Fourteen of the thirty-two starters finished it. Two of them were Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani, and their presence at that starting line makes sense only if you are willing to follow a much longer story backward, past the marathon, past the World’s Fair that surrounded it, and into a war that had ended in South Africa two years earlier. Taunyane and Mashiani had not trained for a marathon. They had not been selected by anyone to represent their country, because their country did not yet consider them representable. They were in St. Louis because a war had wrecked the economy they depended on, because an advertisement in a Johannesburg newspaper had offered them paying work, and because that work happened to require them to run.

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The war was the Anglo-Boer War, and Taunyane and Mashiani had spent it as dispatch runners, carrying messages across open country on foot, often at speed, often through terrain where a horse or a wagon could not easily follow. This was not athletic training in any sense a modern coach would recognize. It was a job, and a dangerous one, done because someone had to get a message from one place to another and running was the fastest reliable way to do it. When the war ended, the skill that had kept them useful to the people paying them suddenly had no market. Farms across the country had been burned. Livestock had been killed. Whole communities had been displaced into camps. For the Black South Africans who had worked as scouts, runners, and labourers during the fighting, peace did not bring gratitude or opportunity. It brought unemployment.

So when the Rand Daily Mail carried an advertisement recruiting performers for a travelling Boer War exhibition bound for America, offering wages and passage in exchange for reenacting battles twice a day for paying crowds, hundreds of people signed up, Taunyane and Mashiani among them. The company was called the South African Boer War Exhibition, and it was, in effect, a piece of imperial theatre touring the United States: real veterans, restaged skirmishes, ticketed grandstands. The actual war had been fought over land and power and the future shape of a country. The St. Louis version was fought over admission prices.

It landed them inside one of the odder juxtapositions in the history of the modern Olympics. The 1904 Games were staged as an adjunct to the World’s Fair, sharing its grounds, its visitors, and, more troublingly, its worldview. Alongside the exhibits of electric lighting and new machinery, the Fair featured ethnographic displays in which people from Africa, Asia, and the Americas were presented to visitors as living specimens of societies that had not yet caught up with Western civilization. The same fairgoers who marveled at the automobiles in one pavilion could walk a few hundred yards and gawk at human beings in another. Taunyane and Mashiani performed their war twice a day within sight of all of it. Somewhere in the course of that summer, encouraged by a fellow performer named B. W. Harris, the two of them ended up on the marathon entry list. Nobody wrote down exactly how the decision was made, and perhaps nobody needs to. Two men who had spent a war running for their lives were about to run forty kilometres for a crowd that had come to see them as a curiosity, against a field of men who had trained for exactly this.

The race itself gave them every reason to fail and no reason to be remembered. The heat was severe enough to end other careers that day. The dust was thick enough that runners described choking on it. And at some point during the race, a pack of dogs ran Taunyane off the course entirely, chasing him into the brush and costing him minutes he could not really afford to lose. He found his way back, rejoined the field, and kept running. He finished ninth. Mashiani finished twelfth. Only twelve men beat either of them, and only two beat both. In a field that had been decimated by heat and dust and a course better suited to punishment than competition, two men who had entered almost as an afterthought had run better than all but a handful of the athletes who were actually supposed to be there.

It would be tempting, looking back, to reach for the explanation that has attached itself to African distance running ever since: something about altitude, or body type, or an inherited gift for endurance. That explanation belongs to a much later decade, built out of a much later set of assumptions, and it has nothing to do with what happened in St. Louis in 1904. What actually explains Taunyane and Mashiani’s finish is simpler and considerably less romantic. They came from a world in which the ability to run long distances quickly was a practical skill, developed the way any practical skill is developed, through use. They had carried messages across difficult ground under real pressure, which is a more demanding education than most marathon training programmes offer. When circumstance handed them a chance to turn that ability into a competitive result, the ability was already there, waiting to be used for something other than survival.

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The final irony took place a short walk from the marathon course, at an event the Fair’s organizers called Anthropology Days. Sullivan and the anthropologist William John McGee had recruited people from the ethnographic exhibits and asked them to compete in athletic contests, hoping the results would demonstrate measurable differences in physical ability between races. The experiment did not produce the results its organizers wanted, and the official response to that failure was not to question the premise but to explain the failure away, folding it into the same story about Western superiority the whole Fair had been built to tell. At the very same World’s Fair, on the very same days, two Black South African men who had never been part of anyone’s experiment were quietly finishing an actual Olympic marathon ahead of most of the field, and almost nobody thought to connect the two events.

That, in the end, is the part of the story that took longest to catch up with itself. Taunyane and Mashiani had, without meaning to, become the first Black Africans to compete in the Olympic Games. South Africa itself would not send an official team to the Olympics until 1908, and when it finally did, that team excluded Black athletes altogether, a policy the country would maintain for decades. Taunyane and Mashiani’s names were misrecorded in the American press of the day, rendered as Lentauw and Yamasani, and then largely dropped out of the record. It would take historians the better part of half a century to reconstruct who these two men actually were, to match the misspelled names in old newspaper columns to the dispatch runners of the Anglo-Boer War, and to state plainly what the results sheet from August 30, 1904, had said all along: that two Black South Africans had entered an Olympic marathon and finished it well.

They had not set out to make that history. They had set out to find paying work after a war had taken everything else away, and running was the one thing they already knew how to do. The Olympic movement had built no pathway for men like them, offered them no invitation, and made no space in its own account of itself for what they achieved. They made the finish line anyway, and it took the rest of the twentieth century for anyone to say so out loud.

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Further reading

Susan Brownell, ed. The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Floris J. G. van der Merwe, “Africa’s First Encounter with the Olympic Games in 1904.” Journal of Olympic History, 1999.

Floris J. G. van der Merwe, “Die ‘Boeresirkus’ van St. Louis, V.S.A. (1904).”

Meghan McCarthy. The Wildest Race Ever: The Story of the 1904 Olympic Marathon. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.

Michael Goksyr. “‘One Certainly Expected a Great Deal More from the Savages’: The Anthropology Days in St. Louis, 1904, and Their Aftermath.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 7, no. 2 (1990): 297–306.

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A week and a half earlier, in a private box above that same track, a different man had quietly made a decision that would shape how this Olympics is remembered almost as much as any race would. He had decided, in effect, to stop congratulating anyone at all. Their names were Jesse Owens and Adolf Hitler. On the scoreboard, August 9 belongs entirely to Owens. In the fuller record historians have since reconstructed, it belongs to both of them and in some uncomfortable ways, in the long run, more to Hitler.

Jesse Owens, that afternoon

The relay itself was almost anticlimactic; Owens, Ralph Metcalfe, Foy Draper and Frank Wykoff ran a world record of 39.8 seconds that would stand for twenty years. What made August 9 extraordinary wasn’t the race. It was what had happened the night before, and what it revealed about who America was actually willing to let win.

The team that trained all season for that relay wasn’t the team that ran it. Two of its sprinters, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, were Jewish. On the eve of the final, U.S. coaches Dean Cromwell and Lawson Robertson pulled both men and replaced them with Owens and Metcalfe officially “for strength,” though Glickman and Stoller had already outrun their white replacement, Foy Draper, in practice. The real reason, widely understood at the time and confirmed by later historians, was that American officials Avery Brundage chief among them did not want two Jewish athletes standing on a podium in front of Hitler. Glickman and Stoller were the only two Jews on the 66-person U.S. track team, and the only healthy members who never got to compete. Owens, already the most famous man at the Games, tried to give up his spot. The coaches refused. He ran, and won, and later said simply: “Those boys were my friends. They deserved to run.”

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So Owens’s fourth gold was built, in part, on the same machinery of exclusion he was supposedly there to defeat. And the machinery didn’t stop at the finish line. When he got home, there was no telegram from President Roosevelt, and no invitation to the White House an honor FDR extended to plenty of white Olympians that year, in the middle of a re-election campaign he didn’t want complicated by photographs with a Black man. “Hitler didn’t snub me,” Owens said later. “It was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.” Stripped of his amateur status within months for skipping an unpaid European exhibition tour, the fastest man alive spent the following years racing against horses, motorcycles, and trucks for cash. “I had four gold medals,” he said, “but you can’t eat gold medals.”

Adolf Hitler, that afternoon

Whatever Hitler personally felt watching Owens win, the myth of a targeted racist snub doesn’t survive contact with the record. On the first day of competition, August 2, he’d congratulated only the German winners in his box, then left before the Black American high jumper Cornelius Johnson took gold. IOC president Henri de Baillet-Latour told him bluntly: greet all the winners from now on, or none, as part of the Olympic protocol. Hitler chose none. By the time Owens won his events, the Führer wasn’t singling out a Black American for humiliation he’d already stopped shaking anyone’s hand, a policy of petty, universal withholding rather than one dramatic act of personal cruelty. The two men, by most credible accounts, never spoke.

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But treating the handshake as the whole story is exactly how Hitler quietly came out ahead. While the world fixated on one box seat, the actual machinery of the Games was doing something far more effective than a snub: it was winning. Germany finished the 1936 Olympics on top of the medal table by a wide margin; roughly 33 golds and 89 medals in total, against the United States’ 24 golds and 56 medals. Owens’s four golds were dazzling, but they were four golds inside a table Germany dominated. Meanwhile, Leni Riefenstahl was in the stands and on the infield with a camera crew unlike anything sport had seen. Trenches dug into the track for low, heroic angles, cameras mounted on balloons and rails, slow motion turning German bodies into sculpture. The resulting film, Olympia, released in 1938, would be watched, admired, and even awarded prizes across the world, selling millions on the idea that Nazi Germany was the most modern, best-organized, most awe-inspiring nation on Earth an idea manufactured in the same stadium where Owens ran, using footage of Owens himself.

So who actually won?

This is the paradox worth sitting with, especially if you write about propaganda, populism, or the optics of power for a living: a regime can lose the race and still win the room. Owens beat the myth of Aryan physical supremacy in the only currency that mattered to him; the stopwatch. Hitler didn’t need to beat Owens. He needed the world to walk away from Berlin believing Germany was orderly, capable, and worth doing business with, and by that measure, the 1936 Games were arguably the regime’s single most successful piece of theater before the war made theater impossible. Two systems of exclusion were on display that August afternoon, one in a Berlin box seat, one in an American relay lineup and an unsent White House telegram, and neither of them lost anything on August 9, 1936. Only the men they excluded did.

Three Must-Reads

Bachrach, Susan D. The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936. Boston: Little, Brown, 2000.

Large, David Clay. Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.

Wiggins, David K., Kevin B. Witherspoon, and Mark Dyreson. Black Mercuries: African American Athletes, Race, and the Modern Olympic Games. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.

Ask almost anyone with an interest in Olympic history about Abebe Bikila and the answer comes instantly: the barefoot runner. The image has become one of the most recognizable in twentieth-century sport. An Ethiopian marathon runner, barefoot, gliding effortlessly through the ancient streets of Rome before winning Olympic gold. It is one of those stories that seems almost too perfect to be true.

But perhaps we have been asking the wrong question for more than sixty years. The real mystery is not why Abebe Bikila ran barefoot. The real mystery is why Europe became obsessed with the fact that he did.

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Because since I am writing my book on the Olympic History I realize that the feet were never the story. The story was that an African had just conquered Europe’s greatest endurance event on the very streets of the former Roman Empire. Yet newspapers devoted far more attention to what Bikila wasn’t wearing than to what he had actually accomplished. That tells us something profound, not about Ethiopia, but about Europe.

In 1960, seventeen African countries gained independence in a single year. Colonial empires that had dominated the continent for generations were beginning to crumble. Across Africa, flags changed, constitutions were rewritten and new governments emerged. Political power was shifting but at the same time another revolution was taking place almost unnoticed.

For decades, international sport had largely reflected colonial hierarchies. Europeans organized the sport elite competitions. Europeans wrote the rules and they were expected to win. African athletes occasionally appeared, but they were usually treated as exceptions rather than equals. They were curiosities. Guests. Rarely were they expected to redefine a sport.

That assumption would disappear one September evening in Rome in 1960. The Olympic marathon began shortly before sunset. The route passed Rome’s ancient monuments before finishing beneath the floodlights of the Olympic Stadium. Among the sixty-nine runners stood a twenty-eight-year-old captain of Emperor Haile Selassie’s Imperial Guard. Almost nobody outside Ethiopia had heard of him: His name was Abebe Bikila.

