Euro 2008 Map - France

The first of Bill Turianksi's conributions to our Euro 2008 series is a map of the France Euro 2008 squad, displaying where each player was born. A few interesting things stood out to me. Nearly a third of the team is from Paris, which makes sense considering the size of the city but less so when you consider there's only one Parisian team in Ligue 1 and only two out of the 60 professional clubs in the country. Two players hail from French dependencies in the Caribbean, which actually makes it less global than some French teams of the past. The World Cup winning 1998 team had players from the Caribbean, Africa, Armenia and even the South Pacific. And finally two players on the team come from Le Puy-en-Velay, a small town in Occitania of about 20,000 inhabitants. And if it wasn't enough to have two players on the national team, it's also the home town of France's current best female tennis player and a member of the French national rugby team!

More Bill's Sports Maps.