France’s national soccer team has become an unlikely barometer for the country’s leading far-right party, whose leaders' shifting rhetoric about the team reflects its broader attempts at moderation — from appeals around racial identity to working-class solidarity — and helps explain why the National Rally is now seen as having a genuine shot at the presidency after decades of falling short.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the party known during his lifetime as the National Front, became perhaps the most vocal domestic antagonist of France’s soccer team as it emerged as an international force in the 1990s. After the country assembled a formidable squad led by nonwhite players with heritage from across its former colonial holdings,Le Pen disowned them as “fake Frenchmen who don’t sing the Marseillaise or visibly don’t know it.”

“It’s a little bit artificial to bring in foreign players and baptize them ‘Equipe de France,’" Le Pen said in 1996, words he repeated even after the teamwon the World Cup two years later. “They put an Algerian in to please the Arabs, a Kanak who can’t even sing the national anthem, blacks to satisfy the Antillais. None of them has any place in a French team.”

As Marine Le Pen prepared to succeed her father as leader of the party, she echoed his critique of the team as an example of France’s new migrants refusing to assimilate,calling the 2010 World Cup squad a collection of "ethnic, religious clans that are creating a sort of apartheid within the team itself.”

“Most of these people consider themselves as representatives of France one minute, when they’re at the World Cup,”she said in a television interview at the time. “But the next, they feel like they belong to another country or have another nationality in their hearts.”

As France’s governing parties weakened over the 2010s, Le Pen saw an opportunity to win support from traditional center-right constituencies. She insisted her party was “not racist,”ejected her father after he repeated statements denying the Holocaust, and rebranded the movement under a friendlier National Rally banner (abbreviated as RN in French).

Even if she was not ready to be a fan of the French national team — Le Pen conceded she "knows absolutely nothing about football” and expressed a preference for rugby — she was ready to abandon her father’s loud tradition of naysaying its successes.

“It’s hard for the RN and far-right wing to be as blatantly critical of Les Bleus when the team has represented the nation well over the last decade in both their on- and off-pitch endeavors,” said Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, a sports diplomacy expert who teaches at New York University’s Robert Preston Tisch Institute for Global Sport and isauthor of two books onsports in France.

When France won a World Cup for the second time, in 2018, Le Pen made her target not the champions themselves but politicians who latched on to the team’s successes. Emmanuel Macron, the centrist who had defeated her for the presidency a year earlier “should focus on the policies being implemented in France, about which there is much to say, and let Les Bleus go all the way to victory,”she told an interviewer. Sporting success, added Le Pen, “won't make worries disappear, it won't make the dangers of insecurity and terrorism disappear, it won't make the financial struggles disappear.”

It was part of a broader redirection of far-right resentments away from race and ethnicity to class and status, embodied by theyellow-vest protests that began months after that World Cup victory. Le Pen began to speak of France’s most famous athletes the way her father once dismissed Paris’ detached elites — “technocratic robots, graduates of the École Nationale d'Administration, and bourgeois bohemians,” he said in a 2006 address to a party convention — rather than as ungrateful immigrants representing the country’s restive suburbs.

The populist shift was evident in 2024, when several of theteam’s top strikers all joined a swift counterattack against the National Rally following its gains in regional elections. French captain Kylian Mbappé called the outcome “catastrophic” and cautioned that “the extremes are knocking at the doors of power.”

“When you have the luck to have a huge salary, be a multimillionaire, the chance to travel in a private jet, I am a little annoyed to see these sports figures giving lessons to people who struggle to make ends meet,” Jordan Bardella, a Le Pen protégé then leading the National Rally,responded to Mbappé.

Now Bardella and Le Pen are waiting to see who will be the party’s candidate in next year’s presidential elections, a choice likely to be shaped by alooming court decision this week about Le Pen’s eligibility to run due to an embezzlement conviction. Polls show either candidate would be in a strong position to win the presidency.

The two party leadersdisagree on plenty of policy and political questions, but when it comes to France’s national team — now seen as favorites to again lift the World Cup trophy — Bardella and Le Pen are united in their messaging.

“This tendency of actors, footballers and singers to tell the French how they should vote — particularly those earning 1,300 to 1,400 euros a month, while they themselves are millionaires or even billionaires — is starting to be very poorly received in our country,”Le Pen said after Mbappé stood by his anti-RN commentsin a widely discussed Vanity Fair interview published just before the World Cup began.

