The Diaspora World Cup. (Or the Davos World Cup?). # 231. 30/06/2026

Welcome, especially if you are football-phobic as this blog goes beyond obsessive factoids to consider serious issues about ethnicity and the world we live in.

The Diaspora World Cup. (Or the Davos World Cup?).

We are at the halfway stage of the football World Cup. A Burundian has scored for Australia, a North African is leading scorer for Sweden, a Haitian has got a hat-trick for Canada. An Albanian/Kosovan is captain of Switzerland, a Ghanaian for Austria. Only one of the Curacao team was born on the island, the rest grew up and learned their football largely in the Netherlands. Overall ten of the forty-eight nations represented have a majority of players born outside their country but eligible via migrated parents or grandparents. Astoundingly, 93 players at the tournament (7.5%, 1 in 14, of the total) were born in Paris and its environs, enabled by the strong presence of francophone North and West African countries. Western European teams are full of diaspora background players. France has a majority with roots in Africa; at points in England’s game against Ghana we had only three white men on the pitch but five with African backgrounds. A quarter of players are eligible for two or more countries abound; France’s superb Michael Olise is also eligible to play for England, Algeria or Nigeria. Though they don’t have a team at the tournament diasporic Nigerians have scored seven goals. And who can’t relish the fact that Folarin Balogun, the son of Nigerian migrants to Britain – people who Musk and Vance say are undermining our civilisation and bringing us to the brink of civil war – has scored goals that are Making America Great on the soccer pitch.

Why football illuminates thinking about race.

Major disparities between different cultures abound.

Why so many Parisian footballers at the World Cup? My guess is that from their earliest years they spent hours playing in the football cages on the dismal housing estates around the periphery of the city. They competed, they challenged, they compared and they learned from each other. They exemplify Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Beatles 10,000 hours’ principle: intense dedication over a long period has honed skills to ever higher levels. Nine-year old boys in our local park have greater ball control skills than did England’s 1966 World Cup winners. As in fifteenth century Florence or 1950s Memphis, exceptional capacities have emerged from very specific communities.

Another extraordinary football statistic is that four of last season’s top ten English Premier League teams now have managers who grew up in the small Basque area of northern Spain. Three of them used to play together as teenagers. Why this startling nurturing of abilities from a very specific area? Perhaps because they came from a footballing micro-culture which not only developed skill, strength and speed but over the years also worked at building into them an abstract instinctive capacity for tactical sophistication.

The explanations above may involve much guesswork but what is clear with football, as with most other human activities, is that abilities do not emerge equally across the board but rather with particular intensity in some cultures at specific times and places.

Competition not control aids racial and ethnic integration.

Stehen Pinker, America’s leading public intellectual, has said that baseball is a major driver of racial integration. He was wrong, of course. It is football. This works at both micro and macro levels. The demands of teamwork and cohesion, sharing pinnacles of success and sorrows of defeat, create a trans-ethnic unity where other factors recede into the background. Meanwhile at a macro level, majority populations rejoice over and welcome the contributions that minorities bring. The exceptional involvement in football amongst diasporic people is interesting. A possible explanation is that it offers a ready route into acceptance and even admiration with indigenous working class communities. Certainly, at different levels, football is to be celebrated as one of the major centripetal forces aiding the cohesion of our society.

The barrage of information at the beginning of this blog made one point very clear – top level football teams are ethnically very integrated. This has not happened because of the prescriptions that are widely used today, including the Church, that are aiming for relatively equal proportional representation, or setting percentage targets for ethnic involvement. In football the intense competition, the value of elite skills, and the benefits of success are all so great that no club or national team would for a moment brook any criteria for selection or appointment other than sheer ability. In football more than almost any other occupation, success is determined by a person’s capacity to deliver the goods regardless of all other factor including their ethnicity.

