This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Fighting the same battle every four years: the racial makeup of national football teams
This is one of my favourite/least favourite culture war topics. It’s such an equal parts fun and frustrating topic because being the World Cup, it draws commentary from absolutely everywhere and everyone: for people normally stuck inside their social media bubbles, you get exposed to all kinds of rare and exotic retardation. Intense mestizo racism, pan-African nationalism, Maghrebi anxiety, intentionally obtuse western progressives, bitter blood-and-soil Europeans; you get a little bit of everything!
The basic thing at issue is something that everybody will see if they tune in to the semifinal starting in 30 minutes: uh, these European teams aren’t very European, are they?
It is funny, isn’t it?
There’s this sort-of intentionally obtuse reaction that seems to be the Anglo progressive default. Oh, wow, sure, I guess there’s a few ethnic minorities on the French team. I actually hadn’t noticed. Kind of weird you did. Not that it’s a bad thing, of course; actually it’s a good thing. Which is obviously so silly. Come on guys, don’t pretend we haven’t all got eyes. If this is your defence it’s a fucking terrible one because it makes you look like an idiot and worse, makes it look you like you think the rest of us are idiots too.
And come on, this is funny! Of course it’s funny, both in the ha-ha sense and the sort of amusingly-interesting sense. There’s a reason everyone wants to get their two cents of opinion on it because it’s natural fodder for jokes that the French team be so visibly un-French in background. Even among the handful of Europeans on the team half of them are the obviously-not-French Hernandez brothers, and the only French French players might be the two worst players on the squad (Digne and Rabiot). If it was the reverse scenario where a bunch of white guys were dominating the roster of some foreign team, the same people professing to be colour-blind would obviously be the first to point this out.
And we know this because there are instances of this happening! This year we had the World Baseball Classic where the majority of the “British” and “Italian” and “Israeli” teams were guys from Iowa and Kansas. For Canadians, it’s an endless source of amusement whenever a non-hockey nation hosts the Olympics to see how many Canucks end up on the host hockey team.
It’s an uncomfortable situation for people
The hesitation to acknowledge the reality of the situation and the inherent humour of it by progressives is some cocktail of unwillingness to cede rhetorical ground to bigots, and a certain unease or doubt about the nature of demographic change in the West and whether it is really bringing us closer towards utopia. And obviously the salience of the issue for others is equally political in nature. I don’t need to explain why some people in western countries would want to make a big deal of this; that is self-evident, especially here of all places. But there are many more people across the world who want to make hay of it. If you go to /r/soccer over the course of the World Cup you will see an endless series of different permutations of “Team France is really Team Africa” from different perspectives.
Some pan-African or Afrocentrists interpret it as another form of neo-colonialism: they see predatory European powers literally stealing the best athletes from their pseudo-colonies, and draping them in the flag of some foreign country. There is an inverse race-focused gripe to “Team France is really Team Africa” that sees it as a sort of neo-slavery where Africans have been taken from their ancestral homelands and brainwashed into supporting their masters. This is an awkward thing for some European ethnic minorities who would really prefer if their “woke” (less in the contemporary social justice sense, more in the original Afrocentric sense) compatriots would not insist that they are fundamentally not their adopted European nationality.
In Algeria and Tunisia meanwhile, there is endless handwringing that their teams are too French, with their squads almost exclusively being made up of players born and bred in metropolitan France. These players may pretend to be citizens by descent but are culturally alien, barely Muslim, and don’t even speak Arabic! Say what you will about the makeup of the England or French or German squads, but at least they speak the national language together. The level of identity crisis that blood-and-soil European nationalists have over football pales in comparison to the Algerian right-wing.
There is also the reality that many of the more outspoken nationalist critics of European teams are obviously motivated in part by crude bigotry. When people talk about too much “diversity” in the German team they’re not talking about the Slavs in the squad. No Spaniard is drawing the line over having Frenchman Aymeric Laporte in the squad. The criticism falls much more squarely on sub-Saharan Africans.
But what would you do differently?