The race itself was magnificent. Bikila remained patient during the opening kilometres, conserving energy while many of the favourites set the pace. Gradually he moved forward until only one serious challenger remained: Morocco’s Rhadi Ben Abdesselam. Together they ran through Rome’s illuminated streets, stride for stride. The decisive moment came close to the Arch of Constantine. The symbolism was extraordinary. Only twenty-five years earlier Mussolini’s Italy had invaded Ethiopia, one of the few independent African nations. The occupation had become one of fascist Italy’s greatest imperial ambitions. Now, beneath the monuments celebrating Roman conquest, an Ethiopian quietly accelerated away from the field.

Bikila did not make his win political. There was no raised fist. He did not make political speeches or interviews. His feet did the talking. When Bikila crossed the finish line in 2 hours, 15 minutes and 16.2 seconds he had broken the world record and become the first Black African Olympic champion. History had changed.

Yet much of Europe seemed unable to describe what had actually happened. Instead, journalists stared at his feet. Italian newspapers portrayed him almost as a mythical figure emerging from the African wilderness. British newspapers emphasized the irony of an Ethiopian defeating Italy on its own soil. American journalists marvelled at the unknown African who had suddenly conquered the world’s greatest marathon.

Again and again, however, one detail dominated the headlines. He was barefoot. He was called the barefoot African or even the barefoot African wonder. Recent historical research demonstrates that contemporary reporting often framed Bikila through colonial stereotypes, presenting him as instinctive, primitive or naturally gifted rather than as the product of disciplined training and military preparation. The fascination with his feet frequently overshadowed discussion of his coaching, tactics and athletic intelligence.

Europe had discovered a story it wanted to tell. Howver, it was not Bikila’s story, it was Europe’s story about Africa. While I was thinking about the assumptions hidden inside the headlines. If a British athlete had won wearing unusual shoes, journalists would have asked about sports technology. If an American had surprised the favourites, they would have analysed his training methods. But when an Ethiopian won barefoot, however, many commentators searched for something mystical. You can hear those journalist thinking: Perhaps Africans were naturally closer to nature. Perhaps they possessed unusual physical gifts. Perhaps civilization itself was unnecessary.

Notice how subtle this shift is. The victory becomes less about preparation than instinct. The athlete disappears. But the stereotype remains.

Bikila himself must have found all this rather puzzling. His explanation for running barefoot was remarkably ordinary. He had been issued running shoes before the marathon. Adidas, already emerging as one of the Olympic Games’ most visible sporting suppliers, had provided footwear for many competitors. But according to Bikila the shoes hurted, they pinched. So he took them off.

That was it. There was no philosophy of barefoot running. No rejection of modernity. No romantic return to nature. The shoes simply didn’t fit. It is one of the least dramatic explanations in Olympic history. Perhaps that is why journalists preferred their own version.

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The irony becomes even richer when viewed through the history of commercial sport. Today it is almost impossible to imagine the Olympic Games without corporate sponsorship. Nike. Adidas. On. Puma. Every medal ceremony doubles as a global advertising campaign. Athletes are walking billboards whose performances are inseparable from the brands they wear.

Rome 1960 stood near the beginning of that transformation. Adidas founder Adi Dassler had already recognized that Olympic champions sold shoes better than any advertisement ever could. Winning athletes became marketing assets. Every victory strengthened the brand. Then came Abebe Bikila and now imagine the scene inside Adidas headquarters. The world’s most memorable Olympic champion had just won...without their product. One could argue that the most famous sporting image of the Rome Olympics became, unintentionally, an advertisement against the official equipment. Not because Adidas made poor shoes, but because one pair failed one athlete. Commercial sport prefers universal solutions. Bikila reminded the world that elite performance remains profoundly individual.

The mythology became even more fragile four years later. At the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, Bikila returned to defend his title. Only six weeks before the Games he underwent an emergency appendectomy. Many believed he would never recover in time. But he recovered and he dominated the race, and this time he wore shoes. Properly fitted shoes. And he had carefully chosen his footwear.

After Rome, he did not become a missionary for barefoot running. Quite the opposite. He spent the next four years searching for the best shoe he could find. During a visit to Japan in 1961, his Swedish coach, Onni Niskanen, introduced him to Kihachiro Onitsuka, founder of the young Japanese shoe company that would later evolve into ASICS. Concerned about the rough roads of the Mainichi Marathon, both men urged Bikila to try a pair of lightweight Onitsuka Tiger Marup racing shoes. Bikila agreed, not because he had changed his philosophy, but because he believed good equipment should serve the athlete rather than the other way around. He immediately noticed the improved grip and won the marathon with ease, later wearing the same shoes to victory in the Košice Marathon. Over the following years he experimented with other brands, including New Balance during the 1963 Boston Marathon and, on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics, Puma, which secured the right to supply his racing shoes. In other words, Bikila approached footwear exactly as today’s elite marathon runners do: he tested products, compared manufacturers and chose whatever gave him the greatest competitive advantage. There was nothing ideological about his decision. If Rome had taught him that ill-fitting shoes could lose a race, the years that followed convinced him that well-designed shoes could help win one. By the time he arrived in Tokyo in 1964, the world’s most famous barefoot runner had become an expert consumer in the emerging global marketplace of sports equipment—an irony almost completely forgotten because the photograph from Rome proved more memorable than the reality that followed.

He again won Olympic gold while breaking his own world record, becoming the first athlete ever to win two consecutive Olympic marathon titles. Think about what that means. The man forever remembered for running barefoot produced an even faster marathon wearing shoes. The famous photograph from Rome had created a myth that Bikila himself quietly disproved. Shoes were never the issue, but his performance was.

Elite distance running is also built on coaching, institutional knowledge, competition structures, military sports programmes, sports medicine, professional management and decades of accumulated expertise. Ironically, we continue to repeat many of the same mistakes made in 1960. We still prefer simple biological explanations to complex historical ones. The language has become more sophisticated, but many assumptions remain the same.

Bikila’s story also invites us to think differently about technology itself. Today marathon runners compete in carbon-plated supershoes costing hundreds of dollars. Endless debates rage over whether footwear has become too influential. World Athletics regulates shoe thickness. Companies invest millions in foam technology. Every major marathon has become a contest not only between athletes but between engineering departments.

Seen from that perspective, Rome 1960 suddenly feels astonishingly modern. Bikila was not anti-technology. He was pro-performance, he he accepted technology when it worked. He rejected it when it didn’t. That sounds remarkably contemporary.

Abebe Bikila died in 1973 after complications resulting from a car accident that had left him paralysed several years earlier. Ethiopia declared three days of national mourning. Yet his greatest legacy is neither his world records nor his medals. It is the question he leaves behind. When we look at the famous photograph of the barefoot Ethiopian running through Rome, what exactly are we looking at? Are we looking at an extraordinary athlete? Or are we looking at Europe’s imagination of Africa?

For more than sixty years Olympic history has invited us to stare at his feet. Perhaps it is finally time to lift our eyes. Because the barefoot runner did not merely outpace the world’s best marathoners. He outsmarted an empire of assumptions. And, for one unforgettable evening in Rome, he even outsmarted Adidas.

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Further reading: Bikila: Ethiopia’s Barefoot Olympian. By Tim Judah. London: Reportage Press, 2008. Pp. 175. Paperback $16.95

Bale, John, and Joe Sang. Kenyan running: Movement culture, geography and global change. Routledge, 2013.

On a warm afternoon in Amsterdam in 1928, Ahmed Boughera El Ouafi crossed the finish line first in the Olympic marathon. The International Olympic Committee recorded the result as a victory for France. Officially, that is still how history remembers it: France won the marathon.

But El Ouafi was not simply “French.” He was born in 1898 in Ouled Djellal, a village in colonial Algeria. Like millions of other Algerians living under French rule, he occupied an ambiguous political position. Algeria was legally part of France, yet its Muslim population enjoyed few of the rights associated with French citizenship. They were expected to serve the empire, but were rarely treated as equals within it.

For one afternoon in Amsterdam, however, none of that seemed to matter. Or so it appeared. El Ouafi’s journey to Olympic gold was anything but conventional. After serving in the French army during the First World War, he remained stationed in occupied Germany. It was there that military officers noticed his extraordinary endurance while running cross-country races. They encouraged him to compete at a higher level.

Like so many working-class athletes of his generation, sport was never his profession. It existed around work rather than replacing it. By the mid-1920s, El Ouafi was employed at a Renault factory outside Paris, fitting training sessions around long shifts on the assembly line. He represented France at the 1924 Paris Olympics, finishing seventh in the marathon—the highest-placed French runner. Four years later he arrived in Amsterdam stronger, wiser and largely unnoticed.

The marathon itself became a contest of patience rather than speed. As rivals faded in the August heat, El Ouafi steadily moved through the field. Eventually only Chile’s Manuel Plaza remained within reach. By the final kilometres the Algerian-born runner had broken away completely. He crossed the finish line alone. He was the new Olympic champion and for a brief moment, the French flag flew because of an athlete born in colonial Algeria.

A victory France struggled to celebrate

One might expect France to have embraced its new Olympic hero. Instead, the reaction was hesitant and revealing. As historians Thierry Terret and André Roger have shown, many French newspapers found it remarkably difficult simply to celebrate El Ouafi as a French athlete. Rather than praising his dedication or tactical brilliance, journalists frequently explained his success through racial stereotypes.

Some described marathon running as something naturally suited to “the Arabs.” Others praised this “small Algerian” who had come “to help France,” language that subtly reinforced the idea that he remained an outsider serving the metropole rather than fully belonging to it.

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The distinction mattered. If El Ouafi’s victory demonstrated the success of French colonialism, then it could be celebrated. If it suggested that an Algerian Muslim could genuinely represent France on equal terms, the implications became politically uncomfortable. His body could win medals for France. Whether he himself belonged to France was another matter entirely.

The world saw something different. Across the Atlantic, Black newspapers in the United States interpreted El Ouafi’s victory as a direct challenge to the pseudo-scientific racial theories that remained influential during the interwar years. At the time, sporting performance was frequently invoked as supposed evidence of racial superiority or inferiority. El Ouafi’s triumph complicated these assumptions.

Readers who lived under segregation and racial discrimination recognised something larger than a marathon victory. They saw an athlete from a colonised people defeating competitors from the world’s most powerful nations. The same race carried radically different meanings depending on who was watching. That may be one of the most fascinating aspects of Olympic history. The Games produce a single result sheet but countless interpretations.

Chile had a hero. France had a problem.

Perhaps the sharpest contrast came not between France and the United States, but between France and Chile. Manuel Plaza, who finished second, returned home as a national hero. According to El Ouafi himself, the Chilean government rewarded Plaza with a house. El Ouafi’s own experience could hardly have been more different. Soon after his Olympic victory, he travelled to the United States to compete in a series of exhibition races. Such events blurred the line between amateur and professional sport, precisely the distinction Olympic authorities fiercely defended during this period.

When he returned, French sporting authorities disqualified him for violating amateur regulations. The punishment effectively ended his elite career. Years later, El Ouafi summarised the contrast in one unforgettable sentence:

“To the Chilean who was behind me in Amsterdam, his president gave him a cottage. Mine disqualified me.”

Few quotations capture the inequalities of interwar Olympic sport more powerfully. In other words, the silver medallist became a celebrated citizen, whereas, the gold medallist became a disciplinary problem.

Forgotten after glory

By the 1950s journalists rediscovered El Ouafi almost by accident. Instead of finding an Olympic legend, they encountered a man living in poverty on the outskirts of Paris, surviving through casual work and largely forgotten by the country whose colours he had carried to Olympic victory. His story ended tragically. In 1959 he was killed during a dispute in a Paris café.

Today, despite being France’s Olympic marathon champion, his name remains unfamiliar even to many followers of Olympic history. That obscurity is striking. Olympic champions are normally remembered because victory creates national myths. El Ouafi’s victory disrupted one. What makes Ahmed Boughera El Ouafi’s story so compelling is not simply that he won an Olympic marathon. It is that his victory exposed a deeper question:

Who gets to represent a nation?

