The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) played a major role in the transformation of association football into a global game. Between 1912 and 1974, before the era of rapid economic sports globalization, FIFA officials attempted to extend the boundaries of the football empire by creating the World Cup and trying to convert new parts of the world to the people's game. It was not an easy task since they met with resistance, obstruction, and contestation. They had to revise their Eurocentric way of thinking and be willing to negotiate. Far from being a mere imperialist process, the path to world football consisted of a series of exacting exchanges and mutual misunderstandings, especially with the South American associations. It is not clear that FIFA officials always understood the demands of the developing football world but they were often able to negotiate and adapt their discourses towards non-European national associations and continental confederations. By doing so, they helped to create, if not an equal football world, at least an international world space.

Dès la première moitié du XXe siècle, le football est devenu le sport roi en Italie. Ce succès est notamment dû à la superposition d’identités que le calcio a pu produire ou endosser. En effet, pour les pionniers du ballon rond, le football était paré du prestige de l’Angleterre et, plus généralement, de la modernité incarnée par les pratiques sportives. Puis, à l’issue de la Grande Guerre, le football cristallisa les sentiments d’appartenance identitaire campaniliste ou régionaliste, exprimés par les violences des supporters. Le régime fasciste tenta d’orienter à son profit ces modes d’identification, en limitant l’expression des régionalismes, et, surtout, en instrumentalisant les succès de l’équipe nationale italienne, la squadra azzurra.

This article argues that the question of national perspectives is a fundamental problem in the writing of European sports history. It does so by demonstrating that France has an equal pedigree, in terms of diffusion and exceptionalism, as Britain, and pleads for a less skewed approach to the history of the subject in general. The article shows, first, that France contributed significantly to the internationalization of sport in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with French networks facilitating the spread of sports across the globe. It considers the impact of French universalism on the institutional structures of world sport and assesses the importance of sport to governmental diplomacy. Second, it proposes that France occupies a special place in the history of European sport, halfway between that of the British on the one hand and other continental sporting cultures on the other. It discusses the role of central and regional administrations in the creation of a sports space that is distinctly marked by a lack of football hegemony. French sport, the article concludes, is characterized by a peculiar mix of anglomanie, invented traditions, internationalism, state interventionism and eclecticism.

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Symbole de l’espoir national des États d’Afrique aux indépendances, le football africain s’est radicalement transformé : lors de la Coupe du monde de 1970, aucun des joueurs zaïrois n’évoluait à l’étranger ; en 2006, aucun des footballeurs ivoiriens ne joue dans son pays. Pour comprendre la dynamique de cette extraversion grandissante, il faut prendre en compte un enchevêtrement de facteurs – l’implication d’acteurs locaux dans le transfert de joueurs à l’étranger, la bienveillante attention portée à l’implantation de structures de formation contrôlées depuis l’Europe, la création de sélections d’expatriés ou encore les naturalisations de joueurs étrangers.