No sport is more political than soccer. They've fought wars over it. It is nowhere more political than in France.
In a week, the French will play host to Euro 2016, the first major tournament here since the 1998 World Cup – widely considered the best iteration of that event yet staged.
They already had their problems – the usual worries about security, heightened by the Paris attacks of November; natural disaster in the form of heavy rains and flooding; rolling public-sector strikes and civil disobedience.
Problematically for the native soul, two of these are universal concerns potentially affecting every nation. The third is a permanent state. The focus inevitably had to be drawn back to something more philosophical than pragmatic. Enter – and this is what they're actually calling it – L'affaire Benzema.
Karim Benzema is a very talented soccer player and a knucklehead of equal quality. For months, he's been the focus of a police investigation into his alleged role helping childhood friends blackmail national team colleague, Mathieu Valbuena, with an illicitly obtained sex tape. Without the benefit of having played much team sports, or ever having heard of team sports, one can probably imagine how the situation might be injurious to locker-room morale.
As a result, Benzema was suspended from the French squad and left off its Euro roster. Most of us would book a couple of weeks in the Turks and Caicos and enjoy the downtime quietly. Not this guy.
In a Spanish interview this week, Benzema – who is of Algerian descent – suggested he'd been omitted because national team manager Didier Deschamps "bowed to the pressure of a racist part of France."
He was empowered in his view by the country's sclerotic, Don-Cherry-after-an-adult-ed-PhD-at-the-Sorbonne, Eric Cantona.
The former Manchester United star (another man pushed out of the French soccer set-up in his prime and still nursing a grudge) posited a political conspiracy reaching back to the Middle Ages.
"Deschamps, he has a really French name. Maybe he is the only one in France to have a truly French name," Cantona told the Guardian. "Nobody in his family mixed with anybody, you know. Like the Mormons in America."
This could go three ways. First, a defamation lawsuit by Deschamps (check); second, a rollicking scandal that threatens to overwhelm a fun month of soccer with a nasty race to the rhetorical bottom (check); third, inspiring Dan Brown to commit another crime against literature. We'll have to hope bad things don't come in threes.
Predictably, everyone with access to a press officer and a media mailing list began jumping in two-footedly with statements of outrage. The left blamed the right. The right blamed the left. Cantona continued to blame Deschamps, but in more hurtful professional terms ("… It will be the first time he moves from a defensive position to an attacking one …")
Everyone blamed Benzema, although the scope of the mushrooming scandal was too politically alluring to allow a guy who kicks a ball in short pants to hog all the air time. Benzema's been largely sidelined at this point while the real power brokers score their points. He'll be dragged back into it when France goes out in the semis.
The ultimate: Former president Nicolas Sarkozy somehow sees the dark hand of current president François Hollande in all this because his policies are "turning the French against each other."
(Note to selves: If Stephen Harper really wants to prove he loves our own national game, he must find an equally French way to blame elbows in the House for the P.K. Subban snub. Perhaps Canada has lost the hard-charging gumption that made the Gauls so feared by their enemies? Or something like that.)
On Thursday, the mess began veering from household spill to toxic disaster. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen accused Benzema of "hiding his wickedness behind a violent charge against the French people."
Wickedness? How evocative. Whatever could she mean?
Le Pen's niece and proxy in the legislature, Marion, suggested Benzema "should go and play for his country" – meaning Algeria.
Even after a few hours in France, you could not escape the furor. It takes an hour in crushing traffic to get into the city centre from Paris-Charles-De-Gaulle airport. The entirety of the ride was taken up by people on the radio screaming – and I mean screaming – at each other about Benzema.
When I asked the driver to turn it down just a bit, he performed one of those patented cabbie fiddles that initially reduces the volume, then slowly increases it to a point just a bit louder than it had been initially. Message received: 'No foreign interference in local affairs.'
Later, an overheated TV commentator referred to Benzema's childhood home, "Marseille," as "one of the most dangerous cities in the world." It'll be comforting news to anyone from, say, Mogadishu who's decided to skip the Grand Tour of the Continent. Also, Benzema's from Lyon.
The truest way to measure the wider cultural importance of sport is not how many people watch it, but how they talk about it. Can the specifics – which guy on which team doing what to whom – be removed from the field of play and applied in a wider context? Can it be stretched so that it applies to everyone, whether they give a damn about the score?
If so, here's the template. In the space of a few days, the easily justified omission of one player has become an existential national crisis. The process is self-sustaining.
If the French team succeeds, it will be said to be down to the bonding experience and bunker mentality that Benzema has created. If it doesn't, it will be blamed on political fractures in the (very multiethnic) squad. It all rounds back on itself.
Either way, it's something to talk about. And talk about. And once they've finished talking about it, to talk about the way they talked about it.
This is what a true publicity campaign looks like – organic, unstoppable and occasionally destructive. Beyond the caveman instinct to chase a target, it's the most basic reason we care about games.