When a city in Kansas embraced Team Algeria during the World Cup, it showed me something France never has: the same humanity, extended to its own footballers and citizens of Algerian descent.
No other sport on the planet unites people the way football does, and this edition of the World Cup was no exception in showcasing just that. Pelé’s beautiful game was the backdrop for many beautiful moments of laughter, love, thrills, tears, and, above all, unity, as 48 nations brought the world together for five weeks.
My favourite heartwarming show of unity in this 2026 edition came from Lawrence, Kansas, and their embodiment of a sincere bond with one nation in particular: Algeria. As a French citizen of Algerian descent, what Lawrence did landed in a very particular way — bias and all. Lawrencians taught a masterclass in what it means to embrace diversity, people, their cultures, and their differences. No effort was spared in giving their guests the most beautiful of welcomes: from main street signage featuring the famous Algerian slogan (1,2,3… Viva l’Algérie!) to restaurants catering to halal eaters to Raï music – a genre born in colonial Algeria in the 1920s – being played in bars and restaurants. Team Algeria won over new fans overnight, who excitedly cheered them on and embraced the culture of a whole nation for no other reason than the sheer joy of it.
The warm hospitality was accompanied by an earthwork of the Algerian flag, created by artist Stan Heard, who called his work, which had its own unveiling party, a small Algeria in America’s heartland. If you don’t know it, the Algerian flag has been known to pop up absolutely everywhere, from public celebrations to sporting events, even, and especially, when it has nothing to do with the celebration it’s appearing in. Something of a homing signal, as one scholar called it, an attachment to the lost country of the ancestors. Not only did Lawrence embrace the Waldo-like flag, they built one on purpose — into the ground no less. My divided identity could only be moved by such humanity; feeling seen and accepted simply for who we are and where we come from, so graciously, felt like a rare sight to behold, and a longing for the same from my own place of birth. Lawrencians didn’t have to do any of it, yet did so wholeheartedly.
Watching this wonderful display of kindness as someone brought up in one environment, while belonging to another by blood and ancestry, made the dissonance devastatingly clear. Lawrencians opening their arms and hearts with such humanity only amplified a dire contrast: the sheer enthusiasm and hospitality towards my fellow countrymen only made it more evident that the country I call home has never extended a semblance of the same treatment to its football players – or its Algerian descendants. Not even a feeble attempt, unlike the surgical preparation Lawrence and its people poured into embracing the Algerian team.
The painful past between the two countries left obvious wounds, many unhealed, that nurture my struggle with reconciling two parts of the same identity; the one reeling from the scars that the other inflicted. Whilst the dark and harrowing history between France and Algeria has lasted over a century, it often feels as if it lingers into the present, fostering, willingly or not, this unspoken lack of égalité and fraternité — on and off the pitch. It doesn’t help that France never apologised for the atrocities it inflicted upon Algerians, as if the past must remain in the past, with no regard for a nation and its people’s need for recognition and reparation.
As much as the general discourse insists on making football apolitical, my ancestors thoroughly disagreed. Algeria’s own independence from France is closely intertwined with the beautiful game: professional players internationalised their struggle for freedom and liberation through football. On the eve of the 1958 World Cup, nine Algerian players playing for France fled the country to join the Algerian liberation movement, the FLN, whose team used football to reclaim their land, legally nonexistent at the time.
Rachid Mekhloufi was one of the most prominent figures of the movement and became a symbol of the political struggle France was heavily censoring from the world. After being sentenced to 10 years in absentia for deserting France, he later returned to the French league, where he debuted and scored two goals that won his club the French Cup. A defining victory that made him French in the eyes of the then head of state, Charles de Gaulle, who, as he was awarding him the trophy, told him: “La France, c’est vous!” (you are France). Ten years after being sentenced, the leader of the country that wanted him behind bars granted him a different kind of victory: belonging. Something he never really believed in, as he once publicly expressed that even as part of the French national team, Algerians were never thought of as French. It didn’t matter that France made Algeria an integral part of its territory and divided the country into administrative regions, added to the mainland. Nearly seven decades later, the same sentiment persists and has never really disappeared.
Former France squad player Karim Benzema publicly echoed Mekhloufi’s words and feelings. The Ballon d’Or winner once said he’s French when he scores, and an Arab when he doesn’t. Decades later, the conditionality of citizenship remains, reminiscent of what France omitted to leave behind: the need for the people it colonised to fit its mould. The sense of belonging Charles De Gaulle offered Mekhloufi failed to take root in France’s psyche, and the current political landscape makes me wonder if he was truly alone in his thinking.
Six and a half decades after Algeria’s independence, things still feel more challenging than they should, and have reached a fever pitch politically in recent years, with one former interior minister working harder than most to worsen an already brittle relationship with Algiers. The question of belonging feels like a constant cloud over your head if you’re of Algerian descent, following you to the supermarket and to the pharmacy, and lingering in the downstairs neighbour who once casually recalled her past life to me, describing an Algerian-owned corner shop she used to go to as “l’Arabe du coin”. Something she said fondly, as though she’d never heard herself, and never clocked that the Arab of the corner was sitting right there. Too many of us have heard, felt and experienced being the Arab of the corner.
