French Sports Clubs Fear Impact of Proposed Religious Symbol Ban

The bill introduced by Les Républicains to ban the wearing of religious symbols in sports competitions and municipal swimming pools, adopted on February 18, 2025, is causing debate. And for good reason, this text proposes to generalize the ban on wearing religious symbols to all sports competitions.

In the eyes of the proponents of the veil ban, the wearing of the hijab is a sign of "religious infiltration" that undermines living together. However, few problems have been observed on the ground. According to a recent parliamentary report from the Flash Mission on communitarian and Islamist drifts in sport, more than 500 clubs have faced communitarian behaviors - a category that includes, for the authors of the text, the wearing of the hijab, the organization of prayers in the locker rooms or the refusal to shake hands with a player of another gender - but "these behaviors only affect a fraction of the 380,000 sports associations and 160,000 clubs surveyed".

In addition, the sports stakeholders interviewed by franceinfo assure, in the vast majority of cases, not to have been confronted with communitarianism in sport. According to many of them, it is important to separate the wearing of the hijab from a potential religious infiltration. "Religion and the solicitation of Islamist circles are two different things," assures Bruno Vetticoz, president of the Gif-sur-Yvette (Essonne) athletics club. The kids I know, who make the sign of the cross when they succeed, or who run with a veil, they are not in proselytism or claim."

Those who defend the wearing of the hijab "want to make the wearing of the veil ordinary, then extract women from the world of sport," says former boxing champion Mahyar Monshipour. Judo star Teddy Riner also takes a stand: "In sport with our neighbors, in other cultures, everything goes well and [the veil in sport] doesn’t bother anyone," he pointed out. "The girls who wear the veil respect the same rules as the rest of the team, there is no proselytism or preferential treatment," adds Laurent Golfier, coach of middle school girls at Montreuil Handball (Seine-Saint-Denis).

Morgane, from the basketball team of La Croix-Saint-Ouen (Oise) confirms: "The other players, it didn’t bother them at all that I wore the veil. What counts in a team are your skills, but everyone comes as they are." According to her, the argument of secularism actually hides "a stigmatization of Muslim women", or even "unabashed racism". Today, she has stopped basketball, the wearing of the hijab during training, allowed by the federal regulations, having only been reluctantly accepted by her new club. "They tell me: ’You just have to go run in the street to do sports’. Already that I’m more subject to insults because of my veil, do you think I’m going to go run outside?"

Sports actors express concerns. "We’re going to lose young girls, for sure," if the Republicans’ bill is passed, says Laurent Golfier. "They’re going to kill women’s football," sighs Jean-Michel Verroux, coach at the Elan sportif de Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis). The text is "completely contradictory to our mission orders," adds Bruno Vetticoz. According to Nicolas Cadène, the text risks "accentuating a system of parallel communitarian sports structures". "We are giving an additional argument to radical religious people who will tell Muslim sportswomen: ’You are mistreated in this country, you are excluded’," he added.