The Olympic Games have always depended upon national teams. Athletes march behind flags, medals are added to national rankings, and victories become symbols of national prestige. Yet nations themselves are rarely straightforward. Empires, colonies, migration, dual citizenship, changing borders and contested identities have complicated Olympic participation from the very beginning. The IOC could record El Ouafi as French. That was administratively simple. Social acceptance proved considerably more complicated. His experience reminds us that nationality operates on at least two levels. There is legal nationality: the passport, the flag, the official record.

Then there is social nationality: whether fellow citizens genuinely recognise someone as one of “us.” Those two forms of belonging often diverge. They did in 1928 and they still do today. Nearly a century later, debates surrounding athletes with migrant backgrounds continue to provoke controversy across Europe and beyond. Questions about “real” national identity resurface whenever footballers, Olympic athletes or world champions have family roots elsewhere. The names change, but the questions remain remarkably familiar.

I research the history of Olympic eligibility for my forthcoming book Who Gets to Play, I keep returning to stories like El Ouafi’s. They remind us that sport does not merely reflect society. It magnifies it.

Further reading: Thierry Terret & André Roger, “Managing Colonial Contradictions: French Attitudes toward El Ouafi’s 1928 Olympic Victory,” Journal of Sport History 36, no. 1 (2009): 3–18.

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Ironically, one of the earliest political justifications for excluding women on biological grounds emerged during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when Nazi officials and international sports administrators alike became increasingly preoccupied with defining who counted as a “real” woman. Over the decades that followed, those concerns evolved into compulsory sex verification programmes, ranging from humiliating physical examinations, the infamous “nude parades” of the 1960s, to chromosome tests and later genetic screening.

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The remarkable thing is not that sport spent decades searching for male impostors. It is that, after testing more than 10,000 elite female athletes between 1968 and 1998, the International Olympic Committee did not identify a single man fraudulently competing in the women’s category. Instead, it excluded twenty-seven women whose chromosomes or genetic characteristics did not fit the increasingly narrow definitions adopted by sporting authorities. [Simpson JL, Ljungqvist A, Ferguson-Smith MA, et al. Gender Verification in the Olympics. JAMA. 2000;284(12):1568–1569. doi:10.1001/jama.284.12.1568

If history teaches us anything, it is that sex testing has been far better at identifying women whose biology falls outside conventional expectations than at uncovering the fraud it was designed to detect. That history deserves careful attention before another generation of athletes is asked to prove that they belong.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the current debate is the problem it seeks to address. Over the past two decades, there have been no documented cases of transgender women entering the highest level of professional women’s tennis in significant numbers, let alone reshaping the competitive balance of the sport. Yet every female player is now expected to demonstrate that she belongs. The burden of proof has shifted from the governing body to the athletes themselves.

The story of Dora Ratjen in 1936.

For decades, Ratjen was portrayed as evidence that organised fraud really had occurred. According to the widely repeated story, Nazi Germany deliberately entered a man in the women’s high jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics to prevent the Jewish athlete Gretel Bergmann from winning a medal and embarrassing the regime. It is an extraordinary story, and one that has appeared repeatedly in newspapers, documentaries and even feature films.

Historical research paints a far more complicated picture. Ratjen was born in 1918. At birth, there was uncertainty about the child’s sex, but the decision was ultimately made to register and raise the child as a girl. Dora attended girls’ school, wore girls’ clothing and entered women’s athletic competitions. Only during adolescence did Ratjen begin to experience growing discomfort with that identity. Years later, after a medical examination prompted by concerns raised during a train journey, doctors concluded that Ratjen had intersex characteristics. Ratjen subsequently adopted the name Heinrich and lived the remainder of life as a man.

Nothing in the surviving documentation suggests an organised Nazi conspiracy to disguise a male athlete as a woman. Internal investigations conducted by the authorities at the time reached the conclusion that there had been no deliberate fraud. Ratjen had simply lived according to the identity assigned at birth until that identity became impossible to sustain

The tragedy lies not only in Ratjen’s personal story but also in the way later generations transformed it into a tale of calculated deception. A life marked by uncertainty became a convenient political narrative because it seemed to confirm widespread fears that women’s sport was vulnerable to male impostors.

The broader history of elite sport reveals a remarkably consistent pattern. The athletes who attracted suspicion were rarely individuals attempting to deceive sporting authorities. More often they were exceptional competitors whose appearance, physique or biology challenged conventional expectations of what women should look like. Elite athletes are, almost by definition, biological outliers. Extraordinary height, lung capacity, muscle composition or limb length are routinely celebrated in male athletes as gifts that contribute to sporting excellence. In women’s sport, unusual physical characteristics have more frequently invited questions about eligibility itself.

The technologies used to answer those questions have changed over time. Visual inspections gave way to chromosome analysis, chromosome testing was replaced by genetic screening, and more recently hormone regulations have become the preferred instrument. Yet despite these scientific developments, the central difficulty has remained remarkably stable. Human biology does not always fit neatly into binary administrative categories.

This historical experience raises an obvious question about the WTA’s new policy. What evidence demonstrates that mandatory testing is needed in elite women’s tennis today? Governing bodies are entitled to regulate eligibility, but good regulation normally begins with a clearly established problem. The Olympic experience suggests that extensive testing programmes can exist for decades without uncovering the phenomenon they were designed to detect.

There is another lesson from history that deserves equal attention. Testing programmes inevitably change the relationship between athletes and sporting authorities. Once mandatory screening becomes part of competition, every woman enters the arena knowing that her eligibility may be questioned. Exceptional performances can become invitations to scrutiny. Bodies that fall outside conventional expectations attract attention long before any laboratory becomes involved. The history of women’s sport contains numerous examples of athletes who found themselves subjected to public speculation because they were considered too muscular, too powerful or simply too successful.

Seen in this longer historical perspective, the policing of womanhood is not an accidental feature of modern sport but one that reaches back to the foundations of the Olympic movement itself. Since the late nineteenth century, sporting institutions have repeatedly assumed the authority not only to organise women’s competitions but also to determine who qualifies for admission to them. The criteria have evolved alongside developments in medicine and genetics, but the underlying ambition has remained surprisingly constant.

None of this implies that fairness should be dismissed. Elite sport depends upon rules, categories and eligibility requirements. Boxing has weight divisions, youth competitions have age limits, and anti-doping regulations exist because performance-enhancing drugs demonstrably undermine competition. The question is not whether rules should exist, but whether particular rules are supported by convincing evidence and whether they solve the problem they are intended to address.

The history of Olympic sex testing offers a sobering answer. A programme that operated for thirty years in the name of preventing male impostors found none. Instead, it revealed the biological diversity that exists among women themselves. That history does not provide easy answers for today’s debates, but it does offer an important caution. Before asking thousands of female athletes to prove that they belong, it is worth considering whether previous generations of sporting administrators were searching for a problem that scarcely existed while imposing profound consequences on women whose only offence was that their biology defied simple classification.

Further reading: Michael Water, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, MacMillan 2025.

By almost every other measure, its production line still is.

Start with a number that looks, at first glance, like an indictment. Of the 102 players at this World Cup who were born in France, 80 of them; four in every five are playing for someone else. Algeria, DR Congo, Tunisia, Senegal, Ivory Coast: between them they fielded a small nation’s worth of French-trained footballers, most of whom France’s own federation never had any real intention of calling up. Read as a headline, that is a story about a country losing control of its own talent pipeline.

France exports four out of every five players it produces — and keeps three out of every four euros its best players are worth. Volume and value tell opposite stories.

Read as a spreadsheet, it is something closer to the opposite. Losing a semi-final and losing your best players are not the same event, and this year France is a clean demonstration of the difference: a team that went out in the last four without ever fielding anything less than the most valuable XI its birthplace could possibly produce. What follows is an attempt to work out how a country can give away almost everyone it trains and still not give away anything that counts.

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The talent factory that everyone else raids

Start with the raw export numbers, because they are genuinely startling. No country at this World Cup produced more players than France, and nobody exports a higher share of what it produces.

That 78.4% is not a footnote. It means Algeria’s back four this tournament could plausibly have been assembled at a French regional trials day. It means DR Congo, a country of 100 million people, filled half its midfield with players who grew up in Lille and Lyon. Morocco’s entire 2018-2026 rise runs partly through French academies. France is, functionally, subsidising the international competitiveness of a dozen countries at once, and has been for years, mostly without complaint and almost entirely without credit.

The obvious next line is that this must be hollowing France out. It isn’t.

The number that flips the story

Export rate measures headcount. It says nothing about quality. So I built the best possible World Cup XI out of every player ever born in France — 102 names, any country, picked purely by market value, one player per position, no loyalty to anyone’s actual squad sheet. If France’s academies really were losing their best output to other flags, this XI should look like a foreign legion.

It doesn’t. It’s just... France.

highest-value France-born player still representing France. “Exported” = highest-value France-born player representing another country. Estimated market values. France’s kept XI wins 10 of 11 positions outright. The single exception left-back is a virtual tie between Theo Hernandez and Rayan Aït-Nouri, and well within the margin of error of a market-value estimate.

Now put a number on the other side. The best XI I can assemble out of France’s exported eighty; Mendy in goal, Koulibaly and Laporte at the back, Mahrez and Ndiaye up front is worth roughly €233 million. Real money, a genuinely good team, the kind of side that could trouble anyone in this tournament. But add it to the €711 million that stayed, and you get an elite value pool of about €944 million produced by France in total. Of that, 75.3% never left.

Compare the two percentages. Eighty-two players, i.e 78.4% walked out the door. But 75.3% of the value stayed in the building. Those numbers are near-mirror images of each other, and that is not a coincidence worth glossing over: it is the whole point. France exports almost everyone. It keeps almost everything that matters.

Why this is actually a good news story — for everyone

It would be easy to read all this as France’s advantage and stop there. That misses what’s actually interesting. France’s academies didn’t just build France’s XI. They built Morocco’s midfield, Algeria’s defence, DR Congo’s attack, and a meaningful slice of Senegal’s, Tunisia’s, and Ivory Coast’s squads too. Eighty players who might never have made it in a smaller, less competitive system got a route into professional football because France’s academies are ruthlessly, absurdly well-stocked — good enough to produce far more elite talent than any one national team could ever field.

That is not exploitation dressed up as opportunity. It’s closer to what a strong domestic football economy is supposed to do: produce more good players than it needs, and let the surplus go somewhere it can actually play. The countries on the receiving end get more competitive national teams, more visibility, more reasons for their own kids to pick up a ball. The global game gets deeper and more interesting, because a Morocco or a DR Congo with access to French-trained talent is simply a better team to watch than one without. And France, it turns out, loses none of what it needs to keep winning, because there was always more talent than it had jerseys for.

Everyone treats reverse flow migration as a zero-sum argument about who a player “really” belongs to. France’s numbers this tournament suggest something closer to positive-sum: a country can be the world’s biggest exporter of football talent and its most value-dense producer at the same time, without those two facts ever coming into conflict. The rest of the world gets stronger. France barely notices the difference.

That is a much better story than “France is losing its talent.” It’s the story of a country that has so much talent, giving most of it away doesn’t even show up in the numbers that matter.

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Data from the 2026 Foreign-Born Football Dataset (Gijsbert Oonk).

For three decades now, these ninety seconds have been treated as a political litmus test. In France especially, the debate has resurfaced before almost every major tournament. If a player does not sing La Marseillaise, does he truly feel French? Does silence betray a lack of patriotism? Or even worse, a lack of loyalty?

The anthem itself has never been the real issue. It has merely been the latest loyalty test in a much older argument about who belongs to the French nation. Long before Kylian Mbappé found himself criticised for speaking about politics, another French international quietly challenged the assumptions behind this debate. His name was Christian Karembeu.

Most football supporters remember Karembeu as the tireless midfielder who helped France win the 1998 World Cup and later lifted the Champions League with Real Madrid. Few remember where he came from. Fewer still understand why, despite giving everything for France on the pitch, he consistently refused to sing the French national anthem. The answer lies nearly 17,000 kilometres from Paris, on the Pacific archipelago of New Caledonia.

Karembeu grew up on Lifou, one of the Loyalty Islands, in a large Kanak family. While he was leaving home as a teenager to pursue a football career at Nantes, his homeland was once again being consumed by the unresolved legacy of French colonialism. In 1988, Kanak independence activists took hostages on the island of Ouvéa after years of frustration over land rights and political exclusion. The French state responded with overwhelming military force. Nineteen Kanak militants were killed when commandos stormed the cave in which they had taken refuge. For many Kanaks, the message was unmistakable: colonial rule had changed its appearance but not entirely its character.

