Laurent-David Samama is a journalist and writer. He is a member of the Sport and Society Observatory of the Jean Jaurès Foundation, and has
published Footporn (ed. Aube, 2021), a book in which he describes, to worry about it, the evolutions of football and draws a parallel between this sport and the pornographic film industry.
LE FIGARO. - Kylian Mbappé's extension to PSG fueled the media for several days. Does this reveal a change in our way of experiencing football?
Laurent-David SAMAMA. -
I see in it the ultimate sign of the pornography of football.
Everything goes further, stronger, faster.
This pornography translates into the constant search for efficiency, money and spectacle, even if it means getting lost in it.
Football was conceived as a game. It has become a sport.
Today it's a business, a kind of entertainment industry in competition with Netflix, Amazon, Disney... Consequence: the players are brands and in a team sport, I see it as a form of deviance.
The media coverage of this event also shows that the players have become more powerful than the clubs.
On Instagram, PSG is followed by 60 million people, while Kylian Mbappé has 71 million subscribers.
If this may seem anecdotal, it reveals that the institutions are losing ground, this applies to football but it could be applied to other areas such as politics or business.
You no longer see yourself working in the same box all your life, just as a player no longer sees himself playing his entire career at the same club.
However, Mbappé, who is skilful and well surrounded, understood that we had changed times.
And he knows that the fans don't want football as it is becoming, with players changing clubs every year and so on.
This new contract was announced with great fanfare at the Parc des Princes, with a staging worthy of an American show, and the striker of the France team was even invited to the TF1 news. Is it the logical consequence of the Americanization of football which is increasingly inspired by the NBA (basketball)?
Yes.
Moreover, more and more clubs are owned by American pension funds (Bordeaux, Red Star, etc.) or by American personalities.
The suspense around whether or not Mbappé should be extended reminded me of 2017, when basketball player Lebron James
teased his departure from the Cleveland
Cavaliers
franchise
, giving the impression that fans were hanging on to his decision.
We come back to the decline of institutions: it is no longer the clubs who control their communication but the players who have taken power.
We can also draw a parallel with the American music and film industry.
Artists have regained control over their careers, releasing their album whenever they want and on platforms that allow them to bypass record labels.
Directors release their film directly on Netflix.
This observation can also apply to the world of books, with authors who publish their books a little more independently, in order to retain more freedom in the choice of title, cover, method of distribution, etc.
The artist, the individual now has the power and Kylian Mbappé is following this trend.
Football players have replaced the rock stars of the 1970s.
Laurent David Samama
Does the proliferation of screens and viewing media have consequences for our relationship to football?
In my book, I say that during the championship period, it is possible to watch football day and night, during the week and at the weekend.
With streaming, the proliferation of channels, it is an interrupted stream that we take along the way, because it has become impossible to watch everything.
The sports journalist Didier Roustan told me that, at one time, he saw about ten matches a year and he remembered all these meetings, because they were rare.
Too much football makes it less valuable.
But football has become rare on free channels. For example, Champions League matches are now all broadcast on paid platforms...
So far, football fans have played the game because France remains a football country.
But supporters are beginning to show a sort of fed up with the cost of access to football.
The public demands that football become popular again, and not a luxury product.
Twenty years ago, you could get to the stadium easily, the whole of France could see the same match on the same television channel, with the voice of the same commentators (Thierry Rolland and Jean-Michel Larqué generally).
And
in
the end, we created common memories.
Will current generations have memories of football in common?
It's not sure.
“Our religion today is football. Stadiums are the new temples. Footballers are the new gods,” said. George Steiner. Are footballers the new gods?
They are new gods because we see them everywhere.
Football players have replaced the rock stars of the 1970s. Because our age is obsessed with performance.
There is a sort of cult of the body, of the result.
Because it is also one of the last areas of meritocracy.
You can grow up in a city, be born in the open sea on a refugee boat like the former player of the France team Rio Mavuba and become international and earn millions of euros.
In a society made up of strong corporations and where it is difficult to climb the ladder, football is a place where hard work often pays off.
And then, like the Greek gods, you can climb very high and fall all the way down.
Laurent-David Samama, "Footporn", Aube editions., €16
L'Aube