Fiston Mayele a la clé 🔑

you don't win silver. you lose gold.

[B @JackyBooooy]

Manu Koné vraiment un double R, un RENOI ROBUSTE

[Fabrizio Romano @FabrizioRomano]

👑✨ 20 World Cup goals in 20 World Cup career games. 27 years old.

Kylian Mbappé. 💥

[Equipe de France ⭐⭐ @equipedefrance]

𝗘𝗡 𝗗𝗘𝗠𝗜-𝗙𝗜𝗡𝗔𝗟𝗘 𝗗𝗘 𝗟𝗔 𝗖𝗢𝗨𝗣𝗘 𝗗𝗨 𝗠𝗢𝗡𝗗𝗘 ! 🇫🇷🔥
Nos Bleus battent le Maroc et rejoignent le dernier carré du mondial 😍

🇫🇷 2-0 🇲🇦 | #FRAMAR l #FIFAWorldCup

[Jojo’s Bizarre Congolese Adventure 🇨🇩🇵🇸 @TJMufuta]

Kwanga-gate version Côte d’Ivoire lmaooooo

[Fiston Mayele a la clé 🔑 @jzzvbs]

@sugeknight75 @oui81626742 @seumyeuff C’est vrai, pas besoin de s’afficher. Mais des fois la honte peut être un moteur

[Romain Laplanche @rolapche]

Thierry Henry a résumé l'esprit du football de rue en banlieue parisienne 🇫🇷 pour FOX Sports :

[KFC France @KFCFrance]

pour des raisons évidentes, aucune serviette ne sera disponible dans nos restaurants aujourd’hui.

[KOA @KwabenaOA]

The way these twins terrorized African teams them times. Killer striker and uncompromising defender

[ًᵗᵒ @tosports13]

very tired of them treating russian athletes like they’re war criminals because of their government when they don’t do the same to american or israeli athletes

[🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🌋🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @hum_dunkin]

I delayed the inevitable with my focus on the underdogs. Revolutions over. Its time to get behind Mbapoleon

[Fiston Mayele a la clé 🔑 @jzzvbs]

@oui81626742 @seumyeuff Le tweet est provocateur mais le fond est là. La plupart des pays africains n’auraient pas permis à ces talents de se révéler. Ce n’est pas avoir honte, c’est être pragmatique. Sinon les pays africains n’auraient pas autant de binationaux. Certains n’en ont pas besoin d’ailleurs.

[RCScouting @RCScouting]

La région de zinzin, zinzin.

[Demba Diop @dembadiopci]

La VAR c’est comme la CPI, elle ne juge que les fautes commises par les pays pauvres !

[NBA Shane @Shane00]

You and bron side by side 😂

[BMS | JOEL 🇫🇷⚜️ @JoelPostbad]

mdrr elle a tellement attaqué la mauvaise personne…

[Cheedee. @Cheedee]

3 ans de prison mais éligible à la présidentielle, toi t'as un casier judiciaire pas vierge tu peux même pas conduire sur UBER ptdrr quel pays

[Maud Destangal @destangal]

« L’immigration africaine, ce sont des gens qui viennent pour profiter des droits sociaux français. »

Remballe ton soutien grand raciste que tu es.

[Da’ Jamal.23⚽️🏀 @Dajamal_23]

Mbappe was provoked many times against Paraguay, he kept his calm, instead he laughed.

Still he was racially abused by a senator of a whole country.

This is to let you idiots know that, no matter what you do, a racist will always be a racist.

Stop defending racism, Idiots.

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

A few thoughts on the ongoing hostility and agression towards the French team coming from the Hispanic world without naming names.

Not long ago I reflected that Black people in France attract a particular kind of anti‑Blackness based on my own experiences. Some of you may remember. I argued that there is a layer of hostility due to the fact that Frenchness destabilises or troubles racialised stratifications.

Because, once more, even within that imagined hierarchy; keeping to whiteness for now, there is still a ranking.

French people sit a few rungs above Spaniards and other Hispanics, who not long ago were not even considered white. I need people to remember this, to understand part of the dynamics we are seeing enacted on our screens.

There is a mostly silent global acceptance of that hierarchy, and actually many groups racialised as white today carry deep feelings of insecurity, if not inferiority, which links back to proximity dynamics and they project that onto Black French people.

Or, in their world, Black people who claim Frenchness, those who identify as French.

And again, this is largely due to racial status anxiety, and what Frenchness represents in the Western racist imaginary: sophistication, civilisation, refinement and so on; all of which clash so profoundly with colonial constructions of Blackness.

So it feels transgressive.
Oxymoronic even.

