Numbers back France’s claim of being soccer’s chief nation
NIZHNY NOVGOROD, Russia — Ask Didier Quillot who he is supporting in the World Cup and the chief executive of France’s first-division league pauses to work up the proper amount of disdain before answering.
“Who am I for? For France, obviously,” he eventually said Wednesday. “I am French. So I am a supporter of my country. “
The answer really isn’t that obvious, though, because Quillot’s league has 19 players spread across the rosters of six of the quarterfinal teams. The leading scorers for Uruguay and France play in Ligue 1. Goalkeeper Danijel Subasic, the hero of Croatia’s victory in the Round of 16, plays in France. So does Brazil’s Neymar, arguably the best player left in the tournament.
Most of them will play Friday when Uruguay and France meet in Nizhny Novgorod, and Brazil plays Belgium in Kazan. All four teams are unbeaten.
“Ligue 1 is now clearly the No. 3 championship after the Premier League and the Spanish Liga,” said Quillot, whose league trails only the EPL and La Liga in World Cup goals. “And in terms of a country, France is clearly the No. 1 country is terms of talent.”
Quillot is mixing apples and oranges because Ligue 1, like any league, can sign players without regard to nationality. And in recent years it has signed some extraordinary ones, including Neymar, the most expensive player in history, and Sweden’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the most talkative one.
That star power helped Quillot negotiate a record four-year, $1.2 billion contract for domestic
television rights, a 60 percent increase over the last deal and one that will allow clubs to do even more spending.
But France’s talent gold rush doesn’t stop at the club level. The country has been even more successful at turning out native-born national-team players — for France and nearly half a dozen other countries, mostly former French colonies.
According to an exhaustive study conducted by Darko Dukic, a former sports sociology teacher at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, France has sent more players to the World Cup this century — more than 200 — than any other nation. In Russia, 50 Frenchborn players have participated, playing for France, Senegal, Morocco, Portugal, Argentina and Tunisia.
“I was definitely surprised by my findings,” Dukic said. “I expected to see Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo or Buenos Aires top the list of cities that provide most World Cup players. I guess it is no longer a secret that
Paris produces some of the best players in the world … We do consider France the No. 1 country in the world for training,” he said. “The academies, the scouting of talent and picking them up and making them great is clearly part of our DNA.”
But remember, he’s French.