France's Troubled Suburbs and Football's Reflection of Society

France's troubled suburbs have produced many French stars, but the divide between the banlieues and mainstream society remains.

The suburbs have produced many of the international household names in France's World Cup squad, including Kylian Mbappé.

However, their success can be contrasted with the experiences of thousands of disenfranchised young people from some of the most marginalised communities in France.

Football can be viewed as a mirror of French society, and the composition of the national football squad has drawn attention to a fractured and divided French society.

The residents of the banlieues – particularly young people – experience disproportionately high unemployment rates, estimated at close to double the national average in some locations, as well as wide-scale social and political exclusion from mainstream French society.

As a result, there are generations of descendants of immigrants from former French colonies who, although born in France and are French citizens, have acquired the status of what Dr Matthew Moran terms the "internal outsider": "immigrants, and especially those of Maghreb origins, find themselves in a no-man’s land at the outer reaches of the Republic – officially and literally."

Since the late 1980s, the suburbs of Paris have been home to ongoing incidents of social unrest and urban violence.

The 1998 World Cup victory of the French football team was short-lived, as the success of the team was not indicative of the success of the French assimilationist model of integration.

Since the 1990s, the far-right National Rally party (formerly the Front National) has gained increasing support, including a shock place in the second round of the 2002 Presidential elections for then leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Since the 1990s, the banlieues have been home to a large population of socially stigmatized and permanently viewed as outsiders.

The banlieues have been home to a population of young people who see football as a way out of the cycle of poverty and discrimination which has come to characterise these neighbourhoods.