2023-11-25 17:00:00
Match nights, big clubs, adored players and wild supporters: the imagination of French football is crushed by its most famous emanations.
And its geography unsurprisingly follows that of the largest cities in France, as we see by mapping the Ligue 1 and 2 clubs for the 2022-2023 season:
But far from these few professional heavyweights, there is a France that plays football quietly. Licensees of all ages registered with the French Football Federation, often passionate amateurs, these children, these men and these women draw another geography of this sport, far from the big cities, their professional players and their star clubs. Because the practice is well anchored in the territory: of the 36,000 municipalities in France, there are licensees in 32,000 of them.
The number of all these football licensees is available on data.gouv, municipality by municipality, for 2019 (figures updated and consolidated in 2022).
To summarize this data, which is too fragmented to be very readable, we have divided the territory into hexagons of 20 kilometers in diameter (or approximately 250 km2 of surface area). On this new network of France, we have calculated, for each municipality, the number of licensees (the same hexagon can include several municipalities).
We related this number of licensees per municipality to the population of each municipality (2018 census, 2017 for Mayotte) in order to calculate the number of licensees per 1,000 inhabitants. It is this number that we visualize here, hexagon by hexagon.
New regions of French amateur football are emerging
These are new regions of French amateur football that are emerging. The areas that stand out are those where a larger share of the population is made redundant. Because at the municipality level, the share of licensees can quickly become very significant: the average number of licensees per municipality is already not negligible with 38 licensees per 1,000 inhabitants, but it can rise up to 333 licensees per municipality. 1,000 inhabitants in certain municipalities, or a third of the inhabitants made redundant. Let us point out that these extreme figures are found in very small municipalities: this record of 333 licensees per 1,000 inhabitants is held by Noirval, in Loire-Atlantique with 5 licensees for 15 inhabitants. And in the 20 highest rates, there are only two municipalities with more than 200 inhabitants.
READ ALSO “The financialization of French football is to the detriment of the clubs” Why relate this number of licensees to the population per municipality? Quite simply because by representing the raw figures, it is ultimately a very classic map of the French population that appears: the more people there are, the more there are football licensees among these people, it’s mathematical.
Another geography of French football is possible with the club map: although they cover the territory very effectively (more than 14,000 clubs in France), they are over-represented in urban areas. They are therefore still drawing a new geography of football, different, but also real and concrete since we map here the places of practice of the licensees, instead of mapping their place of residence.
Let’s finish with one last possible geography of football France: France… which doesn’t play it! That is to say the municipalities where there are no licensees.
Let’s admit straight away that this map also highlights sparsely populated areas, but the result speaks for itself. Fractured, fragmented, it implicitly shows the extent of the influence of the practice of football on the territory: where we find French men and women, we find football players.
#geography #amateur #football #France #maps