The same sentiment decides your professional fate. A government-mandated study in 2018 confirmed that discrimination against French citizens of North African origin was widespread: 103 of France’s largest companies were sent identical CVs, and the one with a North African-sounding name drew a fifth fewer replies, despite every application stating French citizenship outright. Under French law, refusing to hire on the grounds of one’s origin is a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment and a heavy fine. And yet the government that commissioned the study, and pledged to name the companies it caught, never released a single name, essentially avoiding the one measure that would have carried a cost. Yet again, de Gaulle’s words to Mekhloufi are still very much out of reach.
Perhaps not for one employer in particular: the Fédération Française de Football has stayed true to its historical recruitment based on talent and merit. The same qualities that brought Algerian goal scorers to French teams in colonial days continue to underpin the selection of the best squad today. Unsurprisingly, eerily familiar parallels remain: in post-colonial times, that specific class of talent isn’t relegated to the other side of the Mediterranean, but to the banlieues (suburbs), a different yet similar obstacle. The place where immigrants from Algeria and other African countries were then, and still are today, automatically assigned by virtue of their origins. And in pristine conditional fashion, the reason they are rejected by corporations is the very one that nurtures the talent they’re praised and sought for in a national stadium.
The same stadium that was judged very differently by the leader of the political party known for its proud anti-immigration stance. Le Pen – patriarch – accused the French team of having players who were foreigners, unable to sing the national anthem, conveniently ignoring the cardinal rule for belonging to the national football team: citizenship. The same man who snubbed citizenship was, in fact, a paratrooper in the Battle of Algiers, who once admitted he had “tortured because it had to be done” – only to retract himself later, and spend the rest of his life suing those who repeated his own words.
Today, the paratrooper’s daughter is carrying the torch rather successfully. By rebranding her father’s party and infusing more tact into her policies than his founder ever did, she has consistently boosted her poll numbers since her takeover. Despite the party’s departure from the patriarch’s brazen, provocative slurs, the same foundation remains – one that was publicly challenged by Kylian Mbappé (whose mother is of Algerian descent). France’s current captain recently told Vanity Fair of his staunch opposition to a party he believes doesn’t represent France nor its values.
This is déjà vu. France’s football icon and former captain, Zinedine Zidane, openly called on his fellow citizens to stop the Le Pen clan from being elected — the first time in 2002 when the patriarch reached the second round of the presidential elections, and a decade and a half later, when the daughter marched in her father’s exact steps. Throughout all these public calls begging citizens to keep the far right from becoming a fixture of France, my Algerian heritage keeps wondering how the same discourse is still so loud and ever-present, prompting professional athletes to state what is obvious to them, yet so oblivious to many voters. A cynicism sustained by knowing that two politicians formed by the same war hold polar-opposite conclusions, and a more contemporary political class whose message seems inspired by the past more than the present.
And now Zidane lives it again: he and Mbappé officially lead France’s team, as captain and coach, the former welcomed by the latter with a very public “bienvenue chez toi” (welcome home) on social media. Two iconic players, loved and revered in their own right, who share the same historical conditionality reflected in polls and in society. For the first time, a coach of Algerian origins will be in charge of selecting who plays for France, the ultimate job for which he admitted turning down every club that came for him over the last five years. The same country that never came for his son, Luca, who chose to be a goalkeeper in his grandfather’s nation instead. Which of them, in the end, read the country right?
The beautiful game has served as a bridge, carrying the message of unity for decades. What if the essence of the sport permeated politics and wiped away all traces of conditionality? Nobel laureate, Algerian-born, Albert Camus famously suggested as much in an article published in a French football magazine the year he won his Nobel: “After many years in which the world offered me many spectacles, what I finally know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe to the sport, and it was at the Racing Universitaire d’Alger that I learned it.” When asked to write about receiving the acclaimed prize, he chose to submit an essay he had written four years before instead, carrying an indelible message. One beautifully portrayed by Lawrencians this year as they welcomed the team whose country taught Camus what he knew about morality.
Today, the divide is still evident and visible, on and off the pitch, fomented by an ideology that seemingly clings to the glory of a colonial past and seems intent on keeping the status quo ante bellum. Watching a small city in the heart of the United States of America sweep in and offer a rather stellar lesson in humanity, for nothing other than the sake of it – leaves me wondering, beguilingly, whether my ancestors’ fight for their freedom will ever stop being held against their descendants who call France their home.
Thank you for reading! Writing about the intersections of identity and belonging – with football in the background – was as challenging as it was personal, so I’m ever so grateful you took the time to read it.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might also like my previous essay on the complicated layers of belonging and social rituals: Born in Champagne, Never Had a Drop, which explores another angle of what it means to belong (or not).
Want more essays like this delivered straight to your inbox? Subscribe to Even Keeled to join a community of readers and let each new essay find you