However fiercely the ethnic nationalists would protest, something you do not see in any large number are claims that this is all some harebrained DEI scheme. People by and large acknowledge that the makeup of these teams is not decided by politics, but for the most part trying to field the best squad possible. Take the blood-and-soil types and ask them to pick a starting XI for their national football team and they’d probably return something not much different than what it is already. People still want their country to win, and the reality is there is no ethnically pure replacement for Mbappé or Lamal or Bellingham.
The representation isn’t naturally indicative of the demographic swings, either. Yes, France is genuinely becoming more African, but not nearly so much as the national football team would suggest; not for the next generation, or probably not even the next generation after that. While the shift in the ethnic makeup of the squads is in part due to immigration, it has much more to do with the economic and social dynamics at play in these countries.
Football is a sport where there is effectively no barrier to those without money. Many of the game’s biggest stars come from dizzying, grinding poverty that has no genuine parallel in western countries. The academy system incentivizes teams to find and nurture potential stars from a young age. If you are good enough, there are no obstacles in your way. This tilts the balance decisively to those areas where kids play lots and lots of unorganized and semi-organized football without a large focus on academics or other distractions. In most western countries, that is generally the children of economically worse-off ethnic minority groups. The Paris suburbs produced more players than any other single country for this World Cup.
The alternative, seen in capable teams like Norway or Croatia that manage to field teams that punch above their weight while maintaining a more accurate demographic makeup, is to create a society that values and funds participation in youth sports as part of a healthy outlet for children. Treating athletics as meaningless, or worse, primarily an opportunity for profit, is a way to handicap your national sports teams for decades into the future.
As a Canadian, it’s been very strange to experience the reverse of this trend: as hockey has become more and more exclusive and expensive, the diverse and dominant national teams of my childhood have instead become whiter, richer, and weaker. In the most recent Olympics the single token minority on the team was a guy who is quarter-Japanese (I think?). Again, you might expect this would draw a chorus of think pieces about white supremacy or something, but the reality is that no one could plausibly come up with better alternatives.
Pope John Paul famously said that “Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.” There are things to be learned even from this culture war issue, despite most of the conversation about it being worthless. A national team is a reflection of the nation that produced it. Take that as you will.
I'm going to take the complete opposite devil's advocate position here, and say that the racial makeup of national sports teams is clearly the result of racism in the United States, at least. I'll do the always dangerous thing of advocating for my ideological opponents to do something that I think would be in their best interest:
Ibram X Kendi et al. Should Be Advocating for More White Representation in Sports
If we're starting, ad argumentum, from Kendi-ism's basic postulates:
All racial differences in representation are the result of discrimination stemming from racism
The only way to fight current discrimination and cure those differences in representation is with discrimination in the other direction
It's obvious that there can be no other reason why the number of YTs in the NBA doesn't reflect their overall population share. Done and dusted.
But even if we start from the empirical observations of international tournaments and the assumptions of HBD, we still find that YTs are vastly underrepresented in American athletics. The American Olympic basketball team, based on merit and even cheating significantly by bringing along marginal players like Joel Embiid, went to the fourth quarter against Serbia. Serbia was the only country in the Olympics with an all-white team, and they won Bronze. The United States had no white players on their team, despite having a white population multiple times that of Serbia. Argentina is fielding a World Cup team with no players of notable African descent, and they are in the semifinals. This despite having a similarly sized white population to France and England. This would suggest to us that the disparity is not based on innate talent differences.
So, sure, this particular day today there might not be a white player who could replace a superior black players on the national team, but that is all downstream of twenty-odd years of culture. There's a reason why the representation looks the way that it does, and it isn't some sacred natural phenomenon handed down from Mt. Sinai.
This would massively benefit the Antiracism(tm) industry, in that it would prove for a change that they were seeking equality, rather than ethnic grievance. Giving up useless, but symbolic cultural privileges in high profile entertainment industries may not be a fair trade for affirmative action demands, but it would at least be something that the woke are looking to give up.
That instead the "Snowtime Lakers" are being criticized by the woke press should tell us something about the goals of the movement.