Karembeu carried that history with him as he became one of Europe’s finest midfielders. Yet an even deeper layer of his family’s past remained hidden until the late 1990s. While researching the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, novelist Didier Daeninckx discovered a photograph that stopped him in his tracks. Behind iron bars stood several Kanak men who had been transported from New Caledonia to serve as exhibits in what was effectively a human zoo. Visitors paid to watch them perform “primitive” dances and confirm every colonial stereotype about France’s supposedly uncivilised subjects

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Daeninckx recognised one of the faces. After contacting Karembeu, he learned that the man in the photograph was the footballer’s own great-grandfather. Other members of the family had later been transferred to a zoo in Germany and exchanged for crocodiles. It is one of those extraordinary historical episodes that seems almost impossible to believe precisely because it is true. Suddenly Karembeu’s silence before international matches looked rather different.

When politicians demanded to know why he would not sing La Marseillaise, they assumed silence reflected insufficient patriotism. Karembeu himself offered another explanation. “I can’t sing the French national anthem because I know the history of my people.” That single sentence contains more historical weight than years of political commentary.

Notice what Karembeu did not say. He never rejected France. He never refused to wear the national shirt. He never questioned his commitment to the team. He won the World Cup for France. He helped create one of the greatest moments in French sporting history. His silence was not directed against the Republic. It reflected an awareness that the Republic’s history was more complicated than the triumphalist story celebrated in the anthem.

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That distinction has often been lost in public debate. Jean-Marie Le Pen understood perfectly how powerful the anthem could become as a political symbol. Throughout the 1990s he repeatedly questioned the Frenchness of players who failed to sing, portraying the multicultural national team as somehow artificial. The target was never really the music. The target was the idea that French identity itself had changed. Karembeu, a Kanak from the Pacific, and Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, became symbols in a wider struggle over immigration, colonial memory and national belonging.

Yet something fascinating has happened over the past decade. The controversy has shifted. Between roughly 1996 and 2016, the question dominating French football was straightforward: Why don’t they sing the national anthem? Today hardly anyone asks that question. Instead, the debate surrounding Kylian Mbappé concerns whether the captain of the French national team should publicly oppose the far right, encourage young people to vote, or comment on French politics at all.

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The loyalty test has changed. Yesterday politicians demanded symbolic patriotism. Today many demand political neutrality. The irony is difficult to miss. The generation once suspected of not being fully French has become so central to the national story that its leading figures are now criticised not for failing to belong, but for exercising the rights that come with belonging. Footballers are no longer merely expected to represent France. Increasingly, they are expected not to influence the debate about what France should become.

That is why the Karembeu story still matters. His refusal to sing was never a rejection of France. It was a reminder that nations are built not only on shared victories but also on contested histories. For some French citizens, La Marseillaise evokes the Revolution and the Republic. For others, it also echoes through colonial battlefields, military occupations and families who experienced the French Empire very differently. Modern democracies rarely stop testing loyalty. They simply invent new tests. Yesterday it was the national anthem and today it is political speech. The question, however, remains exactly the same as it was when Christian Karembeu quietly stood in silence before the world watched him in 1998: Who gets to decide what it means to belong to the nation?

Across France and to a lesser extent in the Netherlands, thousands of extra police officers are deployed before kickoff. Roads are closed, riot police are placed on standby, and city centres are monitored as if a political demonstration were about to take place rather than a sporting event.

At first glance this seems odd. Morocco and France are allies. Millions of people have family ties spanning both countries. Why should a football match require such extraordinary security? The answer lies far beyond the football pitch.

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France is home to one of the world’s largest populations of Moroccan origin. For many supporters, a Morocco victory is not simply a sporting success; it is also a moment of recognition. It celebrates the country of their parents or grandparents while affirming an identity that is often questioned in everyday French political debates about immigration, secularism and integration.

Families gather, cars honk, flags wave and city centres fill with jubilant supporters. But large spontaneous gatherings also create opportunities for disorder.

Most celebrations are exactly that, celebrations. Families gather, cars honk, flags wave and city centres fill with jubilant supporters. But large spontaneous gatherings also create opportunities for disorder. A small minority may vandalize shops, clash with rival supporters or confront police. Others exploit the crowds for looting or violence that has little to do with football. Police therefore prepare for the worst, even though the overwhelming majority of fans have no intention of causing trouble.

The Netherlands faces a similar, though generally smaller, challenge. Dutch cities such as Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Utrecht have sizeable Moroccan-Dutch communities. During major tournaments thousands gather in public spaces after Moroccan victories. Again, most celebrations remain peaceful, but previous incidents have convinced local authorities that they cannot simply assume everything will remain festive.

There is another layer to this story. Football has become one of the few arenas where post-colonial history becomes visible in real time. Many Moroccan internationals were born or raised in France, educated in French academies and speak French as their first language. They embody a paradox: products of French society representing another nation. Every France–Morocco match therefore raises uncomfortable questions. Who belongs? Which nation has the stronger claim? And what does national identity actually mean in an age of migration?

That is why this fixture feels different from France against Spain or Korea. The rivalry is emotional rather than historical, intimate rather than international. It is a contest between two nations whose histories have been intertwined through colonialism, migration and family ties for more than a century.

Police prepare for riots because they know football can become a stage on which broader social tensions are performed. Yet that should not obscure the larger truth. For millions of supporters, the match is not an expression of division but of multiple belonging. They cheer passionately, sometimes for one side, sometimes for the other, while carrying identities that cannot be reduced to a single flag.

In that sense, France–Morocco is not simply a football match. It is a mirror reflecting modern Europe itself as well modern Football, where diaspora player gain increasing importance.

That is the reality for six Moroccan internationals. They were all born in France. They grew up in French cities, learned the game in French academies and speak French as naturally as Arabic. Their football education is, in many ways, a product of France. Yet their biographies also tell another story.

Most grew up in neighbourhoods shaped by postcolonial migration; places where Moroccan families settled after arriving as workers, often in the industrial suburbs surrounding cities like Paris, Marseille, Montpellier, Strasbourg and Toulouse. These communities produced extraordinary footballers, but they also occupied a different place in French society than white working-class families. They were French, yet frequently reminded that they were also something else. Their surnames, family histories, religion and neighbourhoods marked them as descendants of migration long after they themselves had been born in France.

Look at the biographies. Issa Diop was born in Toulouse. Redouane Halhal grew up in Montpellier. Neil El Aynaoui was born in Nancy, the son of former Moroccan tennis player Younes El Aynaoui. Samir El Mourabet was raised in Strasbourg. Ayyoub Bouaddi came through the football landscape north of Paris, while Gessime Yassine developed around Marseille, one of France’s historic gateways for North African migration. Different cities. Different clubs. Different families. Yet their life stories follow remarkably similar trajectories.

Their families belong to the history of postcolonial migration that reshaped France after the Second World War. Moroccan workers were recruited to rebuild factories, ports and construction sites; many settled permanently, raised children and became part of the social fabric of French cities. Football became one of the few institutions where talent could translate into upward mobility. These six players learned the game in French schools, on French municipal pitches and inside French academy systems. Yet, like many children of Moroccan descent, they also grew up balancing two worlds: fully immersed in French society while maintaining strong family, cultural and emotional ties to Morocco.

That duality is precisely what makes this match historically fascinating. These players are not caught between two unrelated nations; they are products of a relationship that stretches back more than a century. Empire created the political connection, labour migration sustained it and families gave it a human face. Football merely inherited the consequences. When these six men stand opposite France, they are not rejecting the country that educated them. They are embodying the long afterlife of French colonialism and postcolonial migration; a history written not only in archives and treaties, but in neighbourhoods, schools, football academies and, ultimately, on the pitch itself.

That is why this match is so fascinating. It is tempting to describe it as France against Morocco. Historically, it is something much more complicated. The six French-born Moroccan players are not exceptions. They are products of more than a century of shared history between the two countries.

Morocco became a French protectorate in 1912. Colonial rule formally ended in 1956, but the movement of people did not. Labour shortages in post-war France attracted tens of thousands of Moroccan workers. Families followed. Children were born. Grandchildren entered French schools and football academies. The empire disappeared from the map, but its migration routes remained remarkably durable.

Football inherited those routes. French clubs invested in these players with academies and coaches. Yet FIFA’s nationality rules combined with Moroccan citizenship regulations allowed many of them to represent Morocco through their parents or grandparents. When France now faces Morocco, it is therefore not simply playing another national team. It is playing against footballers whose lives were shaped inside France itself. This is one of the reasons I love studying global sports history.

Sport constantly exposes connections that politics often hides. A ninety-minute football match suddenly reveals a century of empire, labour migration, family histories and questions of belonging. We tend to imagine national teams as neat representations of separate nations. In reality, they often reveal precisely the opposite: that nations have always been connected through migration, colonialism and global mobility.

That is why I find these stories so compelling. Football does not erase history. It makes history visible. And nowhere is that clearer than when France lines up against six players it helped create.

Astonished. That is the word doing the least honest work in world football this week.

Start with FIFA, because FIFA is the easy part. This is an organisation that sold a World Cup to Vladimir Putin’s Russia and another to Qatar, a state with no footballing tradition and a migrant labour system that killed the men who built its stadiums. It is an organisation that has since committed itself to Saudi Arabia’s money for the next cycle. Last December it invented, from nothing, a “FIFA Peace Prize” and handed it to Donald Trump, a head of state not previously known for peace, at a ceremony in Washington. Three weeks later, at his own tournament, FIFA proved exactly how little that prize meant.

Because this is the part that gets lost under the Balogun story: FIFA didn’t just bend the rules for the American co-hosts. Over the past month it has stood by, arms folded, while its own showcase excluded people it had every means to protect. A Somali referee, selected to officiate his first World Cup, was turned back at Miami airport over “vetting concerns” nobody would specify, and FIFA’s response was to note that host governments decide who gets in. Iran’s team was barred from spending the night on American soil and had to base itself across the border in Mexico, commuting in to play. An Iraqi striker was pulled aside and questioned for seven hours at O’Hare; his team’s own photographer was refused entry altogether and sent home. Fans from Ivory Coast and Senegal cancelled their trips en masse after officials told their supporters’ association, in plain language, that people from their countries were not wanted on American soil. FIFA’s peace prize bought Trump’s cooperation on precisely nothing. It just proved that the organisation which invented that prize will watch a referee, a photographer, and thousands of fans get turned away and call it somebody else’s jurisdiction right up until an American striker needed a favour, at which point FIFA discovered it did, in fact, have the power to intervene.

That is the real story of this World Cup. Not that FIFA is corrupt, that was clear already, but that its corruption has a direction. It flows towards power and money, and away from a Somali referee, an Iraqi photographer, and a stadium’s worth of Ivorian and Senegalese fans who had already bought their tickets.

Now go to UEFA, and to the pundits, and to the clubs, because none of them get to be merely appalled by this.

UEFA called the Balogun decision a red line crossed. Fair. But UEFA has spent two decades in business with an organisation it has always known operates like this, and has never once found the nerve to walk away; not over Qatar, not over Russia, not over a bidding process so compromised FIFA buried its own investigators’ report, and not, this month, over a referee being denied entry to the tournament UEFA’s own federations are competing in. Rooney and the rest of the punditry chorus filled the airwaves with words like disgrace, on channels that pay handsomely for World Cup rights and will renew those rights the moment the final whistle blows, regardless of what happened this week or last month. And the clubs said nothing at all; not about Balogun, not about Artan, not about a photographer sent home from a tournament his own federation was competing in. Clubs will fight FIFA over a Tuesday fixture list. They will not fight FIFA over who gets to walk through an airport.

So here is the uncomfortable truth about UEFA’s outrage: it is also part of the problem. Every year UEFA stays at FIFA’s table, cashes the broadcast money, and issues a strongly worded statement when the rot becomes undeniable, it is telling FIFA that the table is safe. Nothing UEFA has said this week costs FIFA anything, because UEFA has never shown it is willing to leave

But and this is the part worth saying clearly; being part of the problem doesn’t mean UEFA has to stay that way. European football generates the money, the audiences, and the players that actually make a World Cup worth broadcasting. If UEFA, the major leagues, and the biggest clubs decided that a governing body which invents peace prizes for presidents while turning away referees and photographers no longer deserves their cooperation, FIFA’s leverage would not survive the year. That threat, seriously made and seriously followed through, is worth more than every statement of astonishment UEFA has issued combined. UEFA does not need FIFA’s permission to organise football with integrity. It needs the will to try.

