Why is French Football so sh*t?

I think it's shocking that there's only one top flight team in a capital city the size of Paris.

The main reason these days is, PSG excepted, little money compared to the five other big leagues, and this has been the case for decades. Going further back, France was a bit of a late developer in organised football – the Coupe de France dates back to only 1917 and the league to 1931. Many of the clubs, including PSG, Lyon, Nantes, St-Etienne and Toulouse, are even younger than that. In the early days, football was less popular than other sports such as tennis, cycling, rugby (in the southwest) and motorsports and the national team, a run to the 1958 World Cup semi-finals aside, were a non-existent force until the Platini-Tigana-Giresse era of the 1980s.

One thing France is good at though is investment in sport at grass-roots level so this has resulted in the country becoming probably the best production lines of talent in the world, providing the bedrock for two of the semi-finalists in the last World Cup. French youth coaching is of a very high standard, even at the smallest clubs. If all French players stayed playing in the country, Ligue 1 probably would be comparable in quality to the rest of the big five but French clubs don’t have the cash to keep them. That said, French clubs do often punch above their weight, as was the case with Lens last night.

As for Paris, it has never really been a sporting city, though the suburbs certainly are these days, largely because of immigration.

Edited by Seanachie - 04 Oct 2023 at 11:14am

Baldrick wrote: The main reason is French society is made up of people who like loads of sports.  Go to Italy and England and Germany football is king.  It’s not the same in France.   People in France love cycling, rugby, athletics, skiing and many more.  Paris also has a huge middle class that don’t really do football or rugby but do arts and culture etc.   Club football is big in the northern cities such as Lille and Lens and also Marseille.  The north has been the traditional centre of  industrial working class in France and then Marseille was a working class port city with a huge influx of immigrants.   I remember living in France in 1999 and the amount of people at the college who didn’t give a sh*t about the team winning the World Cup as football wasn’t there thing. They would say I like a tennis or I like basketball.  They live a huge variety of sports a a country.