“Those people who are fortunate enough to live well, to be protected from insecurity, poverty and unemployment,” shetold CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, should “maintain a certain reserve.”

If you want to trace Cape Verde’s emergence as a soccer power, you might go back to 2009, when the country beat Portugal on its way to a gold medal at the Jogos de Lusofonia.

The Lusofonia Games were a junior varsity Olympics for remnants of a common empire, an effort by the 12-country Association of Olympic Committees of Portuguese-Speaking Countries to mimic the Commonwealth Games or Jeux de la Francophonie, an upstart competition for former French colonies. On its face, all of these competitions were an experiment in geographically unlikely camaraderie — could tae kwon do artists from Equatorial Guinea bond with East Timorese ping-pong players? — but beneath, they were an exercise of raw global sports politics.

ACOLOP, as the association is known by its Portuguese abbreviation, was created in 2004 and hosted its first, nine-sport Jogos de Lusofonia the next year in Macau, the Chinese region that was a Portuguese colony until 1999. Around the business meetings that accompanied the second games in Lisbon, the conversation among the national Olympic officials who ran ACOLOP focused on Brazil’s effort then underway to claim both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics for Rio de Janeiro, the first in South America. Both successful bids were built on a Portuguese-speaking coalition that crossed the traditional geographical bases within FIFA and the International Olympic Committee.

The next Lusofonia Games were held in 2014 in Goa, the Indian city where Portuguese traders planted their flag in the 16th century. Then the games stopped, leaving behind a series of canceled plans for follow-up encounters and an archipelago of never-updated web pages.

“To be honest, I think the games ended,” João Malha, a Lisbon-based sports communications specialist who served as press officer for the 2009 games, told POLITICO. “At least, I’ve never heard anything about them since Covid.”

Their legacy roars to life again this week, when Cape Verde enters the knockout rounds in its first World Cup, the smallest country ever to reach that stage.

This era of competitive Cape Verde soccer — which has twice reached the quarterfinals of the African Cup of Nations — can be traced to the 2009 Lusofonia Games in Lisbon. The under-21 Cape Verdean side began with a bang: a 1-0 victory over host Portugal, from which the small Atlantic island nation had won its independence in 1975. It then stampeded through the five-country, round-robin tournament, defeating Mozambique and drawing against Angola en route to the country’s only gold medal, a task made admittedly easier by the fact that Brazil didn’t compete in soccer even as it was the leading medalist across the games.

For those of us who were at the José Gomes Stadium, the most eye-catching player on the pitch that month for Cape Verde was Ianique “Stopira” Tavares, a 21-year-old left back who rampaged down the opposition flank. Three years later Stopira — nicknamed for a French great — moved to a Hungarian club where he spent most of his career. He retired in 2023 and then reversed himself a year later so he could help Cape Verde qualify for the World Cup.

Stopira’s return was a success by any measure, marked by critical goals at every stage despite never having been much of a goal-scorer prior to his retirement. His winner helped second-tier Torreense defeat heavyweights Sporting Clube de Portugal in Portugal’s Taça cup final, becoming the first non-top flight club to reach the UEFA Europa League in its current incarnation. And last October, Stopira scored the most celebrated goal in his country’s history — an extra-time strike which sealed the win over Eswatini that sent Cape Verde to a World Cup for the first time.

Today, the team faces Argentina, and 38-year-old Stopira is likely to start on the bench, as he did in the three group-stage matches. But for at least one more day Stopira’s Cape Verde stands where the Jogos da Lusofonia imagined the country belonged: as a sporting peer to Portugal and Brazil.

14%
The share of Spanish respondents over the age of 65 who told the POLITICO Poll before the World Cup began that they expected other countries to boycott the U.S.-centric tournament “because of politics.” Across all of the five countries we surveyed, young people were far more likely than older ones to take such politicization of the global sports for granted, with up to 60 percent of French respondents between the ages of 18 and 24 saying they expected such boycotts. In Spain, 45 percent of young people did.

Follow other findings from the latest POLITICO poll here.

The scorer of the opening American goal against Bosnia, Folarin Balogun, is eligible to play for the United States only because airline employees in New York kept his pregnant mother from returning to London until her son was born.

As our Riya Misra wrote recently, it makes Balogun not only the leader of a reinvigorated U.S. attack but a poster child for a cause validated yesterday by the U.S. Supreme Court: that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution guarantees citizenship to anyone born within its borders.

