Neighborhood CANs go to Prime
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Every summer, they unleash passions in the neighborhoods, and their most beautiful gestures are captured in poorly framed, pixelated Snapchat videos that loop on the networks. But this year, the neighborhood CANs have taken a spectacular step. Changes of names, sponsors, and even distribution on Amazon: welcome to tournaments where it’s not really fun anymore.
Built in 1973, the Dominique-Duvauchelle stadium has never known a feverish evening like the one that promises to be this Saturday, July 2 from 6 p.m. Not even on the evening of its record attendance on February 9, 2005, during a Cameroon-Senegal which brought together 12,000 people in the den of US Créteil-Lusitanos. Record that could fall tonight. The poster of the day? An unofficial Mali-Congo, final of the National Neighborhoods Cup, new name of the CAN de Créteil. All broadcast on Prime Video on its TikTok account, with partners to rival the FFF (which has still not found a broadcaster for the Coupe de France): Nike and Heetch. An event that sums up in itself the extent of these neighborhood tournaments, which have become local, even national institutions.
Festival des CAN
In Créteil, the CAN was born in 2019, when inter-district tournaments had existed for many years.
“The climate was becoming anxiety-provoking, disputes between neighborhoods were settled around the pitch, sometimes even on it
says Moussa Sow, creator of the CAN de Créteil.
“We wanted to bring people together. However, by bringing the teams together by ethnicity, faith, origin, rather than by neighborhood, we built groups with guys from all neighborhoods.”
And as luck would have it, almost no more problems since.
“People thought it was community, but not at all. We are French above all, and proud of our origins. For example, I am 100% French, and 100% Senegalese”
, sweeps away the organizer of what has become the National Neighborhoods Cup this summer. And for good reason :
“We had a lot of requests. So we expanded to new teams, and out of 16 players, 8 can come from other cities in Île-de-France than Créteil”
, details Moussa Sow, who has nothing to do with the former Lille striker. This is how France, Italy, the West Indies, Portugal and Asia joined the competition this summer. Yet the biggest reinforcement is not a selection, but Amazon, which broadcasts the final.
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