How France Took Over Basketball

Like many boys in Paris’s suburbs, Hugo Yimga-Moukouri had soccer dreams. His mother encouraged him to try basketball instead. Maybe, he suspected, she wanted him to play an indoor sport, so that she wouldn’t have to watch him outside in the winter cold. Or maybe it was just her intuition. Either way, her recommendation proved wise. After picking up the sport at age seven, Yimga-Moukouri, who was born in Colombes to a family from Cameroon, quickly rose through France’s basketball pipeline, enrolling at the National Institute of Sport, Expertise, and Performance, a renowned government-funded academy, known as INSEP, before turning pro at sixteen and signing with Nanterre 92, a storied club near his home town. Now he’s eighteen, and it is clear he has larger ambitions. In April, he signed an endorsement deal with Nike. His teammates have their surnames on their warmup shirts, but Yimga-Moukouri’s bears his initials, which phonetically replicate the American pronoun, as if to say HYM is Him. And at the team’s recent home opener, at a modest arena that seats three thousand, I watched him swish threes, hustle for rebounds, and lock down the defensive perimeter, gliding his chiselled six-foot-eight frame as if on springs. His skill set, at such a young age, makes Yimga-Moukouri seem almost destined for a multimillion-dollar N.B.A. career.

Thirty years ago, no French player had ever appeared on a professional roster in the U.S. Since then, N.B.A. teams have signed more than fifty players from France, including a record seventeen under contract this season, more than any other country outside the U.S. Two French players, including the twenty-two-year-old superstar Victor Wembanyama, likely the best basketball player in the world, have been No. 1 picks over the past four N.B.A. drafts, and seven other French players have been selected in the top thirty. Plus, with back-to-back Olympic silvers, France has emerged as the primary threat to American basketball supremacy on the international stage. “Did we ever imagine France would be fighting for Olympic gold medals in basketball?” Jean-Pierre de Vincenzi, the former director of the French national basketball team, told me. “It seemed like a fantasy.”

This explosion in French basketball talent is no accident. The emergence of players such as Yimga-Moukouri and Wembenyama is the result of development programs commissioned back in the twentieth century. When de Vincenzi was growing up in Bordeaux, in the nineteen-seventies, French basketball was the “laughing stock” of the world, he told me. “We were losing by forty points to the Italians and Spaniards.” By the time de Vincenzi finished his mandatory year of military service, during which he had been the captain of the Army basketball team, and enrolled in a coaching program at INSEP, in 1983, the national team had failed to qualify for five consecutive Olympics.

At that point, other French sports programs weren’t faring much better. The men’s soccer team failed to qualify for three World Cups in the sixties and seventies, and the country’s delegations to the Summer Olympics, in 1960 and in 1964, finished with a medal count outside the top twenty. France’s underwhelming 1960 showing reportedly left President Charles de Gaulle “enraged,” Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, who has written books about the history of French soccer and basketball, told me. So, over the next two decades, the government revamped the country’s sports programs, investing heavily in a centralized development system influenced by “what they were seeing in Eastern Europe,” Krasnoff said. The sports ministry constructed youth-training infrastructure—gyms, pitches, courts—for Olympic sports, including basketball. The idea was to get “as many younger players playing as possible,” Krasnoff told me. “That creates the widest base of the pyramid as possible.” From there, promising athletes were filtered into regional training centers, which further funnelled the very best to INSEP. At the academy’s sprawling campus, which was built by the government in the sixties and seventies, and is tucked in the woods at the eastern edge of Paris, top basketball prospects reach the final stage of their indoctrination into a sporting philosophy that centers on achieving technical mastery through an emphasis on fundamentals and basic drills. “Much like musicians practicing their scales,” de Vincenzi told me. “We concentrated on those specific building blocks.”

Olivier Mazet, an agent who has represented French N.B.A. players such as Guerschon Yabusele and Mohamed Diawara, explained that the newfound investment came at an opportune time: the 1992 Olympics were being held in Barcelona, and the Dream Team had arrived in Europe. “One day, I saw this guy Michael Jordan,” Mazet told me. Suddenly, “the playgrounds were full of people.” A new generation of French boys who aspired to be like Mike found a training pipeline waiting for them. “When you have that major moment in ’92, all the ingredients are already there,” Krasnoff told me. “You already had the right kind of system in place.”

