France national team coach Laurent Blanc has responded to the Mediapart report that stated that Blanc had worked with the French Football Federation (FFF) to create a secret 'racial quota' that would limit the number of players of African descent allowed in the country's training academies by insisting that the accusations are false - and furthermore, that they're offensive (which they would be, if they're false):
Laurent Blanc Denies Ethnic Quota Claims
[The accusation] really bothers me because it’s against my values. To me, this is totally false - there is no draft quota - and it’s a lie to say that the coach of the France team participated, so I cannot tell you about something that does not exist.
I have never heard mention of such a project. Since around 15 years the playing policy has been discriminatory for a certain number of players, [with] athletic and physical criteria being essential.
Today, small players are penalised. That’s discrimination. What upsets me the most is to add ‘colour’ to this. When one accuses me of this type of discrimination, that annoys me. Diversity exists, on the street as in football.
It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of this - I’d really like to think that Blanc’s telling the truth and this is being blown up all out of proportion, but the possibility remains that he really is deliberately trying to ‘whiten’ up the football team. If so, that would clearly be a rather despicable goal, but it also seems that most of the rest of France is rather solidly against such a prospect anyway. When a planned policy apparently has to be kept so secret that half of the FFF is unaware of it, we can be pretty sure that it’s not going to be widely popular move.
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