But the point is that it activates contempt, hostility and identity/boundary policing in a very particular way.

I’d go as far as saying in a way that African Americans, or even Black Britons for a closer geopolitical comparison, are not quite policed — not to deny the very real racism and racial policing they also experience, what I am saying is the kind of outrage the idea of Black Frenchness triggers, has a specific colonial resonance.

Spaniards in that racial hierarchy are located below the French hence necessarily feelings of inferiority are bound to be correlates.

This will be denied, naturally. But a reminder that we all internalise social structures.

No one in France feels inferior to Spaniards or Hispanics. It is simply not a thing, they may too deny the existence of that hierarchy that places them above them, which actually support that hierarchy has been internalised.

[Collingwood 🇬🇧 @admcollingwood]

This is sort of funny, and Brazil have definitely got worse, but it misdiagnoses the problem. In fact, this is a story of what has happened to society and with our economies, and the ideology of our ruling elites.

The first point to accept is that *all* football nations have lost their particular style: there has been a flattening of the way in which teams play. I first started watching football as a very young boy in the late eighties, and through until the early 2000s, most of the big nations maintained a distinct way of playing. The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Brazil and England all spring to mind. But two things have happened -- the first connected to the latter.

First, the Champions League (and later the Europa League) means that the best teams in Europe play each other almost every week during the season. That provides a consistently present interface for an accelerated exchange of ideas, formations, and tactics. But it also acts as a kind of gain of function research for football: there is now an extremely rapid cycle of tactical, transfer policy/player selection, and fitness innovation, response and counter response. The football OODA loop has never been tighter.

Second, and connected to this, there has been an extreme version of the Pareto Principle income inequality that has happened among western societies as a whole. Wealth, partly due to the Champions League, and partly due to the Premier League, has accrued to a smaller and smaller number of teams, even as the size of the pie, due to the massive increase in TV revenue in Europe, has expanded beyond all recognition. This means that all the best players in the world end up in the same handful of clubs. We can name them: Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Juventus, Bayern Munich, PSG, Real Madrid and Barcelona. Furthermore, with the advent of global scouting networks and post-Moneyball databases, this means the best players from anywhere in the world, often at young ages. Remember when an unknown player would have a great World Cup and find himself playing for, say, Tottenham or Monaco or wherever? Those days are gone. We know about every player in the most minute detail. There is no mystery. The good players are already in Europe.

The first time I noticed this process of wealth accumulation was with the great Ajax team of 1995. I was only just a teenager, and that team was like a revelation for me in terms of the way football could be played. All of them (bar Danny Blind and Frank Rijkaard, who were an earlier generation) came up through the Ajax academy system and blossomed at the same time. They played in the Ajax/Dutch style (4-3-3, with two wingers that stayed very wide, and a centre back pushing into midfield when they had the ball, holding possession playing in the opponent's final third). But within two seasons, the entire team was broken up: Davids, Seedorf, Klijvert, Ovremars, Rijzeger, Kanu, Litmanen, even Van Gaal, the young manager -- they'd all gone to richer clubs elsewhere. In the 1960s or 70s, they'd have stayed together and won multiple European trophies. In England, we saw a similar thing with Southampton. Newcastle are suffering the same now.

All this means that players don't stay in their home environments and countries, with their clubs, and the process of mimesis breaks down. Add that to the first point, related to the way intra-European football forces a flattening through various mechanisms, and you have what we see now.

A couple of World Cups ago, the Netherlands played a 3-5-2, to my absolute horror. The Netherlands playing without proper wingers! Now we have a Brazilian team that has two Arsenal players, two Man U players, one Newcastle player -- even a Bournemouth player, for goodness sake. And they'll all have had the majority of their careers outside Brazil. Some will have left when they were 15 or 16, scouted by Shaktar Donetsk (famous for bringing in young Brazilian players) or Real Madrid. Why are we therefore surprised that they play like any other European team?

The Netherlands style lives on -- but through Barcelona and therefore the Spain national team (via Cruyff, and thence Guardiola), not in the Netherlands national team. But the Brazil style (a languid slow, slow, slow, punctuated by sudden bursts of incredible skill, raking passes, speed, and crackerjack long shots) is dead. When better Brazilian players emerge in future, and maybe they return to winning World Cups, they'll do so as Europeans would, not Brazilians. The German and Italian styles are also dead. The English style is also pretty much dead, although that was an evolutionary dead end in terms of International Football, so we do not lament it.

This, rather than boozing or religion, is the reason for what we see with the Brazil national team. I find it deeply sad. But no doubt the neoliberal progressives who run our countries will view it as a great success.

@AaronBastani @WilliamClouston @georgegalloway @jj_bull