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  • Le Football: A History of American Football in France by Russ Crawford
  • Lars Dzikus
Crawford, Russ. Le Football: A History of American Football in France. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Pp. xxv+334. Notes, bibliography, and index. $39.50, hb.

Le Football demonstrates that grassroots American football in France has grown to a healthy size, although it remains largely invisible in mainstream media and marginal in the larger sport landscape. As of 2014, there were 208 teams with over 21,000 organized players. Most importantly, from a historical perspective, Crawford makes clear that the slow but steady diffusion of the gridiron in Europe has long antecedents. Based on newspaper accounts, interviews, and websites, Crawford provides a comprehensive, reconstructionist narrative. Scholars will find a wealth of information applicable to the study of globalization, Americanization, and the diffusion of sports. Those looking for direct engagement with such theoretical concepts and frameworks, however, might be disappointed.

The book covers main developments, key individuals, and important organizations, starting with the first American football game played in France between American soldiers as part of the Great White Fleet's visit in 1909. During both world wars and again from 1952 to 1966, when France left NATO, over a thousand games were played on American military bases around the country. Apart from military football, various entrepreneurs independently sought in vain to introduce the French to the gridiron in 1938, 1961, 1972, 1976, 1977, and 1989. All of this leads up to the main act in the final three chapters: the foundation of the first French team in Paris in 1980 and the game's subsequent growth. Thus, Crawford's main point is that cultural imperialism in the form of military and business efforts had failed to implant the gridiron in France. It was not until football was organized by the French and for the French that the sport took roots. In an early clash [End Page 494] of philosophies and organizations, an emphasis on participation over commercialization won out. Whether this foundation indeed "consigned football in France to a future as a consuming passion for a few but an irrelevancy for most" (206) could be further debated.

The book would have benefited from a deeper discussion of how this particular case study challenges, confirms, or expands previous scholarly work on American sports in Europe (for example, by Allen Guttmann, Joseph Maguire, and Maarten van Bottenburg). Similarly, there is no engagement with extensive work on the reception of American popular culture in France (for example, by Richard Kuisel). Without more conceptual foundation, it is difficult to evaluate, for example, whether games played between American soldiers in France, which as Crawford points out were not intended to reach French audiences, should be considered "clumsy attempts at cultural imperialism" (266). Despite these shortcomings, the book illustrates the complexities of globalization, and Crawford does a fine job with the difficult task of negotiating foreign language sources and covering extensive historical and cultural terrain. The work can serve as a valuable foundation for more theoretical analysis.

Lars Dzikus
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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