The Athletic

Hello and welcome to the TIFO Football Podcast.

I'm John McKenzie and I'm not joined by my good friend and producer Mike Zimmerman today because today I'm joined by a guest host, Alex Barker.

It's great to have you here.

That's a wonderful honour. Thank you for having me. Yeah. And we brought you in because we were lucky enough to talk to Tom Williams. He's just written a book about French football. It's called Vava Vum, the modern history of French football. And you obviously, an expert on French football. So I thought it was only fair to bring you in. You've just listened to that conversation. You've taken part in that conversation. What did you make of it?

Oh, it was absolutely fascinating.

There were so many elements to it where even having read the book, even as you say, being one

of the biggest lovers of French football, these public lovers, there was even so many points

during that where you're making so many

connections between why we think Ligern isn't as good, why it hasn't been able to cultivate

a very rich history. And yeah, it was absolutely fascinating to hear Tom Kahnit these dots

and I guess understand why I love some parts of French football

and why some parts sometimes feel unfulfilling.

Yeah, and I think it was fascinating because we planned the episode

and we had like a running order set out

and I felt like we didn't really keep to the running order whatsoever

because we spent a lot of time talking about this concept of identity

and what is French football's

identity and it's it has an interesting backstory and there's all kinds of socio-political reasons for

why France didn't develop its football culture in the same way as other places and that's impacted

the the place of French football within the wider cosmology of, I suppose, of football around Europe.

But yeah, what I found so fascinating is we were able to touch on that question that we titled

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