We do not need FIFA to protect the integrity of the game. FIFA has never protected the integrity of the game; it has protected FIFA, and handed out a peace prize to prove it. The people who can still protect the game are the ones who keep doing business with FIFA anyway; and who now have to decide whether they are only ever going to be part of the problem, or, for once, part of the solution.

Stop being astonished. Start being useful. My hopes are that Lise Klaveness speaks up to power before the next Norway match. She is one of the few and lets give her full support!

The zero-percent teams

Start with the anomaly common to both matches. Colombia’s 26 players were all born in Colombia. So were Egypt’s. Zero foreign-born, out of 26, on both sides. They’re not alone; Brazil, Austria, and South Africa round out the small cluster of 2026 squads with no foreign-born representation at all. In a tournament where diaspora storylines have dominated; i.e Morocco’s European-raised core, Bosnia’s war-diaspora spine, Cape Verde fielding a squad that’s majority Dutch-born: Columbia and Egypt teams are the quiet exception nobody’s writing about.

Everyone is chasing the diversity story because it’s the more colorful one. But a monoculture squad at a World Cup in 2026 is, statistically, the stranger result. Colombia and Egypt both have real diasporas; Colombians in the United States and Spain, Egyptians across the Gulf and Europe. Neither team’s roster shows any sign of it, and by kickoff, each will be standing across from an opponent built the opposite way.

Egypt’s version has a documented explanation. Football-development analysts assessing the Egyptian Football Association have pointed to Morocco’s federation as the model Egypt has failed to follow Morocco’s “aggressive integration of its diaspora talent pool” has produced a World Cup semi-final, an Olympic medal match, and a U-20 World Cup title, while Egypt is only now being urged to build the kind of centralized scouting system needed to track talent “across domestic competitions and the diaspora pool.” Read plainly, that’s an admission the diaspora pool isn’t being tracked today. This is what I’d call the missed-talent version of purity: not a principled stance, but a capacity gap and it’s the gap Egypt will carry onto the pitch against Australia’s imported strength.

Colombia’s zero is a harder case, and I want to be honest about that rather than manufacture a tidy explanation. It’s tempting to reach for a story, a talent pipeline (like Brasil?) so efficient it locks in players before any European federation could make a claim. I don’t have evidence for that, and I went looking. What I can say is that Colombia’s academy-to-first-team pathway is strong enough that the country exports enormous numbers of players without needing to import any, which is at least consistent with a pure-production model rather than a closed one. But the honest version of this story is that Colombia’s zero is a documented fact with no clear public explanation; not from the federation or the football press or from the eligibility literature (if not please help!). Even outlets that noticed the number didn’t ask why. That, on its own, is worth sitting with: a federation this successful at producing a World Cup squad has never had to explain a decision nobody’s questioned. And on this particular night, that unexamined purity walks straight into Ghana’s return-migration machine.

Put Colombia and Egypt side by side and you get a phrase I keep coming back to: purity versus missed talent. Egypt’s purity looks like a cost talent a more capable federation would have chased and didn’t. Colombia’s purity might be a strength nobody’s bothered to name, or it might be hiding the same missed-talent story Egypt’s is just starting to admit to. Without the federation on record, we don’t actually know which. What we do know is that both are about to find out, in real time, what the alternative looks like.

The two versions of eight

Ghana and Australia never play each other this tournament. But they arrive at the identical number — eight foreign-born players each, out of 26 — by opposite roads, and each will spend ninety minutes standing across from a zero. That makes them the two faces of “diaspora” this matchday puts on display, once against Colombia, once against Egypt.

Ghana’s eight, who take the field against Colombia’s untouched squad, were raised almost entirely in Europe: England, France. The captain, Jordan Ayew, was born in France. These are players who came up through French and English academies, wearing the shirts of clubs that trained them, and only later — sometimes only in their twenties — activated eligibility for a country most of them didn’t grow up in. It’s a recruitment strategy as much as a heritage story: Ghana didn’t develop this talent, it inherited it, fully formed, from academies it never funded. Against Colombia’s homegrown eleven, it’s academy-built ancestry against pure production.

Australia’s eight, who face Egypt, are a genuinely different mix, and this is where the second phrase earns its place: colonial versus immigrant, versus settler, versus refugee. Some of Australia’s foreign-born players carry the old settler-colonial pattern — European heritage (Croatia, Italy, Scotland) reaching back to postwar immigration waves that have shaped Australian identity for eighty years and no longer read as “foreign” to most Australians at all. Others are recent immigrant or refugee-background players — Guinea, Tanzania, Kenya — whose path to the Socceroos runs through actual displacement and resettlement, not ancestral nostalgia. Both groups wear the same green and gold. Both get called “multicultural Australia” in the same breath. But a Scottish-heritage fourth-generation settler story and a Tanzanian refugee-resettlement story are not the same act of belonging, and collapsing them into one feel-good “diversity” headline erases exactly the distinction that matters. Against Egypt’s institutional non-pursuit, it’s two different migration logics, bundled into one roster, facing a federation that pursued neither.

So here’s the real collision, spread across two matches instead of one: Ghana is importing the end product of someone else’s development system, that may be called: ‘reverse brain-drain,’ dressed as homecoming while testing it against a country that has never needed to import anything. Australia is holding together two structurally opposite migration logics: (1) the settler-descendant and the refugee-arrival inside one roster and (2) testing that combination against a federation that has done neither. Both diaspora sides show “8 foreign-born players” in the stat line. Neither means the same thing, and neither opponent is the same kind of zero.

Why this matters beyond one matchday

This is the same argument I made with the Netherlands and Morocco; that the number of foreign-born players on a team tells you almost nothing on its own; the architecture behind the number is the actual story. The Dutch (and French) export enormous numbers of players abroad while fielding almost none born elsewhere a pattern that rhymes with Colombia’s export-without-import model, minus the unanswered question. Bosnia’s diaspora is a war-displacement story, not a labor-migration one that is closer to Australia’s refugee contingent than to Ghana’s academy-poaching. Cape Verde’s Dutch-majority squad is Ghana’s model taken to its logical extreme: a federation that didn’t develop its own talent at all, built almost entirely on a diaspora raised somewhere else.

Four teams, two matches, one night. So far, every migration architecture I’ve been mapping all tournament shows up at once: production with an open question (Colombia), institutional non-pursuit with a paper trail (Egypt), inherited-and-recruited diaspora (Ghana), and a settler/refugee mix masquerading as a single multicultural story (Australia). Twice over, purity meets diaspora and neither side is quite what its stat line suggests. The scorelines on the night will say nothing about any of this. The team sheets say everything.

The question worth sitting with isn’t which model is “more authentic.” It’s who gets to decide that a nation’s football team represents its nation at all the federation that develops nobody and imports everybody, the one that develops everybody and exports the surplus, or the one holding two incompatible migration stories together under a single crest. None of these are cheating. All of them are choices. And choices, unlike box scores, don’t show up on the back page.

Data: Foreign Born Football Dataset, 2026 World Cup (Oonk, ESHCC). Additional reporting: The Football Week (Dec. 2025) on EFA diaspora strategy; Forbes and Foreign Policy (June 2026) on World Cup foreign-born roster composition.

The question has no right answer. It is designed that way.

Say he supports Morocco — and in the Netherlands he is disloyal, not really Dutch, a guest who never truly arrived. But in Morocco the same man is considered Dutch-Moroccan. Not really Moroccan. There is no right answer because the question is a trap. It is not designed to understand divided loyalty. It is designed to expose it.

This is not an accident of bad journalism. It reflects something deeper: an assumption that national identity is the only loyalty that counts, and that diaspora communities must eventually pick a side. But identity does not work like a multiple-choice question. It accumulates. It contradicts itself. It changes over time. And on a football pitch, it becomes visible in ways that a microphone outside a bar simply cannot capture.

The pitch tells a different story

Tonight, the more interesting loyalty test is not in the stands. It is on the pitch. And journalists are completely ignoring it.

Noussair Mazraoui and Anass Salah-Eddine both came through Ajax’s De Toekomst academy. So did Ryan Gravenberch and Brian Brobbey — who tonight wear orange. Same pitches, same coaches, same youth drills. Salah-Eddine won the U17 Euros in a Dutch shirt and only switched his FIFA allegiance to Morocco eight months ago. Tonight he faces the teammates he trained with for years.

Sofyan Amrabat came through Utrecht, moved to Feyenoord, won the KNVB Cup in De Kuip in 2018, and became a Rotterdam football story before the world noticed him at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Tonight he faces Denzel Dumfries and Jorrel Hato — both born in Rotterdam, Feyenoord’s own city — playing for the Netherlands.

Ajax trained both sides. Feyenoord’s cup winner faces Feyenoord’s city.

So here is the loyalty test journalists are not asking. Ask an Ajax fan — Dutch or Moroccan, it does not matter — who they are cheering for tonight: Mazraoui and Salah-Eddine, or Gravenberch and Brobbey? Ask a Feyenoord fan whether they back Amrabat, the man who won silverware in De Kuip, or the Rotterdam-born Dutch players facing him. These are not simple questions either. Club, city, nation, family, neighbourhood — they all pull in different directions at once.

Why the question keeps getting asked

Journalists ask the loyalty question because they want a clean story: he is Dutch, or he is not. The messiness of the pitch — where Ajax produced players on both sides, where a Feyenoord cup winner faces Feyenoord’s own city — does not fit that story. It requires context, history, and an understanding of how migration and football intertwine in Dutch cities. It requires knowing that the Netherlands is the second-largest exporter of football talent at this World Cup, with 66 players born on Dutch soil now representing other nations — including several in tonight’s Moroccan squad.

That complexity is not a problem to be resolved. It is the actual story. But complexity does not travel well on deadline, and it does not generate the kind of social media engagement that a loyalty test does. So the microphone goes out, the question gets asked, and whatever answer comes back — Morocco or Netherlands — is treated as a revelation about belonging.

It is not. It is a man being asked to simplify something that cannot be simplified, in public, on the night his country of birth plays his country of heritage. Whatever he says, someone will use it against him.

The world is complicated. Reducing it to a loyalty test does not make it less so. It just makes the journalism worse.

A note on the data

All player birthplace data is drawn from the 2026 Foreign Born Football Dataset compiled by Gijsbert Oonk at Erasmus University Rotterdam. The dataset covers 1,252 players across all five confederations at the 2026 World Cup. The Netherlands fields one foreign-born player (Guus Til, born in Zambia). Morocco fields twenty. Three Moroccan players were born in the Netherlands: Noussair Mazraoui (Leidendorp), Sofyan Amrabat (Huizen), and Anass Salah-Eddine (Amsterdam). Rotterdam is the top birth city across the entire tournament.

Gijsbert Oonk is Professor of History at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research focuses on sport, migration, and identity. This post is part of an ongoing series, Who Gets to Play, examining inequality in global sport.

The press went wild for the subplot. Would Jérôme speak to his brother before kick-off? (He hadn’t, for weeks, furious about a tackle Kevin-Prince had put on Germany’s captain in the FA Cup final.) What would their father do? How would they greet each other on the pitch? It was irresistible and it was covered almost entirely as human drama: a family story that added spice to a group game.

Almost nobody asked the structural question hidden inside it. Why did two brothers from the same household end up wearing different shirts? What does that tell us about how nationality works about migration, identity, belonging, and the entirely arbitrary machinery that determines which flag a player pulls over his head? The Boateng story was treated as a curiosity. It is, in fact, a window.

Now, sixteen years later, that window is wide open. In the group stage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, spread across arenas in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the same story is playing out on multiple pitches simultaneously and still almost nobody is asking the question. France beat Norway 4-1 on Friday with a squad whose players were born in Martinique, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, and the Parisian banlieues. Cape Verde drew 0-0 with Saudi Arabia with a team more than half of whom were born in Rotterdam and Lisbon. The Netherlands demolished Tunisia 3-1 with a squad built substantially from the Dutch-Caribbean diaspora. And this weekend, Ghana face Croatia, with Iñaki Williams wearing Ghana’s colours, while his brother Nico represents Spain, the reigning European champions, in a different group entirely.

