle, which is at odds with the civilizing work that France undertakes in the colonies . . . It is for this reason that we have all kinds of games, and by this means that we will remove them from the influence of immoral dancing and dangerous companions.2

In French North Africa settlers had been arriving since 1830 and in Algeria had created the football-playing Club de Joyeuses d’Oran in 1897. Despite incurring the disapproval of much of the French educational establishment in Algeria, schoolboys, students and young bank clerks marked out pitches in lines of plaster powder, shared their boots and took their chances on the bumpy military parade grounds and empty spaces of Algiers, Oran and Constantine. They were playing leagues in the main cities within the decade and people were coming to watch. In 1906 Sport Club d’El Biar attracted over 2,000 spectators to their game with a team from the visiting British ship HMS Dreadnought. As in South Africa the physical proximity of a football-playing white colonial working class to the colonized population saw an informal diffusion of the game to the Arab streets of the big cities. In 1910 the first Arab team had donned their green shirts and took to the field as L’Étoile Sportive de Dupere. The colonization of Africa remained incomplete, the diffusion of football had barely begun, but already this strange compelling European game was providing a platform for the assertion of identity and a quiet declaration of independence.

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