OK, I’m boring. And this is the last time I will say this: football won’t change the world. But don’t criticise me for being depressed when, after 20 years, the lesson is not learnt and the same garbage is talked – and it’s being talked by the very people who propagated it last time. Tonight the French Ambassador to the UK proclaimed that the new word is “diversity”, France is now a “diverse” country like its football team and, following the example of its football team, is unified in its diversity. It’s a new reality, a new beginning.

    Exactly 20 years ago, after France won the World Cup in 1998, the buzzword was one that had only been used before to criticise “the Anglo-Saxons” but was now used to describe the new France that had emerged from a football match: “multicultural”. It didn’t last. It couldn’t last. The French Republic never did “multicultural”. It can’t do it without a massive political and cultural shift, amounting to a revolution, in its Republican psyche. If you come to live in France from elsewhere you are told to forget your former culture and “assimilate”, Frenchify yourself. Unify = Frenchify. As a result Mehmet, a French Kurd, told me in 2000, “We’re not really talking about integration, we’re talking more about … assimilation. There’d be a problem going back [to Kurdistan] for many people, a problem of readapting. In fact, some people are ashamed of their Kurdish origins.” His friend Rusen agreed: “Assimilation, adaptation, these are what we have to work with.” So a couple of years after France’s great “multicultural” moment, the fascist Front National came second in the first round of the presidential elections.

    And now? Just under 20 years after French-Algerian Zinedine Zidane scored the winning goal for France in 1998, Emmanuel Macron, seeking election as France’s new president, let fall his opinion that women of African origin in France had too many children. So here we go again and  I doubt if “diversity” will last as long as a couple of years. But back then, although the Front National won the first round of the presidentials, they lost the election decisively at the second round. Today, however, we live in different times: we face a fierce political battle with an internationally resurgent far right, whether it’s in the shape of Trump, Bannon, the Front National, the Italian Interior Minister, the far right of the Tory Party or the disturbing and disturbed Tommy Robinson. Until we’re fully engaged with that, no amount of football will change the world.