Read Riya's story about Balogun and the debate over birthright citizenship here.

LOS ANGELES — In many World Cup host cities, competing teams also find themselves jostling for soft-power supremacy around their matches. But before its first match tomorrow in Los Angeles, New Zealand has had the diplomatic landscape all to itself.

New Zealand is scheduled to face Iran, which has not had formal diplomatic relations with the United States since 1980. Even as President Donald Trump claims an end to the countries’ monthslong war is at hand, Iran will be competing in the World Cup under severe travel restrictions. The team has been forced from its original Tucson training camp to Tijuana, and is being forced to effectively commute to its matches in the U.S. without a full government delegation.

That has left New Zealand alone in pressing its off-field agenda in Los Angeles. On Sunday evening, New Zealand consul-general Katja Ackerley opened her Brentwood mansion to a “New Zealand on the World Stage” networking reception sponsored by the government agencies overseeing the country's trade, sport and foreign-investment portfolios.

“It’s all about soft power, it’s all about person-to-person,” said Peter Miskimmin, the government’s head of sports diplomacy. “We are building relations through sport rather than bringing up arms against one another.”

The country’s Los Angeles diplomatic outpost typically focuses on promoting exports of wine and lamb, expediting visas for Hollywood personnel traveling for location shoots and addressing the perpetual crisis of “Kiwis losing their passports in Las Vegas,” as one previous inhabitant of the office put it.

A delegation of New Zealand officials was preparing for their first World Cup appearance since 2010 uncertain whether any of their opposite numbers from Iran would attend, and how that might affect the standard match-day pageantry.

“This is our first World Cup in 16 years so we can’t tell what’s different,” said James Wear, a general manager of the New Zealand Football Association. “We don’t have anything to compare.”

INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Those in charge of SoFi Stadium have two days to clean out SoFi Stadium between the United States’ thumping of Paraguay on Friday and a face-off on Monday between Iran and New Zealand. They can count on the L.A. County Department of Health to help with the grossest part.

County health officials are already removing wastewater from the stadium before, during and after every match played at SoFi Stadium, to test for the presence of various viruses. The county health department — which is responsible for the well-being of ten million residents — developed its syndromic-surveillance capacity during the Covid pandemic, but is now deploying it for the first time it at a sports facility.

You can read more in a fascinating report from POLITICO health-care reporters from coast to coast, led by my Sacramento-based colleague Rachel Bluth, about how public-health authorities have prepared for a World Cup unfolding amid an Ebola outbreak, rising measles cases in the United States, and continued fears of hantavirus.

Click here for the whole story.

INGLEWOOD, California — Timothy Weah wasn’t among the 11 Americans who took the field at the start of Friday’s match against Paraguay. But he may already be the American left’s favorite player.

In the run-up to the World Cup, the Olympique de Marseille winger has appeared at an event with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and echoed Democrats’ “affordability” messaging in his critique of FIFA’s ticket prices, earning a rebuke from Coach Mauricio Pochettino.

Hours before kickoff on Friday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showcased only Weah — the New York-born son of Liberian President George Weah — in a social media post saluting the men’s national team.

“I'm looking forward to seeing the USMNT represent us in this World Cup,” wrote Clinton, accompanied by an image of Weah on the ball.

Last year, at an Oval Office photo op with his then-club team Juventus, Weah was among a group of players who stood behind President Donald Trump as he floated a possible military attack on Iran.

““It was all a surprise to me, honestly — they told us that we have to go and I had no choice but to go,” Weah later told journalists of the White House visit. “I was caught by surprise, honestly. It was a bit weird. When he started talking about the politics with Iran and everything, it’s kind of like, I just want to play football, man.”

INGLEWOOD, California — FIFA paid tribute to California’s Native American tribes as part of the pregame festivities ahead of Friday’s match at SoFi Stadium, the tournament’s first in the United States.

So-called native land acknowledgments have become common in North America, especially on the West Coast of the United States and across Canada, but have faced criticism and ridicule as the “latest woke ritual,” as one Wall Street Journal commentary put it.

The prerecorded video that played as the stadium filled up with U.S. and Paraguay fans acknowledged the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation and Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians, among others, as “the original inhabitants of Los Angeles County.”

FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s campaign-style efforts to win support from local political officials across the United States last year included visits with tribal leaders, POLITICO reported at the time.