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is mutually reinforced thing. You are correct, that children are trained in sport from early age. In many countries in Europe you have dedicated sport classes since the elementary school, you have more PhysED in curriculum, it is expected to move forward toward local youth sports clubs from there. Now in modern day and age of let's say Germany, this probably means that your child will be there together with predominantly immigrant population in soccer class while it will be predominantly native or at least white in ice hockey class. You mentioned Norway, but there is already problem like that especially with children post 2014 immigrant crisis wave - parents are reluctant to drop their 10 year old into a soccer club with 70% players of immigrant background with all the problems it entails. Just imagine Caitlin Clark example but on steroids.
For now parents just take their children from ghettos and drive them to different soccer class. But I think it will be only matter of time when we will see the overall change. Croatia is safer in that regard.
More options
Context Copy link
This a fundamentally different issue, though. A lot of those countries the local Baseball scenes would be single-figure teams.
Countries where a given sport is overwhelmingly niche having a random Diaspora team of 4th/5th-stringers from a 'good country' who are just happy to be able to represent their national team and/or get the opportunity is different from totally disposing of the locals at the top of a gigantic, cash-rich ecosystem.
The situation is different, but my point was that people who would've otherwise claimed to see nothing at all strange or odd about France's team being 90% African were quick to point out how "Italian" the Italy team was.
More options
Context Copy link
Also, I love the WBC rules for nationality! If you have any claim to being from "country," you're from "country" and that's all there is to it.
I don't know much about the WBC but even passport-holder nationality rules are fine to bulk out 'world cups' for sports that are only really seriously contended in a few places. Rugby League World Cups are kinda funny since there's usually 4-5 teams that are essentially just 'Popular Australian Diaspora nations that don't actually play Rugby League' that are made up of guys who aren't good enough to play for Australia but still professional level players and happen to have a random ancestry passport.
The WBC doesn't even require you to have the passport.
So it's not just that you have the passport, it's that you probably would get the passport if they applied for one, and if participation has been allowed in a past match it can't be revoked because of the prior participation rule.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've been feeling increasingly similar to some of the points expressed in this post with American Football, at least at the collegiate and high school levels, though admittedly less in high school. Originally the game was our collegiate students vs the other teams collegiate students - most of which were if not local, regionally close to the colleges playing. You'd also play the regional teams: Michigan vs Ohio State. Oklahoma vs Texas. Army vs Navy. While football (and other sports) have long left the original realms of student who were athletes, becoming athletes who we pretend are students, and recently it has become even more mercenary with the Name Image Likeness (NIL) deals and portal transfers. Roster turnovers year to year are getting insane. Your arch nemesis' star player is now your star player because some booster offered $2 million more to them.
Now when I follow my alma mater, I couldn't tell you half the players year to year due to all the transfers that happen. When I was growing up, you'd get excited knowing how your team's players would become better with each year on the team, but also the influx of talent coming in as freshmen. The old timers would do me one better by seeing most of the kids grow up into playing at high schools in the area, then going to their local college to play for the alma mater. Each step back in history is more true to the distillation of local pride of "your kids" vs "their kids". Now it is "our money" vs "their money".
Hard to feel pride when the alma mater does well or disappointment when they fail - when there is nothing that the local area did to help raise the kids who are doing well - just a handful of rich boosters paying the best players around the country to win a game. But without the substance for why your team won the game with your kids, it is just a further deracination from the spirit which created the game in the first place.
(and yes I know football was "invented" by Rutgers because they got whipped in baseball by Princeton)
I think the awkward collision here is that college sports are almost explicitly identarian in nature in a way that few other sports are. At least traditionally, you have a certain style of play, a famous coach, you keep players for a few years, you get to see them grow and develop and flourish, and then (again traditionally) often never even had to see them show up at a rival school, because they'd either age out or "graduate" to the pro leagues. All on top of the inherent local nature of many state colleges, which is statistically quite strong, and then you also have personal connections in the alumni base which simply isn't present in pro sports (you occasionally get a "native son" or daughter who is praised to know end but this isn't actually all that common). So yeah, the NIL/transfer era is truly tragic, almost everyone is feeling this way. I say this doubly so as a college basketball fan, where you are almost extra aware of the players since teams are so small.
