Willy Sagnol the player never hesitated to tell the world what he was thinking. Willy Sagnol the manager has been similarly content to speak his mind, particularly on the subject of referees. So when Bordeaux’s main newspaper, Sud-Ouest, organised a group interview between the Bordeaux manager and some fans among their readership, we were entitled to expect plenty of material to chew over. What we didn’t expect was to be thrown into another row about racism and stereotyping of African players in French football.
After eighteen minutes, having already given some measured comments on squad management and a more detailed assessment on the development of young star Thomas Touré, Sagnol received a fairly anodyne question about how Bordeaux will deal with the loss of a number of their players during the upcoming African Cup of Nations.
At first Sagnol reacted in PR mode. They would deal with that situation in the same manner as their problems with injuries since the start of the season: going match by match, monitoring the energy levels of the players closely, adapting selection and tactics where necessary. So far so unremarkable. Then Sagnol the inveterate talker took over.
“What’s sure is that while I am manager of the club there will be far fewer African players joining the ranks of Bordeaux, because I don’t want to find myself losing twelve players for two months every two years.”
Perhaps not the nicest thing to say, but a harmless enough proposition, and one shared by a decent number of managers around Europe. But when asked whether those comments might deprive him of a significant portion of the available talent pool, Sagnol went further still. He ended up scratching at the scar tissue of a wound that has been festering upon French football for some time, a wound exacerbated in April 2011 during the Laurent Blanc racial quota controversy and a wound that is now, once again, bleeding.
“The advantage of your “typical” African player is that he’s cheap, he’s a player that’s ready to fight, who is… powerful, on the field. But football isn’t just that; football is also about technique, intelligence, discipline. So you need everything. You need Scandinavians too. They’re good, they have a good mentality.”
Only Sagnol knows whether he intended to imply that African players don’t have technical skill (a preposterous thing to say), nor intelligence or discipline (just as preposterous, but with added connotations of an unpleasant and unpleasantly familiar nature). Perhaps realising that he may have just put his foot in it, he tried to place a more positive spin on his comments.
“It’s a mix, a football team, it’s like life, it’s like France. It’s a mix, you have defenders, forwards, midfielders, fast players, big players, small players, technical players…voilà.”
At this point he seemed to realise that he should shut up, and the discussion moved on. Had he said the part about the mix without the comments that preceded it there would be no problem. But the only reason he was talking about the qualities a team needs is that he’d just said something which at best could be qualified as daft, and at worst racist. Sagnol’s comments, once they were published on Tuesday morning, prompted a huge reaction on social media, most of which could be found on the spectrum between shock and fury.
The explosion of questions that arose encompasses long term, short term, parochial and wider implications of what Sagnol said. There are only so many that can be dealt with here, but we can start with the small and work our way up. Firstly, how on earth is Willy Sagnol supposed to look his squad in the eye and have their trust after today?
After all, it should not be forgotten that Sagnol is first and foremost a manager tasked with getting the best out of his team. He cannot do that if he does not have their trust and confidence. And he will not have their trust and confidence if some, many or most of his squad, whatever their background, interpret his comments as most people seem to have done, as evidence of either crass stupidity, blinkered bigotry or outright racism. This is especially true for Bordeaux captain Lamine Sané, one of the players set to take part in the 2015 CAN. Sané was mentioned in a not-particularly-helpful press release from Les Girondins on Tuesday evening, in which they gave their total support to Sagnol, denounced “those who seek to exploit this controversy for malicious ends”, and helpfully reminded everyone that Sagnol made Sané captain as soon as he was appointed this summer. Clearly Bordeaux missed the memo which pointed out that the defence, “some of my best friends are black”, and variations thereon, are not legitimate arguments when defending yourself against accusations of racism. Whether Sané was asked for his opinion on the matter before he was held up as a human shield is not known.
Quite what the most depressing thing about this whole scenario is depends on your point of view. For a Bordeaux fan it might be some version of the above, but for a fan of French football in general it is probably the fact that one of the younger generation of coaches should still be thinking and saying garbage like this. So what does this controversy say about French football today?
It won’t escape anyone’s attention that at around the same time on Monday that Sagnol was making his comments, one of Ligue 1’s only two black coaches was losing his job. Whether Claude Makélélé deserved more time to save Bastia’s sinking ship is a debate that can be had another day, but his being let go when other coaches of struggling clubs are being given more time certainly left something of a sour taste. France may be progressive in that it’s giving rookie black coaches a chance in the first place (Hi, England!), but various types of racism persist. The immediate reactions have revealed not only diverse points of view but also some of these structural issues.
