- published: 21 Aug 2015
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L'Équipe (French for "the team") is a French nationwide daily newspaper devoted to sports, owned by Éditions Philippe Amaury. The paper is noted for coverage of football (soccer), rugby, motorsports and cycling. Its ancestor was L'Auto, a general sports paper, whose name reflected not any narrow interest but the excitement of the time in car racing.
L'Auto originated the Tour de France cycling stage race in 1903 as a circulation booster. The race leader's yellow jersey (maillot jaune) was instituted in 1919, probably to reflect the distinctive yellow newsprint on which L'Auto was published. The competition that would eventually become the UEFA Champions League was also the brainchild of a l'Equipe journalist, Gabriel Hanot.
L'Auto and therefore L'Équipe owed its life to a 19th-century French scandal involving soldier Alfred Dreyfus - the Dreyfus affair. With overtones of anti-semitism and post-war paranoia, Dreyfus was accused of selling secrets to France's old enemy, the Germans.
As different sides of society insisted he was guilty or innocent - he was eventually cleared but only after rigged trials had banished him to an island prison camp - the split came close to civil war and still have their echoes in modern French society.
Thierry Daniel Henry (French pronunciation: [tjɛʁi ɑ̃ʁi]; born 17 August 1977) is a French footballer who plays as a striker for New York Red Bulls in Major League Soccer.
Henry was born in Les Ulis, Essonne (a suburb of Paris) where he played for an array of local sides as a youngster and showed great promise as a goal-scorer. He was spotted by AS Monaco in 1990 and signed instantly, making his professional debut in 1994. Good form led to an international call-up in 1998, after which he signed for the Serie A defending champions Juventus. He had a disappointing season playing on the wing, before joining Arsenal for £11 million in 1999.
It was at Arsenal that Henry made his name as a world-class footballer. Despite initially struggling in the Premier League, he emerged as Arsenal's top goal-scorer for almost every season of his tenure there. Under long-time mentor and coach Arsène Wenger, Henry became a prolific striker and Arsenal's all-time leading scorer with 228 goals in all competitions. The Frenchman won two league titles and three FA Cups with the Gunners; he was nominated for the FIFA World Player of the Year twice, was named the PFA Players' Player of the Year twice, and the FWA Footballer of the Year three times. Henry spent his final two seasons with Arsenal as club captain, leading them to the 2006 UEFA Champions League Final.