Without the slightest apology to Karl Marx, Patrick Vassort denounces football as "the opium of the people". Vassort is one of the founders of the Committee for the Boycott of the World Cup (COBOF) and his campaign has inspired a two-hour radio debate sponsored by Le Monde and France Culture, in which Vassort and his sports-loving opponents dispute whether France should welcome players like the Nigerian Daniel Amokachi (who publicly applauded the late Gen Sani Abacha's repression), whether football has become a new religion, whether the sport is corrupted by money.
Mr Vassort and his fellow-academics at COBOF are appalled that all French political parties - including the Communist Party and the Communist Revolutionary League - have fallen victim to World Cup fever. "The consensus in France is total," he complains. "At no point did anyone speak out against the pharaonic expense." The cost to France for hosting the World Cup: Ffr10 billion (£1.19 billion).
Almost no one. The satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo gave COBOF free rein in an issue entitled "Horreur footballistique". Several thousand signed a petition asking for the World Cup to be cancelled, and Vassort receives dozens of letters each day.
A rival, more light-hearted group called La Coupe est Pleine (The Cup is Full) seeks alternative entertainment for those tired of football. Two French television stations and the Alsace region have declared themselves "foot-free". The television stations are not stupid: housewives under 50 are the prime target of advertisers.
French authorities take COBOF's anti-World Cup campaign seriously. "The prefecture of police called me several times to ask what we were doing," Mr Vassort says. "They investigated me - the cops came to interview my concierge! - and they are using government bureaucracy to harass us." When COBOF held a demonstration in front of the FIFA office in Paris, there were more riot police than demonstrators.
COBOF is against all organised, commercialised sports. "Through the competitive system, the selection and hierarchy, sport mixes the ideologies of capitalism, liberalism and fascism," Mr Vassort claims. "The history of the World Cup shows it: in 1934, the World Cup was played in Mussolini's Italy. In 1938, France received a joint German and Austrian team, right after the Anschluss."
Mr Vassort is not alone in criticising the sycophancy of French sports journalists. "There is total complicity between the sports organisers and the sports journalists," says Alain Rollat, the Le Monde columnist who organised the radio debate. "The commentators are the high priests of this new religion, and they hide anything that spoils their High Mass." Among the incidents ignored by the French press were the sodomisation of a Scottish supporter on the opening night of the World Cup, and the muggings of tourists in Saint Denis, near the Stade de France, Rollat says.
Perhaps Catherine Trautmann, the former Mayor of Strasbourg and the Socialist Minister of Culture, was wise to opt out of the World Cup. When the Strasbourg municipality saw how much it would cost to host matches, it instead declared all of Alsace a "football-free region" and hired an advertising agency to spread the word.
The glut of football advertising and sponsorship led several colleagues in a Paris public relations firm to form La Coupe est Pleine, COBOF's rival in the anti-World Cup movement. "We wanted to unite with them," Patrick Vassort says. "But they refused. We have a political position; they don't. They just want to forget about the World Cup. They refuse to analyse it. You can't force people to think."
That's right, Christine Lam, an organiser of La Coupe est Pleine, confirms. "We're not aggressive, we're not even really against football. We're just trying to organise alternative activities for people who are fed up." La Coupe has distributed "Espace sans foot" stickers to over 1,000 members, and its website tells internauts about, for example, SOS Femmes Sans Foot, a group of restaurants which offer to send drivers to pick up and take home football widows.
La Coupe est Pleine has joined forces with Fabienne Boutier, a record producer who set up an ad hoc T-shirt company called Ras la Coupe. The sexy, tight white T-shirt shows a soccer ball on the front, with a red diagonal line through it like a traffic sign.
Serious anti-Cup activists scorn her T-shirts as cheap commercialism, but Boutier is not discouraged. "It's just a gag," she says. "We have a baggy version for men too, but we sell four times as many to women. I've had it with the World Cup - you can't eat a yoghurt or open a bottle of mineral water without seeing the Footix symbol - it's too much."
A poll by Elle magazine concluded that 600,000 French women would be willing to pay for a male escort during the World Cup. Twenty-one per cent of those surveyed said they would go to see a Chippendales-style male striptease - and Paris's Elysee-Montmartre theatre is providing one. Another theatre is playing a World Cup satire called Red Card to full audiences.
The unemployed, homeless and illegal immigrants are trying to use the World Cup to remind people that they exist, holding their own symbolic matches between the gueux (beggars) and maitres du monde (masters of the world). The gueux players have names like RMI (minimum insertion revenue), while the maitres call themselves G7, IMF and WTO. If anyone needed reminding that football is not the real world, the beggars keep winning.