In April 1958 a small group of footballers led by Rachid Mekloufi quietly left their professional teams in France and quit the country clandestinely. Convened in Tunis, they announced their commitment to the FLN’s struggle for Algerian independence from France as the first national football team of Algeria. The move won the ‘Onze de l’indépendence’ enduring admiration and scored the FLN a significant public relations victory. As this episode illustrates, sports constituted a compelling terrain for political action during decolonization. From 1957 through independence, the FLN and the French Army both looked to sports as a tool – not only to win loyalty and build legitimacy, but to transform rural Algerians into modern political subjects. Despite their deeply opposed visions of Algeria’s future, the FLN and the French Army shared remarkably similar developmentalist worldviews. For both, the underdevelopment, illiteracy, and underemployment of Algerian youths – who represented a disproportional sliver of the population – were key problems. And for both, sports offered a preliminary solution. Sports hardened bodies. It taught perseverance, self-discipline, and teamwork. In short, sports offered a means of socialization (and nationalization) that was both cheap and attractive. This paper draws on the archives of the French Army and colonial administration to examine one athletic program in particular: the ‘foyers sportifs.’ These rudimentary sports clubs were originally designed by French army officers as a tool to help socialize Muslim youths whose purportedly ‘backward’ religious and cultural habits rendered them ill-prepared for ‘modern’ life. But as they ballooned in number to more than seven thousand by 1961, I argue, they became sites not just for asserting state power, but contesting it. By situating these camps in a longer history of political contestation through sports in Algeria, and by tracing their eventual absorption into the independent Algerian state as a tool of youth education, this paper complicates the notion of sports as a straightforward tool of socialization and highlights the deep ties between physical cultural and developmentalist thought at midcentury.