ABSTRACT
In examining the beginnings of international football in France, this article will ask the question: what is, or rather was, an international match? Seeing the term ‘international’ used in the press in the 1890s to describe matches between French and English clubs, made me examine my own preconceptions about what constitutes an international match. More widely the study raises
the issue of how historians view change. Nancy Struna posed the question: ‘From what direction – the “end” or the “beginning” – do we view change?’:
In trying to tell the story of international football in France from the beginning, it will become clear that the earliest events where the word ‘international’ was attributed to football matches involving French teams do not correspond to the exclusive model of ‘international matches’ as used in later official histories of international football, following the creation of FIFA. In this brief history of the beginnings of ‘international’ football in France, what I wish to avoid is interpreting as inevitablewhathappenedhalf a century laterwith the inventionof the World Cup or interpreting the World Cup/European Nations Cup as the only model of international football, or the model that football people had always been striving towards. The future is never written in advance. At least, as will be argued, the origins of international football in France are to be found in the 1890s, well before the founding of FIFA (1904) and it was a different type of international football.2