The data is not hidden. It is right there on every squad list, in every birthplace column. At this tournament, roughly one in five players was not born in the country they represent. The corridors of migration are written into the tournament’s DNA -Ghana to Spain, Ivory Coast to France, Curaçao and Cape Verde to the Netherlands, Scotland to Australia. And yet the television coverage celebrates national identity, the commentary box talks about mentality and character, the politicians pose with jerseys, and the structural question: how did these players end up here, and what does that tell us about the world goes almost entirely unasked.

This piece asks it. Not through data - though the data is extraordinary - but through the brothers. Because nothing makes the question more vivid, or more human, than two people who share the same blood, the same parents, the same bedroom, the same first ball in the same backyard, and arrive at different answers to the question: who are you, when the world asks you to choose?

The 2026 World Cup features at least seven pairs of brothers among its 48 competing nations. Four are wearing the same shirt. Four are not. Together, they tell a story that stretches far beyond sport — about migration, belonging, the inheritance of identity, and the quiet, enormous weight of what it means to pick a side.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup, spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, features at least seven sets of brothers among its 48 competing nations. Four of those pairs are wearing the same shirt. Four are not. Together, they tell a story that stretches far beyond sport — about migration, belonging, the inheritance of identity, and the quiet, enormous question of who you are when the world asks you to pick a side.

PART ONE: THE SAME SHIRT

France — Théo and Lucas Hernández

They grew up in the academy at Atlético de Madrid. Same dormitory, same drills, same coach’s voice echoing across the same training pitch in the Spanish capital. Yet when Lucas Hernández — two years older — made his debut for France in 2018, Théo had to wait another three years for his.

The family background is Spanish-French: their father, Jean-François Hernández, played professional football in France. The boys were born in Marseille before the family relocated to Madrid for his career. Their French nationality was never in question; it was always the flag they would play under. What was never guaranteed was that both would make it to the very top, and if they did, they might be selected together.

In 2021, when Théo finally earned his senior debut alongside Lucas, they became the first brothers to start together for France since 1932. The statistic tells you something about how rare the achievement is. The story of Qatar 2022 tells you something about the emotional weight they now carry.

Lucas was thirteen minutes into France’s opening game against Australia when he went down clutching his knee. Anterior cruciate ligament, right leg. His World Cup was over. His brother, already on the bench, came on to replace him. Théo went on to score in the semi-final against Morocco, driving France to the final they would lose on penalties to Argentina. ‘I’m playing for both myself and for Lulu,’ he said during the tournament. ‘He told me we need to win this, to bring the Cup home for him.’

At 2026, with both healthy and in form — Lucas at Paris Saint-Germain, Théo at Inter Miami, where he became the first Frenchman to be named to a World Cup squad while playing outside a European league — they are back together. The question that drove one brother onto the pitch in Qatar now drives them both: can they win the thing that Lucas missed?

Curaçao — Leandro and Juninho Bacuna

The Bacuna brothers were born in Groningen, a canal-laced university city in the northern Netherlands, far from the Caribbean island where their parents grew up. At home, the family spoke Papiamento, the creole language that emerged among enslaved people on Curaçao, born from Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and West African roots. Outside the house, they spoke Dutch.

Both progressed through Dutch youth football. Leandro played for the Netherlands Under-21s. Juninho reached the same level. Neither was selected for the senior Oranje squad. And yet the choice to represent Curaçao was never primarily about being overlooked — it was something older and more deliberate than that.

Leandro was the pioneer. When he switched allegiance to Curaçao in 2016, the national team was still building its identity following the island’s autonomy from the Netherlands Antilles in 2010. ‘You have to feel it with your heart to join,’ he has said. He became captain. He became the record appearance holder. And he opened a door that others — including his younger brother, and later former Manchester United winger Tahith Chong — walked through.

Juninho followed in 2019. Together, they helped lead Curaçao to the unthinkable: qualification for the 2026 World Cup, making the island — home to around 150,000 people; the smallest nation ever to reach a World Cup. When the qualifying draw was sealed with a goalless draw in Jamaica in November 2025, a homecoming parade toured Willemstad. Leandro said he had never seen so many people in the streets. On an island where baseball is the national obsession, football had, for one night, brought everyone together.

They played in North America as captain and creator;roles they have earned across years of belief in something that nobody else thought possible.

Cape Verde — Laros and Deroy Duarte

Here is an image that contains a world. A young boy is doing keepy-uppies with a battered ball along the touchline. He is five years old. The coaches are there to look at his older brother, who is in a trial session for the Stade Rennais Under-9s. At the end of the session, the club signs both of them.

The boy doing keepy-uppies was Désiré Doué. The older brother was Guéla. But the Duarte brothers - Laros and Deroy, both born in Rotterdam - have a story with a similar texture: two children of Cape Verdean parents, raised in the Netherlands, choosing to play for the country their family came from.

Laros, three years the elder, played through the Dutch youth system from Under-16 to Under-20 level before making his senior debut for Cape Verde in 2024. Deroy — who made his Cape Verde debut two years earlier, in 2022, despite being younger — was already in the team waiting for him. In Atlanta on 15 June 2026, Cape Verde drew 0-0 with Spain in one of the tournament’s great shocks. The brothers played in the same midfield. When Laros was substituted, with his brother still on the pitch, he said afterwards: ‘On the pitch you don’t really realise it. When the whistle blows, it’s a party.’ Their parents, watching in the stands, were crying.

Across the tournament, the Bacunas and the Duartes are doing something structurally similar: taking the Dutch football pipeline — the academies, the development pathway, the technical education — and delivering it to the Caribbean and the Atlantic. This is what Rotterdam and Groningen look like in the final stages of a World Cup.

Netherlands — Quinten Timber (and the brother who should have been there)

This story begins with what is absent.

Ronald Koeman’s original squad for 2026 included twin brothers: Quinten Timber of Marseille and Jurriën Timber of Arsenal. Both of Curaçaoan descent — their parents are from the island — they were set to become one of the great same-nation sibling partnerships in Dutch tournament history, following in the footsteps of Ronald and Frank de Boer, and René and Willy van de Kerkhof.

Then Jurriën’s groin injury, which had kept him out of the final weeks of Arsenal’s Premier League-winning season, failed to heal in time. He was withdrawn from the squad just before the opening game. He flew to Miami. He watched from a distance.

‘Watching the first game will be the hardest,’ he told De Telegraaf from his holiday. ‘But I’ll try to enjoy seeing my little brother there. I know how special it is to be there.’ And then: ‘I’d rather he win it than I would win it myself.’

The sentence lands with the full weight of what fraternal love actually means. Not sentiment, but something harder: the genuine subordination of your own desire to someone else’s fortune. Jurriën Timber had already missed Euro 2024 with an ACL injury. Missing a second major tournament, with his twin brother playing in it, is a specific kind of grief. Quinten Timber will carry that grief onto the pitch every time the Netherlands play.

PART TWO: DIFFERENT ANTHEMS

Spain / Ghana — Nico and Iñaki Williams

The most famous of all the brother stories begins in the Sahara Desert.

In the early 1990s, Félix Williams and his pregnant wife María made a journey from Ghana through the desert towards Europe. They drank their own urine to survive. They buried people who died on the road. Félix’s feet were burned from walking barefoot on the sand. They eventually reached Spain, settled in Bilbao, and in 1994, Iñaki was born — the first child, the first steps into a new country.

Both brothers grew up Basque. Both play for Athletic Club, whose rule of fielding only players from the Basque Country or its diaspora makes their presence at the club a story in itself. Both were eligible for Spain and Ghana. And for a long time, it seemed they might both choose Spain.

Iñaki represented Spain at Under-21 level and appeared once in a senior friendly. But the senior call-ups dried up. As he approached his thirties, it became clear that Spain would not come for him the way it had not come for him before. In 2022, he made a decision that was also a reckoning: he would play for Ghana, his parents’ country, the place his grandfather had always wanted him to represent. He visited Ghana with Nico that summer. He saw barefoot children in the streets and said to his brother: ‘Listen Nico, if it wasn’t for Mum and Dad, we could be one of those kids.’

Nico made a different calculation. He had come through the Spanish youth system, had been capped at Under-21 level, and felt that his identity — his football identity, his personal identity — was Spanish. Spain came calling before he had made a competitive senior appearance, essentially closing the door. He chose La Roja, scored in the Euro 2024 final against England, and is now one of the most coveted players in European football.

Ghana tried for years to change his mind. They never did. At 2026, the brothers play for different countries — Nico in the Spanish colours of the reigning European champions, Iñaki in the black, gold and red of Ghana. They still train together at Athletic Club. They still speak every day. At the end of that June friendly in 2022 — Ghana’s 1-0 win over Nicaragua, played the same night Nico assisted the goal that sent Spain to the Nations League finals — Iñaki was getting changed in a dressing room with a Ghanaian flag taped to the whitewashed wall. He found out about his brother’s assist among all the socks on the floor.

Same family, same club, same dressing room. Different flags.

France / Ivory Coast — Désiré and Guéla Doué

They started together. Their paths simply led to different places.

The Doué family settled in France from Ivory Coast, and both Guéla and Désiré were born in France — Guéla in Angers in 2002, Désiré three years later. Their father is Ivorian; their mother is French. Both joined Stade Rennais as children. Both came through the academy together. Both were on the same journey for most of their teenage years.

Then the international paths diverged. Guéla, who never received a serious approach from the French national team, made his choice with his heart: his father’s country, the flag his family had carried from West Africa to Brittany. He now plays for Ivory Coast as a right-back, wearing the captain’s armband at Strasbourg in Ligue 1.

Désiré stayed with France. His talent — electric, dizzying, the kind that makes defenders look like they are moving underwater — was simply too obvious for the French system to ignore. He scored twice and assisted once in PSG’s 5-0 Champions League final victory over Inter Milan in May 2025. He was twenty years old. France called him in the same breath.

Was there a moment of decision? Both brothers have been careful about what they say publicly. ‘My brother and I are like twins,’ Désiré has said. There is no bitterness in the Doué household about the different choices — only, it seems, a family pride that found two different channels. When Guéla scored the equaliser against France in that Nantes friendly, then crossed for the winner, the camera found Désiré on the bench. Smiling.

At 2026, Désiré is in the squad with France. Guéla is at the tournament with Ivory Coast. They have already played against each other once; they may do so again. The older brother paved the way and the younger followed — but not to the same destination.

Australia / Scotland — Harry and John Souttar

They are from Luthermuir, a village of around 300 people in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Their father played for the local team. Both boys came through the youth system at Dundee United. And then their international careers split at the root — because of their mother.

Heather Souttar was born in Port Hedland, Western Australia. That single biographical fact -their mother’s birthplace- made both brothers eligible for Australia. John, the elder, chose Scotland, the country where he was born, where he grew up, where he has played his club football at Hearts and Rangers for most of his adult life. Harry chose differently.

In 2019, while on loan at Fleetwood Town, Harry switched allegiance to Australia. The decision was not universally welcomed back home: he had represented Scotland at youth level. ‘There was a lot of people saying a few things I didn’t really agree with,’ he said after the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where he helped Australia reach the last sixteen before losing to eventual champions Argentina. ‘But it came full circle.’

What unites the brothers, beyond the same village and the same parents, is grief. Their older brother Aaron — eighteen years older than Harry, described by him as ‘like a second dad’ — died from motor neurone disease in July 2022, aged 42. John dedicated a goal for Scotland to Aaron while he was still fighting the illness. Both brothers carry tattoos in his memory. Those tattoos will be visible on the World Cup stage this summer.

For 2026, Scotland qualified for their first World Cup since France 1998 — a 28-year absence that has marked a generation of Scottish football. John Souttar is in the squad. Harry, now at Leicester City, will represent Australia for the second time. The family will travel between venues in the United States and Canada to watch both sons play. The brothers were placed in different groups and narrowly avoided meeting each other in the first round.

Their mother, Heather — the Australian-born mother whose birthplace gave Harry his eligibility — is coordinating the travel itinerary.

