France’s iron veteran who battles on and off the pitch

The captain of France is arguing away in an Italian restaurant in Barcelona at nearly midnight, but not about football. Lilian Thuram, 36, leads his national team into the European Championships next weekend, yet he isn’t proud of that.

It will take many hours over two days to get him to reveal some secrets of his team. Thuram prefers talking about Barack Obama. He may also be the only footballer ever to say: “There’s an interesting young ethnographer at the Musée de l’Homme…”

At first glance, you’d guess Thuram was a jazz trombonist: a huge black man with a deadpan expression in rimless glasses and a black fedora. At dinner, the only hint that he’s played a record 139 matches for France is his intake. Today he has flown in from Paris, missed lunch, trained with Barcelona, did some voluntary gym work, and now says he’s ravenous, but he doesn’t even finish his pasta. He sticks to orange juice all night. Frank Rijkaard, his coach at Barcelona, told me: “He’s an example: the extra attention he gives his body. Physically he’s strong as iron.”

Thuram has two careers. On the pitch, the defender has been world and European champion. Off it, he speaks for France’s ethnic minorities. When Nicolas Sarkozy called rioters in French ghettoes “scum”, Thuram led the protests. When France’s far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen said there were too many blacks in France’s team, Thuram responded in his deadpan manner: “Personally, I’m not black. I’m French.” His foundation, the Fundación Lilian Thuram, combats racism. In short, Thuram is football’s version of tennis’s civil-rights hero Arthur Ashe.

And Thuram sees football as an example for France. About a third of French people describe themselves in polls as racist, yet Thuram insists there’s never been any problem integrating France’s black, white and Arab footballers into a team. He explains: “We’re all fixed on the same goal: winning. That makes things easier. It would be different if you demanded that everyone become like you. In football it’s hard to be racist. Racist people tend not to know the other, but in football you share things. And in football it’s harder to have discrimination, because we are judged on very specific performances. Sincerely, I’ve never met a racist person in football. Maybe they were there, but I didn’t see it.”

That’s enough football. Minutes later Thuram is marvelling: “Are museums free in England? Serious?” After two hours of this sort of talk, I suggest that he hardly seems proud of his stunning career. Thuram agrees: “I don’t think a career is the most important thing for a person. And I have a problem with this word ‘pride’. I can be happy, because it’s personally amazing to be world champion. But I don’t think ‘pride’ can express it.”

The next afternoon we meet in Barcelona’s vast trophy room. This time Thuram promises to talk football. How does today’s French team compare to the French world champions of 1998? “In ’98, a lot of players played in Italy. And Italy develops the culture of winning. In Italy, whether you play well or badly, what matters is to win. I think that enriched our French football culture.” The defender Thuram is himself a monster built during 10 seasons in Italy, as he’ll show when France face Italy in Zurich on June 17.

“Today’s French team is less experienced, with very few players based in Italy. The sort of emblematic French players now are at the end of their careers. It wasn’t like that in ’98.”

Is he himself less strong today? “It’s obvious,” he says instead. “In ’98 I was 26. Now I’m 36. So it wouldn’t be serious to say I’m as strong now. The important thing is I know it.”

He admits it can be “difficult” to be the only person of his generation surrounded by youths. The oldies’ task, he says, is to educate the youngsters in the “humility” required to play for France: the individual is nothing, the collective everything. It’s a sporting cliché, but as Thuram lectures on it he loses some of his solemn cool, and heats up. This is his footballing ideology.

It’s odd that he’s still here educating, because he quit the French team in 2004. The coach, Raymond Domenech, called him up regardless, and Thuram came. France reached the World Cup final in 2006, and he kept coming. Why? “Simply, at the World Cup I had extraordinary feelings. Your adrenaline rises, it’s an intense pleasure. I think the most magical moment in football is when the two teams line up to enter the field, greet the fans, the referee whistles for kick-off. At this moment we have the capacity to write a new match, a new history.”

Sometimes the experience is so intense that Thuram leaves the field afterwards unsure of the final score. “Look, I generally know how many goals we let in, but maybe not how many we scored.”

What about Obama? Thuram briefly reviews post-war American history, then concludes: “Obama is important in the collective imagination. It’s a strong symbol coming from America, and a strong message for the image of blacks.” So is Thuram.