That year, de Vincenzi’s junior national squad won a European championship, and one of the team’s best players, Tariq Abdul-Wahad, whose mother had been a professional basketball player after immigrating to France from French Guiana, saw an opportunity to play pro in the U.S. He enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he played for two years, before transferring to San José State University, where he averaged 23.8 points in his senior year and started for his team in the N.C.A.A. tournament. In 1997, he became the first French national to play in the N.B.A. At the 2000 Olympics, with de Vincenzi coaching the senior team, France won silver. (Its roster included Stéphane Risacher, whose son Zaccharie would later be picked first over all in the 2024 N.B.A. draft.) The next year, the San Antonio Spurs drafted Tony Parker, an INSEP alum from Normandy who would go on to win four championships over the course of his hall-of-fame career with the San Antonio Spurs. “For kids in France,” Mazet told me, “all of a sudden you were able to see a French player becoming a superstar in the N.B.A.” Three years later, Wembanyama was born. His six-foot-six father, of Congolese descent, was a track-and-field jumper; his six-foot-three mother, and both of her parents, played pro basketball. By age sixteen, Wembanyama was playing professionally with Nanterre while also starring on INSEP’s eighteen-and-under team. In his first-ever game with the national academy, he had twenty-two points, ten rebounds, and seven blocks.

Born in Bordeaux in 2000, Joël Ayayi “adored” soccer when he was young, he told me, but he kept getting upset because when it rained, they just cancelled the games. He decided to switch to his family’s sport. His father, an immigrant from Benin, had played pro basketball in France’s lower divisions. His older sister also played, and she was considered a rising star on her way to INSEP, a professional career, and the Olympic team. “For me, it was kind of like mirroring whatever she was doing,” Ayayi told me.

He joined a local youth club, Élan Béarnais, which is partially funded by local government subsidies (for the 2025-26 season, it received more than eight hundred thousand euros) and in 2003 produced two first-round N.B.A. draft picks, Boris Diaw and Mickaël Piétrus. In the summers, Ayayi attended a camp organized by Diaw, who also grew up in Bordeaux and who played in the N.B.A. for fourteen seasons and, like Parker, won a championship with the San Antonio Spurs. At age eleven, along with other top local players handpicked by French Basketball Federation scouts, Ayayi competed in a tournament against the best players from neighboring provinces. Afterward, he was among the ten invited to his region’s Pôle Espoirs training academy. He lived on the campus during the week, attending classes and practices, then spent weekends back home to play for Élan Béarnais. Not every student was invited back for the following year. “Some players improve, others don’t, and some who weren’t previously selected might make the cut later,” de Vincenzi told me. “This process continues year after year, with players rotating in and out.”

Forecasting success in basketball differs from most other sports. A young soccer player’s skill level may reliably serve as a barometer for his prospects, but a basketball player’s chances of reaching the highest level usually hinge on something out of everybody’s control: height. The F.F.B.B. works tirelessly to spot signs that a kid will be tall, taking detailed measurements, including wrist X-rays, de Vincenzi told me. He instituted a quota for regional academies to admit at least two youth players deemed “likely to reach a significant height,” he said, “even if they aren’t necessarily the absolute best right now.” “When a player is destined to be a giant, they’re often lanky and thin, with less developed motor skills than their peers,” he told me. “They often get overlooked.”

During Ayayi’s third year at the regional academy, his cohort competed in a tournament against other regions. Scouts watched him throughout the tournament and selected him for a camp where he would try to secure a spot at INSEP. Around two dozen candidates spent a week at the academy for what Ayayi called “the test,” duking it out for ten spots. “It’s super competitive,” he told me. “It’s really just like a funnel, like a selection of selections.”