Some of France’s media seemed reticent to criticise, talking about Sagnol having expressed himself “in a clumsy manner” or “crudely”. How the wider French media deal with this issue going forward will be instructive in examining where their priorities lie regarding the issue of racism in French football. Sud-Ouest, for their part, simply seem terrified at the prospect of having jeopardised relations with the major football team of the region, whose fans comprise much of their readership, and have thus published a follow-up titled “Why there is no Sagnol controversy”. The comments section underneath that article, somewhat predictably, are mostly comprised of people sarcastically thanking Sud-Ouest for landing their manager waist-deep in the malodorous stuff, wondering why anyone is complaining given that Sagnol didn’t say anything that was untrue, or railing against political correctness gone mad. Criticising one’s own team is not something that comes easily to football fans, after all.
Some slightly better-known people have also been asked for their opinions on the matter. One member of Aquitaine’s regional council, Naïma Charaï, has expressed her astonishment and dismay at Sagnol’s words, and we can expect politicians from across the spectrum to emit much more heat (and perhaps even some light) over the coming days. Figures from within football have also been invited to chip in. Claude Le Roy, who knows Africa better than most having managed many of the continent’s national football sides, pointed out the gaping hole in Sagnol’s logic by reminding the ex-St Etienne man of other stephanois for whom being African wasn’t an impediment to being technically proficient, intelligent, disciplined or even all three, citing the examples of such multi-talented and highly influential men as Eugène N’Jo Léa and Salif Keita.
Louis Saha has harshly criticised Sagnol’s “indefensible” words, but not the man himself, saying he’s 99% sure his ex-colleague in the national team isn’t a racist. Instead he has implored Sagnol to understand why people are so shocked and appalled by what he said. Of course, one of the first whose views were sought on this matter was Lilian Thuram, who is in danger of becoming the media’s go-to man whenever the issue of racism comes up. Thuram responded with his usual mix of exasperated yet eloquent frustration, bemoaning the presence of both prejudice in France and people like Sagnol who are reinforcing such prejudices among other people.
Alongside the likes of Saha and Thuram, Sagnol represented France at senior level with distinction for eight years. As any readers of this site will probably be aware, during that time he will have played with a number of players of African origin who most certainly did not lack technique, intelligence or discipline. Perhaps Sagnol shall “defend” himself (and in so doing open up a whole new case of worms) by saying that was referring only to players who came to France as adults. But what then of players like Victor Ikpeba, 1997 African Footballer of the Year, with whom Sagnol played as Monaco reached the semi-finals of the Champions League? For both club and country, a huge chunk of Sagnol’s career was spent with people who proved his comments from Monday’s press conference to be completely false. Perhaps he spent little time actually in their company. Perhaps that might explain why he is labouring under such a dated and absurd misapprehension. Or perhaps we should cease looking for logic where there is none. After all, not ten minutes before he was questioning the mentality of African players, Sagnol was praising the character and determination of Henri Saivet while the Senegalese forward fights to regain fitness. Work that one out.
Lastly, for now at least, what does this mean for African footballers, both in France and beyond? This is the biggest, and probably the toughest question to answer. Maher Mezahi put out a series of measured tweets on Tuesday afternoon that highlighted just some of the possible consequences that Sagnol’s comments might have, as well as the absurdity inherent in any discussion of “typical” African players. We look forward to seeing his complete thoughts on this matter being given the space they deserve in the mainstream media.
Suffice it to say for now that Sagnol’s comments won’t help. It’s bad enough that these stereotypes still exist anywhere, never mind in the mind of one of Ligue 1’s more promising coaching prospects. We can probably assume that he isn’t the only one, and furthermore that France isn’t the only place where these opinions are held. Other writers, most notably Jonathan Wilson, have previously highlighted the negative effects that this exact kind of stereotyping of African players by Europeans has had throughout African football, from youth player development to the performances of their national teams. Sagnol, whether he wanted to or not, effectively legitimised this process and then had his position defended by his club, one of the biggest in France. If you can find an example of institutional propagation of dangerous misinformation having positive effects, I’d like to hear it.
As hard as it may be, we must hope that something, anything, positive can come out of this. Perhaps the process of this question being dealt with across the media will make some within the game see the light and thus update their views on African players as both footballers and human beings. The alternative, which seemed to be happening below the line on the reaction piece in Sud-Ouest as well as during RMC’s phone-ins earlier on, is a retrenchment of positions and an unthinking defence of the utterly indefensible. And in the absence of progress, all we will be left with is angst, anger and tension. And a gaping wound on French football which will take a long, long time to heal.