Netherlands / Ghana — Brian Brobbey and Derrick Luckassen

This is the newest story in the set, and the most compressed.

Brian Brobbey — born in Amsterdam to Ghanaian parents, now at Ajax, an explosive centre-forward — has been a Netherlands international since 2023 and is part of Ronald Koeman’s 2026 squad. His half-brother Derrick Luckassen took a different journey: he progressed through Dutch youth football at multiple levels, from Under-18 to Under-21, without ever breaking into the senior Oranje picture. Earlier in 2026, Ghana came calling. He accepted.

It is, structurally, a story the Williams brothers already told: two players of Ghanaian descent who both had Dutch football pathways, and who arrived at different conclusions about where those pathways led. For Luckassen, the Ghanaian call-up was a late pivot; for Brobbey, the Dutch identity was always the one that felt real. The brothers may yet meet in the knockout stages. If they do, it will be the strangest kind of reunion.

——

The 2026 World Cup is, in the language of migration research, a tournament built on corridors. Ghana to Spain, Ivory Coast to France, Curaçao and Cape Verde to the Netherlands, Scotland to Australia. These are the routes that migration has carved across the last forty years — routes followed first by parents fleeing poverty or war or simply looking for something better, then by their children, born into new countries, playing under new flags, carrying old names.

What the brothers show us — more sharply than any dataset can — is that those corridors do not resolve neatly. The same parents, the same house, the same backyard, the same first ball. And yet: different answers to the same question. Same blood, different flags.

What makes the difference? Sometimes it is the grandfather’s wish, like Iñaki Williams. Sometimes it is the mother’s birthplace, like Harry Souttar. Sometimes it is the simple fact of which federation called first, or called at all. Sometimes it is something harder to name — a sense of who you are that cannot be assigned by any football association.

The brothers who chose the same shirt chose togetherness. The brothers who chose differently chose themselves.

Both choices, this summer, get to play at a World Cup.

——

Gijsbert Oonk is professor of history at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he researches sport, migration, and identity. His dataset of foreign-born players at the FIFA World Cup spans 1930 to 2026.

(1) The tightest pipeline: Curaçao

Start with the most extreme case. Curaçao has a population of roughly 150,000 people, smaller than Rotterdam-Zuid, the southern district of the city where I work. Of their 26-man squad, 25 were born outside the island. Not scattered across the world, but concentrated in one place: the Netherlands, and especially Rotterdam. Sherel Floranus, Ar’jany Martha, Gervane Kastaneer: three players born in Rotterdam alone. Two others, Juninho and Leandro Bacuna, both arrived from Groningen. Laros and Deroy Duarte — brothers, as it happens grew up on Dutch streets before committing to the island their parents came from.

This is the most concentrated diaspora pipeline at this World Cup, possibly in football history. Curaçao is not drawing on a broad international diaspora: it is, for all practical purposes, a Dutch club wearing Caribbean colours. And because of the colonial history connecting the island to the Netherlands; Curaçao was part of the Dutch Kingdom until 2010, and still is in a constitutional sense, this pipeline has an institutional logic behind it, not just an accident of geography.

When I watch Curaçao at this World Cup, I will be watching a team that could plausibly have played at De Kuip or with Sparta.

(2) The organised diaspora: Morocco

Morocco tells a related but distinct story, and one I have been tracking since before it became widely understood. Twenty of their 26 players were born abroad, but spread mainly across four different European countries, each with its own migration history feeding into a single national shirt.

Spain leads with six players, France matches it with six more. The Netherlands contributes three, Belgium another three. Achraf Hakimi, born in Madrid to Moroccan parents, is perhaps the most famous, but the squad includes players from Montpellier, Molenbeek, Hoboken, Strasbourg, Amsterdam, Terassa. It is a genuinely super-diverse squad in the sense the sociologist Steven Vertovec meant: no single dominant culture, no single language group, everyone in some sense a minority. They speak Arabic, French, Spanish, and Dutch, and use English as their common ground.

This is not new. In academic work I published in 2020, I used the concept of migration corridors; the structured pathways that colonial and labour migration histories create between countries, to show that this kind of reverse flow was predictable and growing. Former colonies recruiting from the diasporas their historical relationship with Europe produced: Algeria drawing on France, Morocco drawing on the Netherlands and France and Belgium, Tunisia doing the same. What looked like an interesting anomaly in 2018, when Morocco reached the quarter-finals with a heavily diaspora-shaped squad, is now the established norm. For Morocco in 2026, 20 of 26. The corridor has become a highway.

What I did not predict clearly enough was Haiti.

(3) The hidden pipeline: Haiti

Nobody calls Haiti “basically a French team.” They should.

Fifteen of Haiti’s 26 players were born outside the country. Of those fifteen, eleven — nearly three-quarters — were born in France. Not in one city the way Curaçao’s players cluster in Rotterdam, but scattered across the French map: Montfermeil, Aubervilliers, Colombes, Lagny-sur-Marne, Châtenay-Malabry, Rennes. The remaining four were born in the USA (2), Canada (1), and Switzerland (1).

The structure is almost identical to Morocco’s: a former French colonial relationship, decades of migration to the metropole, and now a national team drawing heavily on the children of that movement. Haiti declared independence from France in 1804 — the first Black republic in history, the product of the only successful slave revolution the world has seen. The migration corridor that followed was long, complex, and often violent. What it produced, among other things, was a diaspora in France large enough to build a competitive World Cup squad from.

And yet almost no pundit will frame the Morocco vs Haiti match on 25 June as a contest between two French-pipeline diaspora sides. Morocco gets that analysis because it is written about constantly, because it reached the World Cup semi-finals in 2022, because Achraf Hakimi plays for PSG. Haiti gets almost none of it. Same migration logic. Wildly different levels of attention.

This is the gap my research has always tried to close. The migration corridors do not discriminate by visibility.

(4) The colonial route, still running: Ivory Coast

Ivory Coast closes the set with nine foreign-born players out of 26; smaller in scale than the other three, but running through the same channel. Seven of those nine were born in France. Ivory Coast’s relationship with France is not the labour-migration story of Morocco, nor the postcolonial rupture story of Haiti. It is something more continuous: a francophone West African nation whose football development has always been intertwined with French clubs, French academies, French youth structures. The corridor here is not reversed colonial migration so much as a still-active colonial infrastructure for producing footballers. The route runs the same direction it always has.

Who are we cheering on?

I want to close with a question I first asked publicly in my inaugural lecture at Erasmus University in 2019, and which these two matches make newly urgent: who are we actually cheering on?

The question sounds simple. It is not.

I am Dutch. I live and work in Rotterdam. On 25 June I could reasonably cheer for Morocco; the Netherlands has three players in that squad, including Noussair Mazraoui, born in Leiderdorp. I could cheer for Curaçao, a team built almost entirely from my city and its surroundings, a team that represents the Caribbean part of the Kingdom I am a citizen of. In Rotterdam, Cape Verde has always been part of the fabric of the city, thus I could cheer for them too when they play elsewhere in this tournament.

And in Curaçao itself? The island’s fans can, with equal justification, cheer for the Netherlands. Many of them have family there. Some of them grew up there. The players in the Curaçao squad are, in a very real sense, also Dutch players who made a different choice.

This is what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah meant when he argued that national identity is a “wafer-thin construction” not that it is fake, but that it is contingent, built on choices and histories that could easily have gone differently. A person born in Groningen who moved a hundred kilometres east would be supporting Germany. The Curaçao players who grew up in Rotterdam could have been playing for the Dutch national team. Laros Duarte, in fact, played for the Dutch youth setup before switching.

The squads on the pitch will not be representing nations in the simple geographic sense. They will be representing something more complicated, more interesting, and — when you look closely at it — more honest about what nations actually are.

35 foreign-born in one match. 34 in the next. Two fixtures. One question that has no easy answer.

For most of the twentieth century, the German national team looked strikingly homogeneous. This is a reflection of a citizenship regime built on jus sanguinis, ethnic descent, that kept second-generation migrants off the pitch even as they filled the stands. France and the Netherlands told a different story far earlier: postcolonial migration from the Maghreb, West Africa, Suriname, and the Antilles fed directly into their football pipelines, producing diverse squads by the 1980s and 1990s. Germany arrived at a similar place, but through different routes and a generation later. What changed? In 2000, Germany reformed its citizenship law and, a new generation of players, born to Turkish, Balkan, and African parents, became eligible to represent the country their families had rebuilt. The squad you see today is the result of that legal turning point, compounded by labour migration and refugee flows. So the question isn’t why Germany looks different now. It’s why it took so long.

Germany’s 2026 squad contains exactly one foreign-born player: Waldemar Anton, who was born in Olmaliq, Uzbekistan, and moved to Hanover at the age of two. By the standard measure, birthplace versus represented nation, Germany is among the most homogeneous squads at this tournament, next to Brasil for example. Yet look at the squad photograph and something does not quite add up. Of the twenty-six men Julian Nagelsmann has chosen, twelve have at least one parent from outside Germany. Six of those parents, or their families, came from West Africa. Germany’s squad is not diverse despite its migration figures. It is diverse because of migration. The numbers just do not capture it. To understand why, you need two arguments and five family stories.

Argument one: The Bundesliga was a destination

West African football migration to Germany is not ancient history. It has a precise origin point. Before the late 1980s, the presence of African players in the Bundesliga was negligible: a handful of individuals who rarely lasted. Then Tony Yeboah left Ghana for Saarbrücken in 1988, moved to Eintracht Frankfurt, and became the first African to captain a Bundesliga side and the first to win the Bundesliga Golden Boot, in 1993. He changed something. In his wake came Jay-Jay Okocha from Nigeria, Samuel Kuffour from Ghana, Jonathan Akpoborie from Nigeria and, in 1990, a Senegalese striker named Souleymane Sané, who arrived at Wattenscheid and would go on to score over 100 goals in German professional football.

The Bosman ruling of 1995 then opened the floodgates. The European Court of Justice’s decision freed players from transfer fees at contract expiry and dismantled quotas on foreign players within the EU. Clubs across Europe began recruiting more aggressively from West Africa. The proportion of foreign players in Europe’s top five leagues doubled in a decade.

These men arrived as professionals. They were employed, visible, and by local standards financially secure. They lived inside German clubs, in German cities, in overwhelmingly German social worlds. And some of them met German women, formed families, and stayed.

Argument two: The citizenship law changed at exactly the right moment

Until the year 2000, Germany operated one of the strictest citizenship regimes in the democratic world. Citizenship followed blood, not birth jus sanguinis, not jus soli. A child born in Germany to two Nigerian parents was Nigerian. Period. Naturalization required fifteen years of lawful residence.

But the children in our story were not born to two Nigerian parents. They were born to one West African father and one German mother. And that made all the difference. Through their German mother, they were German by birth, automatically. They entered the German youth academy system at age seven or eight, not as immigrants navigating bureaucracy, but as German children.

What you get, when you combine these two things, a specific migration wave of professional footballers, and the citizenship inheritance of their German-born children, is a squad that the foreign-born statistic cannot see.

Five families

Leroy Sané’s father, Souleymane, grew up as the son of Senegalese diplomats in Paris. He was called up for French military service in 1982 and — being on holiday and missing the paperwork deadline — was posted to the Black Forest in Germany. He started playing football for a local club, caught the eye of a Bundesliga scout, and the rest of his career unfolded in the Ruhr Valley. It was there that he met Regina Weber — an Olympic bronze medallist in rhythmic gymnastics at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. Their son Leroy was born in Essen in 1996, named after his father’s Senegal coach Claude Le Roy. Because France registered his birth at their embassy in Germany, Leroy held eligibility for three countries. France never called. Germany did.

Jonathan Tah’s father, Aquilas, came from Ivory Coast and settled in Hamburg. His son was born in 1996 in the multicultural district of Altona, raised by his German mother Anja after his parents divorced. Tah grew up speaking German and French, started playing at Altona 93, and is now a defender for Bayern Munich with over forty international caps. He could have represented Ivory Coast. He chose Germany. When he signed for Bayern in 2025, he visited Ivory Coast for the first time.

Jamal Musiala’s father, Daniel, is a Nigerian-born British sociologist who met Musiala’s German-Polish mother Carolin at the University of Southampton. Jamal was born in Stuttgart in 2003, moved to England at seven, joined Chelsea’s academy, and was eligible for Germany, England, and Nigeria. England courted him. He chose Germany. He told a Nigerian chef on a cooking show that his father talks to him about Nigerian culture and food constantly. He has never been to Nigeria. He is, perhaps, Germany’s most gifted footballer of his generation.

