How can we explain the fact that football established itself in the interwar period as the star sport of sports news, initially little appreciated in France?
The special thing about football in France is that it only became a popular sport at the end of the First World War. Until 1919, football was actually divided among several federations. During the war his practice at the front increased the number of his followers. In 1917, the Charles Simon Cup was created, in which all teams, small or large, could participate: it was a great success. The event, inspired by the model of the FA Cup, the English Cup, satisfies the very French taste for egalitarianism. The audience loves it when Tom Thumb wins. To use the words of Louis Aubert, publisher in 1936 of Guestbook Coupe de France: “ In the Coupe de France there are goats that put several large wolves to flight before lowering their horns and touching the grass in the meadow with their goatee… “.
Following the example of cycling, the Coupe de France, organized by the French Football Federation, has press titles as partners: Lectures for everyone, Sport, The little ParisianFirst and then after the Second World War France evening.
The rise of football also has socio-economic explanations. In the early 1930s the population became urban and football became an urban sport. In the same way the working class is homogenized: the worker is increasingly employed in the big factory. As such, it can be used in sports paternalism to monitor employees’ leisure time, helping them understand Taylorist principles by comparing it to team play. In 1928, at the same time that Peugeot’s directors began building the larger factory in Sochaux, he founded FC Sochaux, the first professional French football club. But football can also be used by workers’ federations, in particular, after the creation in 1934, of the Sports and Gymnastics Federation of Labor (FSGT), which emerged from the union of two socialist and communist workers’ sports federations, the Union of Workers. Sports and Gymnastics Association of Work and the Sports Federation of Work.
Football is as present in employers’ publications as it is in the bodies of the FSGT. It also led to the creation of a specialized press. Certainly it is very present, with bicycles, on the pages of the Sports mirrorborn from the transformation of the illustrated newspaper The mirror which showed the First World War, and which had a circulation of 200,000 copies in the 1930s, the weekly magazine Football was created by journalist Marcel Rossini and is exclusively dedicated to football. After sinking into collaboration, he was replaced after the war by France football and also belongs to the Amaury group The teamtransformation of Car.