The upshot is that college sports had something to lose, and find themselves in a weird spot where no one's sure how much to care about representation. Nowhere is this more visible in my personal opinion than my own alma mater, BYU! Not only is there a strong cultural component, there's also the desire to have the athletes represent the values, which is still strong but at least slightly in conflict with a desire to win as still relative newcomers in the high-profile Big 12 conference, plus the desire for good PR for the underlying church. I think they are threading the needle slightly better than most, but there's no denying that things are decidedly strange.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
National sports competitions start to lose their purpose without the ethno-nationalism that once implicitly pervaded the world when they were started. Frankly, the participation of the United States was always weird for that reason; it would have made a lot more sense for individual states to have their own teams. I want to see different tribes fight each other in an arena, but if they're all just mercenaries then it loses most of its meaning and interest. It's kind of fun watching good players play against other good players, but regular professional teams already exist for that. I'm curious to see whether these sporting events will have the legs to keep going as so many countries descend into more fractured ethnic blocks.
Relatedly, the UK countries compete separately at the World Cup (it's England specifically, although I think Scotland and Wales have qualified before), but as a combined "Team GB" at the Olympics.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Uh, the English national team doesn't look more diverse than England itself; Bellingham is the only black player I can name. Granted he's a genuine star, but so is Kane. Today's semifinal was genuinely France's Africans vs Spain's Africans, but England vs Argentina is pretty much Northern European Whites vs Italian Whites.
Have you looked at the England squad? Sure their 'superstars' are less African but of this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_national_football_team#Players about 15 are of African heritage. The UK is not >50% African even if the BBC's output tries to frame it that way.
More options
Context Copy link
Saka (starboy), Madueke, Eze, Rashford, Ivan Toney, Marc Guehi, Nico O'Reilly, Reece James, Djed Spence, Jarrel Quansah (red card lol), Mainoo (why), and I think I'm missing some. The England squad is very black, particularly London players.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Doesn't France use a definition of "French" that looks more like the American self-definition? I suppose I can't speak to how widespread the view is within the country, but at least from here it has a reputation, far more than the rest of Europe, of considering France to be a meme, and its adherents to be French.
I guess I'd be interested in hearing a real French perspective on this, if someone is willing to volunteer one.
I'm not French but I lived in France for four years. Speak the language, regularly read French news/social media, so I would probably have as good an insight here as anyone.
Historically France had a much more "expansionist" sense of nationalism. France at the time of the revolution was not a deeply cohesive nation-state, with probably just some 20-25% of the population speaking what we would register as French with a variety of minority languages and cultures proliferating. French nationalists saw the French project as one defined by culture that inferior peoples could (and would) integrate into. You can see that by 1812 France had directly annexed Catalonia, the Low Countries, a strip of northern Germany, the left bank of the Rhine, much of Italy, as well as modern Croatia and Slovenia; these were all deemed to be peoples who, if not French now, could be French in the future. As late as 1919 French nationalists were still arguing that all the people on the left side of the Rhine were more French than German. France, unlike most other European countries, have integrated some colonies directly into the structure of the metropole: French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, and Réunion are not separate overseas territories or dependencies but rather integral regions of France.
The big changes to this mentality came after the 1960s. France lost the war in Algeria, and with it the Algerian provinces that had been annexed into France. Over a million pied-noirs (white settlers) and Algerian Jews left Algeria for France. Around the same time, France turned to the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa for low-income labour. The state also increased offers of education in France for those areas of Africa in the French cultural/colonial sphere (where France still wields considerable influence). Over time the non-European population of France has increased significantly.
So people are basically of three minds. Many right-wingers (and perhaps less openly, people aligned in the center and left) think French identity is primarily racial. You have to have a majority, if not pure (for the more extreme), ethnic connection to the French nation. There's a certain hypocrisy here as people would not say this of the various other waves of European immigrants to France (particularly there has always been a historical connection with Poland), and a not-insignificant number of the most hardline of these are somewhat lacking on this count (like Éric Zemmour, who is a Sephardic Jew). Also from my experience this rhetoric is oriented rather squarely at sub-Saharan Africans, somewhat lesser at Maghrebis, and almost not at all against southeast Asians.
