“Really the little morality that I know, I learned it on the football fields and the theater stages which will remain my real universities” : by evoking his years of apprenticeship, Albert Camus (1913-1960) celebrated in 1959 the values of fraternity and mutual aid which preside over the practice of team sports in general, and of the most universal of them in particular, this football already so popular in the time of the youth of the author of The Stranger.
Now a total and globalized social fact, football now holds up an often cruel mirror to our societies. Individualism, cult of money and triumph of image and appearance, endemic violence of certain small groups, corruption… Too often, football leaves the sports pages to occupy those of news items or legal chronicles.
In this respect, the grotesque choice of Qatar as the host country of the 2022 World Cup was a new disastrous signal, rightly denounced in 2010 by a few courageous voices.
An insult
Lavish construction sites mobilizing tens of thousands of immigrant workers in conditions that some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have not hesitated to describe as modern slavery, catastrophic ecological toll to come, restricted freedom of expression, repressed dissenting voices, rights women placed under the sign of discrimination and inequality, without even mentioning those of lesbians, gays, bisexual, transgender or intersex people: the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar was an insult to all those and all those who have suffered and still suffer from a repressive, unequal and violent state. An insult also for all lovers of the beautiful game who, like Albert Camus, do not renounce the ideal both ethical and poetic to which tends, in its most beautiful and most poignant moments , football.
City of sports, sportswomen and athletes, Montpellier (Hérault) loves football. After popular Sète, which was one of the first strongholds at the beginning of the 20the century, Montpellier knew how to write, from 1919 with the birth of the Montpellier Olympic Stadium (SOM), and even more from 1974 – date of birth of the Montpellier Hérault Sport Club (MHSC) of “Loulou” [Louis] Nicollin (1943-2017) – glorious pages by winning the 1990 Coupe de France and, against all odds, the French Ligue 1 championship in 2012.
Here, a certain idea of football has been embodied, away from the now dominant model of large groups and pension funds: a family club, which has known the great joys, but also the small storms that all families experience. , deeply rooted in its city and its territory, focusing its development on training, the emergence of young talents, solidarity with neighborhood clubs, also betting very early on in women’s football… A spirit, that of La Paillade, made of “grinta”, of shared effort and talent, but also of a little madness, the one that presides over the greatest exploits -, and it took madness and talent for the band of kids who won , ten years ago now, the championship, under the nose and beard of a PSG then recently acquired… by Qatar.
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