Opening Pour

When the Fédération Française de Football was established in April 1919, the question of what symbol should represent French football had already been answered. Le Coq Gaulois had been on French coins since 1899, on war memorials since 1918 and had survived Napoleon's attempt to remove it as a national emblem.

All this made it easy for the federation to step into something that was already there.

In Latin, gallus means two things simultaneously. It describes the ancient region of Gaul, the territory that broadly corresponds to contemporary France and it means rooster. That linguistic accident, noticed and embraced during the French Revolution as republicans sought a symbol untied to royalty or the church became the foundation of one of the most recognisable identity systems in sport.

Le Coq Gaulois has carried French national teams across every sport for over a century.

The Origin

The rooster's path to the national team shirt was gradual.



The Comité Français Interfédéral began using the bird as its official symbol in the early part of the 20th century and it debuted on Les Bleus' shirts in a match against Belgium in 1909. It's been present in one form or another ever since.

What gave the symbol its charge was the weight it already carried before football adopted it. Napoleon had attempted to replace the rooster as a national emblem and failed.

The French government's own framing captures the depth of that meaning: "The rooster became the symbol of a France sprung from peasant origins, proud, opinionated, courageous and prolific. While the rooster is not an official symbol of the Republic, it still stands for a certain idea of France."

When the Fédération Française de Football was formally established on 7 April 1919 under its first president Jules Rimet, the rooster was formalised as the centrepiece of its crest. Football inherited a symbol that had already been doing national identity work for generations.

The Crest And What It Has Held

The evolut

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