There are other people, probably still the plurality, that consider Frenchness a matter of culture and that anyone can become French. This still involves a lot of snootiness about what that means (French culture of course being manifestly superior in all ways), despite proclamations of laïcité an intense (and not undeserved) skepticism of Islam, and again some extent of double standards with respect to who is "French enough." (No one ever questions whether someone named Nowak or Kowalski is French).
The third group of people are the smallest and mostly left-aligned, particularly with the political party La France Insoumise (communists, basically) who believe the French identity to be completely flexible and not worth all that much to begin with.
How does this work vis-a-vis the Algerians when they held explicit racial pogroms against European French and yet they're happy to be part of greater France when it suits them?
You mean from the perspective of the French, or the Algerians?
It's water under the bridge except for the most bitter nationalists at this point. It's definitely sore for the pieds-noirs but they're dying off. For most French people their issues with Algerians living in France would be much more pointedly about crime or Islam or terrorism, not a conflict barely anyone can remember anymore.
Likewise Algerians are quite happy to come to a more prosperous, stable country; nevermind that once they conquered and tried to colonize you. It's not like contemporary Vietnamese have much gripes with the French either; in fact quite the opposite.
Most of the French people I meet are through martial arts, so I'm way overindexing for Algerians and Tunisians, but there does still seem to be a lot of complaining from those groups. Which is particularly ironic since the ones I tend to meet tend to be of the upper classes in French North Africa who have parents or grandparents that bear the majority of the blame for pillaging the areas
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
From the last time this controversy erupted:
More options
Context Copy link
You almost got me here. Almost.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The influence of sports stars extends beyond the field. If, hypothetically, all great soccer players were Japanese, then Japanese culture would proliferate among Europeans; Europeans would start listening to Japanese music and imitating the behavioral norms of the Japanese, while the women be more interested in dating a Japanese in the same way as K-Pop leads to interest in Koreans. So there are significant second-order effects on society from the athletic figures we venerate.
More options
Context Copy link
Nick Suzuki? Yeah he's quarter japanese, though as a Habs fan no one here ever thinks of him as a minority.
More options
Context Copy link
A quick nitpick:
Every European country values youth football. Nations like Norway and Croatia are not exemplifying a distinction by having a good run this WC. Smaller nations periodically field strong teams, usually due to a coincidence of a talented generation synergizing at the right time to fit the right tactic. What historically separates the "big" football nations is their sheer depth.
A larger talent pool allows managers to select players who fit a specific structure, rather than being forced to field every decent player they have out of necessity and then organize around it. They are also more tactically flexible, whilst the current Norway squad, for instance, would find itself lost without Haaland at the top, there would be no lack for creative midfielders for Spain. Ultimately, no country in Europe treats football as meaningless. Every major club and most minor ones run professional and serious youth academies.
A more general thought on youth academies and the representation of foreigners:
What the mainstream often ignores about youth development is the role of HBD.
Many Sub-Saharan African players mature physically at an earlier age, making them dominant in youth cohorts. Whilst undeniably talented, their early physical advantages can skew academy recruitment. As clubs increasingly fill limited academy slots with these early-maturing players, local European prospects find themselves competing for fewer opportunities.
This can manifest in predictable ways. Where, to take an American example, dynasty establishing talent like Tom Brady can only shine through via high resistance to adversity. Or where team defining players like Travis Kelce are far from first picks. This early peak contrast becomes clearer in adulthood. Players who relied on early physical dominance at the youth level and are described as having a lot of 'potential' often plateau after 20. Meaning there was no 'potential'. They were at their peak at 17 to 20.
The most extreme examples being Freddy Adu, Macauley Chrisantus and Dominic Adiyiah. All extremely accomplished on the youth level with golden boots and the whole charade, but falling off a cliff when the physical advantage wasn't there for them to rely on. Compared with European players with 'potential' like CR7, Messi or Rooney that had 'potential' as teens and then hit their stride in their mid 20's. There is an obvious skew there despite the many variables and complexities of football.
I think these are all bad examples; they were all teenage wunderkinds who made their pro debuts at 15
Why would that make them bad examples?