The significant over-representation of diasporic footballers at the World Cup is not the consequence of DEI policies, or the push for quotas. It is simply the result of the pressure on teams to find the very best players from anywhere, come what may. So top players are found in unexpected places, the demand for talent knows neither geographical, racial or religious boundaries. An explicitly Muslim, Egyptian footballer becomes a local hero and icon in Liverpool simply because he could give the team a quality no one else could offer.

Because highly placed ethnic minority footballers did not achieve their status because of ‘inclusive’ policies they are not hobbled in their own or in other people’s minds by the suspicion that they are merely woke appointees. The short term benefits of such policies in creating greater diversity are outweighed by the long term problem that they taint all appointments, appropriate or not, with a niggle of inauthenticity.

The ‘sheer ability’ criteria that rules in football, with the happy outcome of substantial ethnic diversity and positive interactions, cannot of course produce such welcome results in every sphere. Unevenness will always occur. South Asians are absent at the World Cup, though increasingly prominent in Silicon Valley. They are also prominent in the House of Commons, whereas Chinese heritage people overall choose not to be. Black people had little profile in football before the emergence of Pele in the late 1950s, now they thrive. In football, results dominate.

This does not make such hard-headedness necessarily appropriate in every sphere of life, nonetheless the happy outcome it has in football ought to make us more attentive to the importance of measuring success in other fields, and not so enamoured of the benefits of central control or ethnic criteria in appointments.

Or the Davos Cup?

There is, as ever, an alternative and more negative way of reading the World Cup narrative. Football is also one more instance of the dominance of a global, financial elite; able to shower quite extraordinary wealth on a microscopically small percentage of people.

In ‘The Birth of the Modern World’ (2004) C A Bayly suggested that globalisation increased the similarities between nations, but increased the differences within nations. Football illustrates this. The style and tactics of teams from different parts of the world are increasingly similar, frequently through coaches developed in the major European football nations (except in England – we don’t do well at producing managers). As a result, unfancied teams can hold major teams to a draw, even eke out a shock win.

The international culture brings benefit in that there is now less edge between opposing national teams. Infamously, in 1966 after a bruising quarter-final match the England manager, Sir Alf Ramsey, referred to the Argentina team as ‘animals’, a slur that was not forgotten. The teams then came from different football worlds, the World Cup has a history of ‘battles’. Now however globalised football has developed international camaraderie. Often both opposing national teams will include players who earn their living at the same clubs. A quarter of the 48 national squads include a player from Manchester City, ten of have a Crystal Palace player, as also from Bayern Munich.

But the downside is a game increasingly driven by global finance and profit. Players - wealthy and hero-worshipped as they may be - are also helots driven to take part in more and more games to the cost of their skills and at risk of possible serious injury in order to feed the appetites of television companies and the club owners. This enlarged World Cup has been extended by a week, thereby diminishing players’ opportunity for recovery between seasons. Gathered round the football honey-pot, focussed on the notoriously corrupt FIFA (Federation of International Football Associations), is a network of administrators, agents, lawyers and accountants. The gift of an ersatz FIFA ‘Peace Trophy’ to Donald Trump was only the most shameless example of the growing corruption of the game’s leadership.

Football, once the people’s game, has increasingly moved out of the people’s reach and into the hands of the wealthy. The exorbitant ticket prices and brazen profiteering of transport companies put attendance beyond the possibilities of all but wealthy elites from the various countries. Who are the people in the stadiums cheering on Panama, D R Congo or Iraq? No doubt some are expatriates who have sufficiently prospered in the USA to afford the journeys and the tickets, but more are likely to be from wealthy elites or leaders in political life who can afford the exorbitant costs of being present at the global jamboree. Meanwhile the vast masses gathered together around television screens in Johannesburg, Rio, Accra or Cairo, including one-time school-mates of the players, are living in intensifying poverty and squalor.

Wealth has often generated great productions. Football too produces great performances – a goal by Mbappe! How can we not but relish the brilliant football on show at the moment; as well in the West rejoicing that it generates greater inter-ethnic cohesion. But after Trump has finally awarded the trophy to the winners worldwide injustices will abound and intensify.