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Notes -
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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