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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9778 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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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.

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.

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