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Diaspora teams at the World Cup

The growing phenomenon of diaspora teams is discussed by Simon Kuper in the Financial Times. . In eight squads at the tournament, the majority of players were born outside the country they are representing, comprising Curaçao (25 of whose 26 players were born in the mainland Netherlands), DR Congo, Morocco, Bosnia, Algeria, Haiti, Tunisia and Cape Verde.

These countries have mostly recruited from their western European diasporas. Overall, 23.6 per cent of players in this year’s tournament were born outside the country they are representing — up from 9.6 per cent in 2006, according to an Oxford university study.

That is the case because western Europe excels at producing footballers. Its social democracies make amateur football widely available and affordable, enlarging the region’s talent base. And since the average player does not have the ball for about 89 minutes a game, the most basic question in football is, “Where should I be now?”

Western Europeans learn to answer that from the age of six. That’s why 98 players across all squads in the tournament were born in France and 67 in the Netherlands. The likes of DR Congo and Morocco have a strong European influence. Only one of Morocco’s starting 11 against Brazil was born in Morocco.

Unlike other diaspora sides, Morocco manages to recruit players good enough to have played for the western European countries they grew up in. The captain, Madrid-born Achraf Hakimi, would surely start for Spain, and the team’s leading scorer, Ismael Saibari, would be a strong addition to talent-starved Belgium.

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