In France, authorities prohibit the collection of data on an individual’s race, religion or ethnicity. However, that seems not to be the case for the French football club Paris St-Germain which is facing a football inquiry over racial profiling.

After the French investigative website Mediapart published leaked documents, the French Football Federation said its ethical council will look into PSG’s recruiting policy after club scouts illegally profiled the ethnic origins of potential young recruits.

In a statement released by PSG, the club said that the practice of racial profiling took place between 2013 and 2018 but that its management was not aware of it at the time, knew about it only last month, was done in secret, and has vowed to get to the bottom of what happened.

PSG knows that forms used by the club’s department responsible for scouting outside the Parisian region “contained an unacceptable identification field” which listed prospective players as French, North African, black African or West Indian. PSG said the forms were established “purely on the personal initiative of the person in charge of this department”.

It added that recruitment is decided only on “skills and behavior” and that the forms went against PSG’s “spirit and values”.

This year, France, the World Cup-winning team, featured no less than 15 of its 23 players with African heritage, including 19-year-old wonder Kylian Mbappe. The 1998 team that won its first World Cup was labeled the Black, Blanc, Beur (Black, White, Arab) and was hailed a positive representation of a multi-ethnic France. Those who celebrated the team, which included the legendary Zinedine Zidane, of Algerian origin, saw its success as proof that France could move forward from its colonial past and into a welcoming, inclusive idea of “Frenchness.” But there were voices — mainly by the far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen — who saw the team as the disappearance of the “pureness” or “whiteness” they want for France. The rise of his daughter Marine Le Pen has made clear how many people in France don’t want the face of the country to change. It was Marine Le Pen who argued that the problem with the national team was down to them having “another nationality in their hearts”.

For millions of soccer fans around the world, Africa, in effect, won this year’s World Cup, packed as it was with the sons of immigrants, making this World Cup a victory for the immigrant dream. While some saw this as a celebration of the country’s diversity, the far-right used it as an insult towards those players who are not considered “French” enough, whose identities come from somewhere else and are not really genuinely French.

It is this constant signaling of some of the player’s “otherness” that reinforces the narrative that they are not completely French. That is why in a country that continues to have a strained relationship with immigrants from its former colonies, the World Cup teams came to embody a national idea, a celebration of an integrated France. This same sentiment that united the players and the nation under the flag of the French republic must extend to the country’s clubs, including PSG.

It is a diversity that many French citizens still struggle to embrace. Nevertheless, social and racial profiling is illegal in France. It must be made illegal in Paris St-Germain.