Football
Football is the most popular sport in France, with 2,225,595 licensed players in 2009. Football is also known as Soccer (primarily United States,Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) The sport was imported from England at the end of the 19th century, under the name of association football. In its early days, the sport gained followers mainly in the Paris area and the Northern part of the country - Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Normandy were the first teams that were created outside Paris. In the South, football's competitor, rugby football, was more favoured at the time. Established in 1919 from competing organizations, the Fédération française de football consists of 18,000 teams.
The France national football team is one of only eight teams to have won the FIFA World Cup (1998), with good results in other editions: runners-up in 2006, third place in 1958 and 1986, and fourth place in 1982.
It is also one of only nine teams to have won the UEFA European Championship (1984 and 2000). France was also the 1984 Olympic Champion.
Ligue 1 is the French professional league for association football clubs. It is the country's primary football competition and serves as the top division of the French football league system. Contested by 20 clubs, it operates on a system of promotion and relegation with Ligue 2. The most successful club in the French first division history is AS Saint-Étienne with 10 championships (last one in 1981), followed by the 2010 champion, Olympique de Marseille with 9 titles and FC Nantes with 8 titles.
The Coupe de France is the premier knock-out cup competition in French soccer. The Coupe de la Ligue is the second major cup competition in France. The Trophée des champions is played each July as a one-off match between the Coupe de France winners and the Ligue 1 champions.
Only one French club, Olympique de Marseille, has won the UEFA Champions League in 1993. Stade de Reims (1956, 1959), AS Saint-Étienne (1976), and AS Monaco FC (2004) have been runners-up.
SC Bastia (1978), FC Girondins de Bordeaux (1996) and Olympique de Marseille (1999, 2004) have also been runners-up in the UEFA Europa League.
France women's national football team main international achievement has been fourth place at the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup.
Women's national professional competitions are supervised by the Fédération française de football. The first division is the Championnat de France de football féminin. Olympique lyonnais is the most successful team in French first division history with 9 titles from 1991 to 2011 and is also the current European Champion.
Read more about this topic: Sport In France
Famous quotes containing the word football:
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“...I’m not money hungry.... People who are rich want to be richer, but what’s the difference? You can’t take it with you. The toys get different, that’s all. The rich guys buy a football team, the poor guys buy a football. It’s all relative.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)