Because they weren't slow to develop, and had already established themselves as superstars by the time they exited their teens.
The point is not that they were 'slow' to develop. Rooney, for instance, was very mature physically as a teen. The point is that they demonstrate a development curve that doesn't peak at 18 but rather ~25. Unlike many of the African prospects that go through academies as stars and then seemingly plateau or completely fall off after 18.
So if we take that concept and apply it to a more average European academy player, how are they supposed to demonstrate their 'potential' if they are competing against players who've already peaked? If both are similarly skilled at 18 but one is done developing and the other has years of improvement left then we're reaching closer to the issue.
Ah, I see your point. I think there's a bit of cherry picking: you can point to lots of white players who peaked at 18 or 19 and lots of African players who rounded into form later. I think I'd be inclined to agree that there might be a general trend where sub-Saharan African players might generally trend that way, but there's also issues in a lot of those countries with players faking their birth years (such that players that look to be excellent 16 or 17 year olds are really OK 20 year olds).
The physical peak might be a large part of the issue there. Sub-Saharan Africans age faster. They hit most developmental milestones earlier than Europeans and start puberty, on average, a full year earlier. This can obviously give an advantage during the important developmental era of 12-16.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I remember Steve Sailer (note: he's smart but obviously biased) used to do a lot of speculation about this on his old blog. Basically his argument was that a big part of the reason the NBA was so black was that talented young white players got bodied and fouled out of the game before they had a chance to really develop, and the couaches were too clueless or biased to stop it. We've recently had an increase in white NBA players, but most of them have come from heavily white European countries, where they get a chance to grow and develop at their own pace until they're ready for the pro leagues. The few white players in the NBA tended be guys like Larry Bird or Rick Barry, who were not only physically huge but also had "special" personalities (read: stubborn/mean enough to thrive in the dirtiest of games).
More options
Context Copy link
I played Elite Rugby for a year or so and there was a similar factor with Polynesian players. They generally dominated youth-level off a combination of getting bigger earlier and having a playing culture built around being ball-dominant and big highlight plays. They thus got a good chunk of the academy slots, but a lot failed to convert into actual professional players due to a combination of the physical gap closing as they aged and a lot of their style not really converting into structured professional play. In the meantime they ate up a ton of development resources and discouraged slower-maturing players along the pipeline.
The effects on minority culture of Sports being seen as a principal pathway to success are also highly deleterious. The amount of young Polynesians I knew who made no efforts towards having a plan B, and who are now going nowhere, is very high. Both as their individual priorities, and how their subculture was pretty anti-intellectual.
More options
Context Copy link
You know ball. However, I would say that in football, there's a constant pattern of youth players who are physically dominant on U-16/18/21 teams (black, white, and hispanic) failing to kick on after that peak. It's kind of priced into football youth development in a way it isn't in American football. Also, breaking through early and playing a ton of minutes is a recipe for being an injury disaster in your late 20s, as the example of Rooney (or Jack Wilshere, or Gareth Bale - btw I disagree with your assessment of Rooney, he went to United at 18 and was their top league scorer in his first season) shows; late-blooming players often have much longer peaks because by the time they reach that peak of game intelligence their body is still able to handle it. Helps if you're in Spain/France and thus doped to the gills, of course.
Yeah, Rooney is not the clearest example as he probably matured faster than most in his age group, and he was physically capable enough at 16 to play with adults. But as you say, he kept on developing mentally. He wasn't just his physicality and I'd argue that many of his best performances didn't even revolve around his goal scoring ability which is what defined his earlier years.
And whilst it is of course true that youth stars of all stripes don't always live up to the hype, there's a difference between talent like, for example, Januzaj and the examples I gave. Whilst Januzaj had a lot of hype, he ended up being a middling player at the top level. That's a far cry from never even making it to the top level after being sandwiched in accolades between Toni Kroos and Bojan at 17 like Macauley Chrisantus. Not that a professional career in 2nd division football is a failure by any means. But it's certainly not living up to the imagined potential.
