football: soccer
pied noir: literally "black foot", French colonists born in North Africa who returned to France when the North African colonies gained independence
Les Bleus: The Blues, the nickname for the French soccer team
In 2010 there was quite a sports scandal in France. The French soccer team -former world champions- lost in the initial rounds -for the first time in history I believe. The team, Les Bleus, had been mired in a sex scandal involving an underage prostitute and in-fighting between the coach and team members.
France has a large population with North African ties. One group are the pied noir who came to France after the French colonies in North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) gained independence. An even larger group are Arab North African immigrants. There is something of a tension here at times I'm told between the European French and the Arab North African French. At times the North Africans appear to feel home is more North Africa than France. The French appear to want the North African French to be thoroughly French and let go of their North African cultural identities.
The other night Algeria tied England in the World Cup. You would have thought Algeria won the World Cup. The Algerian men here were shouting and driving around for hours honking their horns and waving the Algerian flag. My friend Keith saw something like 300 Algerians on motorcycles driving through the city in a victory parade.
Every country appears to wrestle with some type of racial or ethnic situation. The French Arabs still appear to straddle two worlds here and there are sometimes some tensions between them and French society in general about where their true hearts are.
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