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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.
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.
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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.
You almost got me here. Almost.
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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.
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Nick Suzuki? Yeah he's quarter japanese, though as a Habs fan no one here ever thinks of him as a minority.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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%.
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