A football match which will be played tonight, PSG-OM and which triggers so many passions, why? Deciphering with the sociologist Jean Viard, research director at the CNRS, who also knows Marseille very well. A city on which he has worked a lot. PSG-OM: as a match like no other, it is a construction, we can recall, enough “marketing” at the time, between Canal+ and Bernard Tapie, to make it an important moment of the season. The real classics were rather Bordeaux-Marseille, Lyon-Saint-Étienne.
franceinfo: How to explain that finally, this antagonism is so quickly and so deeply installed?
John Viard: It’s quite logical, because they are two completely different urban systems. Paris is a top-of-the-range city, it’s a bourgeois city, of high administration, etc. A well-to-do level of income, a relatively bourgeois city basically to put it simply. Marseille is not that. Marseille is a big port. It’s a city of interbreeding, of mixing which can both vote for the extreme right and at the same time, for example, when you go to matches at OM, there are a lot of people who come from Algeria, Africa, etc. It’s quite funny.
It’s a very mixed audience, but there are a lot of women. It’s important, women, it means that it’s quite calm, the atmosphere. Afterwards, it’s true that well, there were a hundred games, PSG won 46, OM won 34, it’s true at the same time that it’s not the same machines. The PSG is 600 million budget and even a little more. It is also a huge machine with extremely expensive players.
Marseille is a match, a much more popular thing. The public has a central role in Marseille. Bernard Tapie, who built, who led to the European Cup, it’s not at all the same relationship between the two cities, I think. Afterwards, everyone has their clubs and preferences.
But Marseille, which is funny with the current president, Frank McCourt, who is American, he is a man who owns sports clubs in the United States. And he bought OM because his father, in 1945, was one of the American soldiers who landed to liberate Marseille. And in his imagination, Marseille was his father’s place. It was a form of family loyalty. This is the reason that made him invest.
A priori, it’s completely different from Qatar, which has invested in PSG, which is a sporting strategy, of course, but also still very great communication. Qatar has made sport its main calling card. They are two completely different logics. But think of Spain, Barcelona and Madrid, we set up the same system since Barcelona is a popular club. The club is owned by the Barcelonans.
Everyone has their little actions while Madrid is not at all the same system and it’s a bit the same type of clashes. It is the port city, more mixed, more open to the world; and then the capital of the earth, more rigid, I would say, Madrid, they are two cultural systems, both very beautiful, I do not make a hierarchy of values, they are two cultural systems which clash with blockages which make our supporters, well, we better separate them.
And what do you think, precisely, of this sporting rivalry? Is it healthy to have rivalries that are expressed in sport like that between territories?
Basically, I prefer sporting confrontations to military confrontations. there is in sport a dimension of national or urban competition. It empties them, it allows them to express themselves, that’s good. And then, they are places of passion, so passion and violence are often quite close, etc.
Afterwards, it’s both a staging, of course, but it refers to something real. It is that indeed, France is both Mediterranean and from the Centre, and from the North, so that is on both sides, these are two different systems and that sheds light on that. To interest the game, it is necessary to stage the competitions. It interests the game, it crystallizes the populations. It is not negative to be crystallized, to be passionate. It creates a common.
You know in Marseille, there are more people who go to the theater than to the stadium… You shouldn’t believe either that all you think about is kicking a ball. I say that to put things into perspective a little, but at the same time, even those who did not go to the matches, we are very curious to know the result. We discuss, they won, etc. So it’s very identity, Marseille, it’s undeniable.
I think that the PSG, it should not be very different in Paris, perhaps a little less popular, inevitably, the social codes are not exactly the same. But basically, that we make communities, that we have shared projects because we live together. I think that’s what builds societies.