INSEP’s pristine campus boasts state-of-the-art facilities bearing Adidas branding. Banners on light posts celebrate Olympic alumni. A basketball gym is named after one of them, Parker, who currently coaches the junior national team. Another alum, Diaw, is now general manager of the senior national team. Ayayi made it in, and described the school’s rigorous routine: classes at 7:45 A.M., practice at 11 A.M., more classes at 2 P.M., then another practice from 4:30 P.M. to past 6 P.M.; exams on Wednesdays, games on the weekend. At seventeen, or even sixteen for the most talented, players start competing in France’s third-division league against seasoned pros.

After graduating from INSEP, Ayayi played for four years at Gonzaga, then played briefly for the Washington Wizards in the N.B.A. These days, the six-foot-five guard plays for Paris Basketball, one of the best clubs in France’s top division. Ayayi told me that, even in the few years he’s played in the French professional league, he’s been shocked at how much better the young players have become. His cohort at INSEP, he estimated, wouldn’t stand a chance against the new generation. “We would have got smacked if we played against these guys because every year I feel like it’s better than the next one,” he told me.

On a crisp fall morning, I took the train east from Paris to Noisy-le-Grand, a suburb with one of the many new basketball facilities that have gone up around the country in recent years. This one, named the One Ball, is the training center for Paris Basketball. In the jet-black complex, just off the highway, I found several courts, each enclosed behind big windows, stretching out along a corridor, and heard a symphony of squeaking sneakers and bouncing balls. The airy lobby features a projector screen showing N.B.A. highlights, a pair of arcade Pop-A-Shot machines, and a wall of signed jerseys from legendary French players such as Nicolas Batum and Rudy Gobert.

On one court, a dozen kids dribbled through drills at a clinic while their parents looked on from plush leather chairs. Most of the kids wore soccer or basketball jerseys. (More than thirty years after the Dream Team arrived in Europe, the most common jersey I spotted was still Jordan’s.) On another court, cloaked behind curtains, Paris Basketball held its practice. Afterward, the towering pros in sweats and slides shuffled to the cafeteria, ordering from a menu split into one section for standard cafeteria fare, such as a chicken sandwich called Le Dunk, and one for “African food,” including yassa, attiéké, and jus de bissap.

Nearly every player on the team is Black. As in soccer, French basketball has tapped into a growing youth population fuelled by migration from former colonies, and the stars who go on to represent the nation on the brightest stage represent a vision of multiculturalism that redefines old notions of French identity. I caught a Paris Basketball match in the Adidas Arena, a gleaming venue constructed for the 2024 Olympics on the city’s northern outskirts, and found a break-dancing crew performing during time-outs, while an m.c. with an Afro hyped up the crowd. Hip-hop dominates the soundtrack. Teens dressed in athleisure sing along. Founded in 2018 by David Kahn, an American former N.B.A. executive, the club is co-owned by the actor Omar Sy, the star of “Lupin,” a megahit French show about a brilliant burglar who outwits old-money aristocrats. When the jumbotron showed him sitting courtside at a recent game, the crowd went wild. Sy’s character, Assane Diop, a Senegalese immigrant from the Paris suburbs, owns a collection of Air Jordans and coaches his son’s basketball team.

With so many French basketball stars being the children of immigrants, and benefitting from government investment in youth programs, the country’s basketball triumphs spotlight success stories for national values that now appear in jeopardy. The anti-immigration Rassemblement National party has increased its share of seats in parliament, and its leader, Marine Le Pen, is the favorite for the Presidential election next year. Meanwhile, France’s national debt has soared this decade, amid the rising costs of social services for an aging population and increased defense spending in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, provoking calls from Le Pen, and other party leaders, for austerity measures.

Of course, the vast majority of young people, those not deemed exceptional athletes by the sports ministry, already receive far less investment in their development. This fall, students in Paris’s suburbs have protested overcrowded classrooms and deteriorating public-school infrastructure, launching a movement that has expanded across the country and sparked weeks of civil unrest and police crackdowns, while receiving support from Wembanyama himself. Early in the protests, a video of the mayor of the Paris suburb Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, went viral. Bagayoko, who has been a regular presence, protected a group of students from riot police. A child of Malian immigrants who campaigned on expanding social services, he is a former semi-pro basketball player who rose through the local and regional development programs. Before taking office this year, he coached a local youth basketball team. ♦

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