Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Non, je m'en foot pas


The print media in France is probably the biggest in the world and certainly one of the best. In almost every field the magazines are of a higher intellectual and editorial level than their counterparts in the English-speaking world, in football especially. Though the grand old sporting paper L'Équipe suffers from an over-earnest editiorial voice and an uncharacteristic tendency to factual errors, the twice-weekly France Football, which awards the European footballer of the year award is essential reading, then there is the humorous monthly fanzine Les Cahiers du football, a sort of Gallic When Saturday Comes. Best of all though is the amazing So Foot, which walks a fine line between intellectual and political analysis of the game and wry fanzine-style humour. This month's number includes a look back at the historical footballing adversity between France and Italy, a superb article on Torino FC as they celebrate their centenary as the only Turinese club in Serie A, a piece on Lebanese football in Hizbollah-controlled regions, football-related interviews with actor Jean-Pierre Darroussin, government minister and Valenciennes club chairman Jean-Louis Borloo, and novelist Laurent Mauvignier, whose new novel Dans la foule is set during the Heysel tragedy in 1985. It's a shame they don't cross paths with FourFourTwo, recently launched in French, and do an English-language edition. It is a superb magazine and their website, even if you don't read French is well-worth checking out, as is their MySpace page. The magazine also releases football-compilation CDs, including an excellent one recently in tribute to George Best, the footballer who best personifies the magazine's worldview.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The magazine looks good, by good I mean the incomprehensible text looks the part...the edition you've shown has a feature on Mogwai...I couldn't access it on their webpage - does it go much into their attempts at colonising Japan to all things 'tic?

hail!hail! and here's to a goalfest come Saturday morn!

seanachie said...

The Mogwai article refers to the soundtrack that the band did for Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parrano's excellent film Zidane, a portrait of the 21st century. Standard Mogwai fare, and very effective.