Nice shot. By naming Téléfoot its future channel, which will broadcast the Ligue 1 championship next season, the nebulous Spanish group Mediapro has won an “historic mark”, a duo of prestigious commentators (Grégoire Margotton and Bixente Lizarazu) and a partnership with TF1.
It was time for Mediapro, which was slow to specify the conditions for launching this channel. At least the sign has been laid, even if the operation resembles these takeovers of unclaimed brands by start-ups who want to sell something else entirely.
If the program is among the oldest on French television, it owes most of its myth to its antiquity. In September 1977, "Télé Foot 1" became the first regular meeting with football, and it was necessary to convince of its merits both the chain and the clubs, which feared that the stadiums would empty.
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Colombo against Stopyra
The magazine is scheduled for the second part of the evening, Friday or Saturday, and, during the first broadcast, its presenter Pierre Cangioni requests spectators to support it. It was useless, the public was demanding, the day after the European epics of the Greens and on the eve of the renaissance of the Blues.
Cangioni is the phlegmatic presentation of the 1970s, except when he groans against the excessive length of a Colombo. You can almost feel the smell of cigarettes on the tweed suits. The star is football, the magic is that of the evening’s goals, finally visible. Telefoot is going to write forty years of football history on television.
The show quickly entered popular culture, firstly thanks to its ending credits: a front-back montage of game scenes on the music of "Mah-nà mah-nà", song from an Italian documentary sensation on Swedish sexuality (Sweden, hell and paradise, Luigi Scattini, 1968).
"I don't give a damn, I don't want to miss Telefoot", will sing Renaud in 1981, ready to support the terrible emissions of Saturday evening to see "Cangioni and Stopyra". The show works so well that it seizes a niche of choice, still in effect: Sunday morning at 11 am. Mass has been said.
Vintage journalism
For Cangioni also, after the presidential election in 1981, dismissed – according to him – by socialist power. The football right will return quickly because, after an interlude Michel Denisot-Jean Raynal, begins the double decade of the legendary duo Thierry Roland-Jean-Michel Larqué (1984-2003).
Alongside the annoying uncle and the rascal uncle flourishes a generation of boy-scouts determined not to wait the years to become old-fashioned: the lively Christian Jeanpierre, the doct Frédéric Jaillant, the appliqué Vincent Hardy and a very distant Pascal Praud of his current character of dandy néoréac.
Their colleague Marianne Mako undergoes ambient sexism because football "Not intended for women journalists", according to Roland. In 1986, a report brought down the black players of FC Nantes from a tree to the music of "Noir c’est noir". A few years later, a journalist enumerates them in the Nantes workforce, noting that " it's a lot ".
Let's not debunk anyone, blame the time. A time during which a May 1993 Telefoot can be presented live from Bernard Tapie's Phocea (Jean-Michel Larqué and Thierry Roland are accommodated on board), a few days after the VA-OM affair was launched.
Football show without football
This "golden age" for several generations of viewers lasts until 2004. Designated head of the ship, Thierry Gilardi imports some quality from Canal + but, after his death in 2008, Christian Jeanpierre takes control for ten years. Above all, the match loses much of its interest by losing the rights to the match images.
The Canal Football Club has taken up the torch of the Sunday broadcast, and Telefoot becomes a football program without football: interviews, exotic reports, people angles. For something to happen, Franck Ribéry must land on tap on the set during the 2010 Knysna psychodrama.
At least the show – one of the few free-to-air football windows – remains family-friendly, good-natured, and escapes the polemical excesses of talk shows.
Telefoot will only have been modern at the start, will have broadened the interest in football in France without ever deepening it – drama of televised football in this country. By also announcing the production of a program "Vintage Telefoot", TF1 and Mediapro have understood that nostalgia is a big part of its value.