Malick Thiaw’s father, Souleymane Thiaw, is Senegalese and was a goalkeeper. His mother, Marjo-Kristiina, is from Oulu in northern Finland. Thiaw was born in Düsseldorf in 2001, grew up speaking six languages including Wolof and Finnish. His wife is South African. In the same squad is Leroy Sané — whose father is also named Souleymane and also from Senegal. Two Senegalese fathers, two different German mothers, two different paths through European football, one national team.

Felix Nmecha’s father, Kalu, is an Igbo Nigerian from Abia State who settled in Hamburg, where Felix and his older brother Lukas were both born. In 2007 the family moved to Manchester; both boys joined Manchester City’s academy. Felix was eligible for Germany, England, and Nigeria. He chose Germany. His brother Lukas is also a professional footballer. Their father Kalu can be seen in photographs at contract signings, standing beside his sons.

The exception that proves the rule: a refugee’s son

And then there is Nadiem Amiri. Both of his parents fled Afghanistan during the wars of the 1980s. His father built a trucking business in Ludwigshafen; his mother worked in elderly care for twenty years. Nadiem was born in 1996, the same year as Sané and Tah. He speaks fluent Dari. At fourteen, his parents took him to Kabul to see where they had come from.

Amiri’s path to the Germany squad is completely different from the West African stories above. His parents were not professional athletes who arrived with social status and financial security. They were asylum seekers. His route into football came through talent alone, identified at Kaiserslautern and developed at Hoffenheim by a young coach named Julian Nagelsmann, is now the Germany manager who called him back into the squad after nearly five years away.

Wikipedia now describes him as ‘the greatest footballer of Afghan origin due to his accomplishments in Europe and for playing in the 2026 FIFA World Cup.’ His cousin Zubayr plays for Afghanistan. Amiri works with the Red Cross on Afghan refugee programmes. He is a different kind of Germany. He is not the child of a Bundesliga footballer and a German Olympian, but the child of two people who had nothing and made something from it.

What the numbers miss and what they promise

The 20-percent figure, the share of foreign-born players at this World Cup, is real and it matters. It has risen across nearly a century of the tournament. Morocco bring twenty foreign-born players; Brazil bring zero; Germany bring one. These are structural facts about migration history, colonial networks, and citizenship law. But the Germany squad shows that the foreign-born measure is only one lens, and not always the sharpest one.

The West African dominance in Germany’s squad is not an accident or an abstraction. It is the direct legacy of a thirty-year process: a specific migration wave of professional footballers who arrived in the Bundesliga from the late 1980s onward, who formed mixed families with German women in German cities, whose children were German by birth and entered German academies before they were ten. The citizenship law before 2000 was pure jus sanguinis — but it did not matter for these families, because the German mother made the children German from day one.

Look forward and the picture changes again. Germany’s 2000 citizenship reform — and its 2024 expansion, which now allows children of long-resident foreign parents to hold dual nationality permanently — means that a future cohort of children born to two non-German parents is now German by law. The pipeline does not dry up; it broadens. Future Germany squads may include players whose parents were Afghan refugees who never played Bundesliga football, or children of Nigerian engineers who arrived in the 2010s.

The World Cup has always been a mirror held up to global migration — imperfect, delayed by a generation, shaped by laws and accidents and the specific moment a Senegalese soldier missed a paperwork deadline and ended up in the Black Forest. The 2026 Germany squad reflects migration waves from the 1980s and 1990s. The 2038 squad will reflect something we are only beginning to see now.

One foreigner in the squad. The most international generation in German football history. Both things are true. The statistic does not lie. It just does not tell the whole story.

Data from the 2026 Foreign-Born Football Dataset (Gijsbert Oonkt). Family background sourced from Bundesliga.com, DFB official profiles, and player interviews. The foreign-born figure of >20% refers to all squads at the 2026 World Cup group stage.

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Then Dutch manager Dick Advocaat made a substitution. Nathan Aké entered the field in the 82nd minute. At first glance, it seemed entirely unremarkable. Aké was a promising young defender who had progressed through the Dutch youth system and was being rewarded with a senior debut. The Netherlands comfortably won the match, and most supporters forgot about the substitution almost immediately. Yet that seemingly insignificant decision tells us something profound about the modern World Cup.

Aké was born in The Hague to a Dutch mother and an Ivorian father. At the time, he was still eligible to represent either the Netherlands or Côte d’Ivoire. By introducing him in an official World Cup qualifier, the Dutch Football Association effectively secured his international future. Under FIFA’s rules at the time, Aké could no longer switch allegiances later in his career.

Eight minutes on the pitch changed the composition of future World Cup squads. What looked like a routine substitution was actually part of a much larger struggle taking place across international football. Long before national teams arrive at a World Cup, football federations are competing for players with multiple nationalities, migration backgrounds, and family connections that stretch across continents.

This hidden competition has become one of the defining features of the modern game.And at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, it is more visible than ever. The evidence appears in a striking statistic. Among the countries participating in the tournament, some of the teams with the largest numbers of foreign-born players are not traditional football powers but countries whose populations are deeply connected to migration. Curaçao leads the world with twenty-five foreign-born players in its probable World Cup squad. Morocco and the Democratic Republic of Congo each have twenty. Bosnia and Herzegovina follows with sixteen, while Haiti, Tunisia, Cape Verde, Qatar, Croatia, and Turkey complete the top ten.

At first glance, these figures seem surprising. Why would countries with relatively small populations have such large numbers of foreign-born players? The answer is that we are asking the wrong question. These countries are no longer drawing solely from the population living within their borders. They are drawing from something much larger: global diaspora communities.

For decades, football fans assumed that national teams reflected national populations. Brazilians played for Brazil. Germans played for Germany. Argentinians played for Argentina. The World Cup appeared to be a straightforward competition between nations

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That assumption no longer holds. Increasingly, national teams are transnational projects. To understand why, we need to look beyond football itself and examine one of the defining forces of the modern world: migration. Over the past half century, millions of people have moved across borders. Families have established lives in new countries while maintaining cultural, emotional, and legal ties to places of origin. Children are often born in one country while retaining eligibility for another through their parents or grandparents. In many cases they possess multiple passports, multiple identities, and multiple possible futures.

Football has become one of the most visible arenas in which these realities play out. A teenager growing up in Rotterdam may be eligible for the Netherlands, Morocco, and perhaps another country through family connections. A young player in Paris may have the option of representing France, Senegal, Mali, Algeria, or Congo. A footballer born in Brussels may simultaneously belong to Belgium and several African nations connected through family migration histories.

For football federations, these players represent both an opportunity and a challenge. The result is a global competition that few supporters ever see. National federations recruit aggressively. Coaches make phone calls. Former internationals visit families. Officials cultivate relationships with parents and agents. Young players are invited to training camps. Sometimes decisions are influenced by emotion and belonging. Sometimes they are influenced by sporting opportunity. Usually they are influenced by both.

No country illustrates this phenomenon more clearly than France. France has become the world’s most important exporter of football talent. During the 2026 World Cup, close to one hundred participating players were born in France. Yet only a minority of them represent the French national team. The majority play for other countries. This remarkable situation is rooted in France’s colonial history and its subsequent migration patterns. Generations of families from North and West Africa settled in French cities, particularly around Paris, Marseille, and Lyon. Their children grew up within French society, attended French schools, and developed within French football academies.Many became elite footballers. But not all of them chose France.

The result is extraordinary. Players born and trained in France now represent Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Mali, Congo, Comoros, and numerous other nations. France has effectively become the world’s largest football academy.

When football analysts discuss talent production, they often focus on clubs such as Barcelona’s La Masia or Ajax’s academy. Yet from a global perspective, the most productive football factory in the world may actually be the Paris metropolitan region itself.

The banlieues surrounding Paris have become football’s equivalent of Silicon Valley. The concentration of talent is astonishing. Population density, migration networks, street football culture, professional academies, and fierce competition have combined to create one of the most productive sporting environments ever seen.

But France’s experience also highlights a deeper question. Who owns talent? When a player is born in France, educated in France, and trained by French clubs, but chooses to represent Algeria or Senegal, what exactly does that choice mean? The answer is often more complicated than the public debate suggests. Commentators frequently frame these decisions as questions of loyalty or identity. Yet players themselves often describe a more nuanced reality. They may feel simultaneously connected to multiple places. They may speak several languages. They may feel at home in both countries. Their decisions often reflect overlapping identities rather than exclusive allegiances.

At the same time, sporting calculations matter. The competition for places in the French national team is extraordinarily intense. A player who narrowly misses selection for France may become a star for Morocco, Senegal, or Algeria. Choosing another country is therefore not merely an emotional decision; it can also be a rational career choice.

Perhaps no federation has understood this reality better than Morocco. Over the past decade, Morocco has built one of the most sophisticated diaspora recruitment systems in world football. Officials actively identify talented dual nationals across Europe and cultivate relationships long before players reach senior level. Recruitment efforts extend beyond the players themselves and frequently involve parents, extended family members, youth coaches, and agents.

The strategy reached its most visible expression during the 2022 World Cup. Morocco became the first African nation to reach a World Cup semifinal. Yet many of its key players had been born or raised in Europe. Hakim Ziyech grew up in the Netherlands. Achraf Hakimi developed in Spain. Several others emerged from football systems in Belgium, France, and elsewhere. Morocco’s success demonstrated that diaspora populations could become a major competitive advantage.

What once appeared to be a challenge of migration had become a source of national strength. The same pattern is visible in smaller countries. Consider Curaçao. With a population of roughly 150,000 people, the island would seem far too small to compete consistently at the international level. Yet migration has fundamentally altered the equation. Large Curaçaoan communities in the Netherlands provide access to a much larger pool of football talent. Players developed in Dutch academies can strengthen the national team while maintaining meaningful connections to their Caribbean heritage.

Cape Verde offers a similar story. More Cape Verdeans live outside the country than within it. Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the United States all host significant diaspora communities. Football allows these dispersed populations to reconnect through a shared national project.

The Democratic Republic of Congo provides perhaps the most striking example of all. According to current World Cup projections, twenty of its twenty-six internationals were born outside the country. Most were raised and trained in Europe, particularly in France and Belgium. Yet they have chosen to represent Congo.

From a football perspective, the strategy is brilliant. Congo gains access to players developed in some of the world’s strongest football systems. From a sociological perspective, however, the phenomenon reveals something larger. The nation is no longer confined to territory. It exists wherever its people live. This observation connects directly to a broader question that extends far beyond sport.

For much of modern history, citizenship was imagined as a relatively straightforward relationship between individuals and states. People belonged to one country. Political rights and national identities were largely contained within territorial borders. Global migration has complicated that picture.

Millions of people now maintain meaningful ties to multiple countries simultaneously. They may possess dual citizenship. They may speak several languages. They may participate in economic, social, and political networks that cross borders. International football offers a unique window into these transformations because it forces choices that are usually left ambiguous. At some point, a player must decide. Which country will they represent?

The answer often reveals that identity is not singular but layered. Football’s governing bodies have gradually adapted to this reality. FIFA’s eligibility regulations have become increasingly flexible, reflecting the growing complexity of citizenship in a globalized world. The organisation’s rule changes acknowledge what migration scholars have long argued: belonging is rarely as simple as a passport. The 2026 World Cup therefore tells a story that extends well beyond football.

It reveals how globalization has transformed one of the most powerful symbols of the nation-state.

The World Cup still appears to be a competition between nations. Flags wave. Anthems play. Supporters dress in national colours. The symbolism remains enormously powerful. Yet beneath that symbolism lies a different reality. Modern national teams are often assembled through transnational networks of migration, family, citizenship, and mobility. The geography of football increasingly mirrors the geography of migration itself.

Perhaps that is the most important lesson of the 2026 tournament. The future of international football will not be determined solely by coaching, tactics, or talent development. It will also be shaped by migration corridors, citizenship laws, diaspora communities, and competing visions of belonging.

The World Cup still speaks the language of nations.

But increasingly, it is being written by diasporas.

And that hidden competition may be the most fascinating co

ntest in world sport.