Sure, I agree with the points you're making. I'm just trying to say that these prospects come and go every year, every top club's fans are hyped up about their academy players, or some other academy prospect they want to sign, and the majority of them go the Januzaj route. Some are cut early, some make it into their early twenties and then go to Bremen or Getafe or Tottenham, and a few make it to be stars, but always far fewer than fans expect in a given season.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In every sport there's just always going to be certain styles that are better suited to being the dominant athlete on the pitch and absolutely shellacking people you are better than, but that are less viable against other professional-tier players. You can argue about why so many resources are devoted to players/why they aren't being taught how to function better as part of the professional metagame, but there's always going to be an issue where coaches are more concerned with winning the current age-level game instead of developing players to best function at the top level.
There's plenty of American Football players who are super dominant at the CFB level but don't have the right attributes or game style to thrive in the parity-driven NFL. Tim Tebow's the classic example of that where his physical running style was viable against COllegiate defenders but was never going to last against pro competition.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is an even weirder problem for progressives than it is for blood-and-soil nationalists, since they're often familiar with more essentialist arguments about human populations. Even accounting for the effects you mention further down, there is no plausible way that a completely football-obsessed nation like England ends up with a selection where unmixed ethnic English players are a minority (all of whom are also either washed like Henderson or soon too old to warrant a call-up), assuming that merit is distributed equally across groups. Same goes for Germany, we had like one black guy in the era from 2006 to 2014, now we're suddenly half black, too (and here too the remaining whites ones are typically on the older side and soon to be replaced).
The obvious implication is that black people are just better at (at least some parts of) football, which clashes with progressive ideas about this topic. Tepid acknowledgements of racial differences in things like fast twitch muscle fibers can pass their watchful eye in sports limited to more singular pursuits like sprinting, but football is too much of a composite between various disciplines that the seeming superiority of blacks in it would sit comfortable with the standard progressive outlook on the reality of ethnic groups and differences between them.
More options
Context Copy link
The Death of Nationality is the Death of Meaning
This identity crisis is endemic at all levels of the game. It starts at the lowest level, where local coaches are wont to scout outside their townships and communities to plug squad gaps. Which can eventually leave supporters wondering who exactly they are cheering for when none of the players on the pitch are local. This trend scales all the way to the top, where elite clubs deploy international scouting dragnets to vacuum up global talent.
Leagues try to patch this wound by mandating "homegrown" player quotas, while clubs aggressively market their academies as 'local'. But these measures are at best bandaids when the 'local' academy prospects are ethnically foreign anyways.
This lack of organic connection has fundamentally altered the mentality of the modern player. Today's game lacks the raw, tribal intensity of previous eras. Most notably exemplified by the 'Golden Generation' with players like Roy Keane*, Steven Gerrard, John Terry, Gary Neville, Paul Scholes and Frank Lampard to a lesser extent played with a borderline obsessive ferocity. The tribalism was so severe that it actively sabotaged the English national team where the players didn't even socialize or eat together, discounting Keane who is Irish.
You might say that's a weakness, and it obviously was. But it was also beautiful. A human story that contextualized an era.
All of this is to say that when football relies entirely on global mercenaries, when the goal is for the symbol of the team to win, you lose the ability to build genuine dynasties or narratives. Without a shared local or national identity, victory becomes sterile, and the emotional connection between the fans and the pitch is severed. That doesn't mean you can't enjoy things. But it's a level below the 'original'. The true story is with the homogenous teams that represent the essence and effort of distinct people and everyone watching feels it.
More options
Context Copy link
Of course. When we said "no more brother wars" we weren't talking about the brotherhood of man. We were talking about Europe, and Europeans.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think there's anything to add. It's like noticing that American soldiers are blacker than the general population. Yes, and?
Blacks haven't been overrepresented in combat troops since Vietnam- black volunteers overwhelmingly pick safe behind the line MOSes that teach practical civilian job skills. Doorkickers are mostly white with a few hispanics and oddball groups.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think many people notice that American soldiers are blacker than the general population, where the armed forces are 17% black and the general population 13%. In fact I'd wager most would not think such a thing at all considering blacks are underrepresented as frontline troops, sitting at around 10%.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link