Why football always precedes sociology by Luigi Guelpa

When in 1998, on the eve of the World Cup in France, it was written that the future of football belonged to multiracial teams, some might have thought it a provocation, one of the many exaggerations that football allows, just as it allows adults to cry in front of eleven men in shorts or the illusion that a victory on penalties can improve a nation’s GDP. Today, on the eve of the World Cup organized by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, we must recognize that provocation has become commonplace. Not because the world has become better. The world rarely improves. It simply changes shape. And football, the most reliable sociological laboratory of the contemporary age, noticed this before universities, governments, and often even citizens. In 1998, France seemed an exception. It was the France of Zidane, Thuram, Desailly, and Djorkaeff, a team that seemed to have been built by an enlightened official from the Ministry of Integration rather than a coach. The France Black-Blanc-Beur was interpreted as a political manifesto accidentally disguised as a national football team. To be more precise, before 1998, France already seemed a statistical exception in the great European football atlas, but a limited edition: a rare bird, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say black. In the late 1970s, his garde noire guarded the frontiers of the penalty area with the authority of an ancient colonial legion. At the heart of the fortress stood Marius Tresor and Jean Pierre Adams, two foreign bodies only to those who continued to confuse nationhood with skin color. Then the imp Jean Tigana joined them to christen the lands in between.

Today, that France no longer represents the future. It represents the past. Because the future has arrived and spread like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Netflix, and all the other ecumenical religions of the global age. Nearly all the planet’s major national teams have become laboratories of cross-breeding. Not just those in countries traditionally built by migration. Even those that until a few decades ago imagined themselves as ethnic fortresses, living museums of national identity. The Germany that then seemed to be composed of eleven Prussian forest rangers, genetically selected to win head-to-head matches, would today be incomprehensible without the children and grandchildren of Turkish, Balkan, African, and Middle Eastern migrations. England has become a small Commonwealth in shorts. Belgium plays like a footnote in European colonial history. Switzerland increasingly resembles a United Nations conference. Sweden seems to have transformed its locker room into a census of the wars and migrations of the last thirty years. Football anticipated sociology because the ball always arrives before the professors. First come the children playing in the backyards of the suburbs, then the scouts, then the clubs, then the national teams, and only then do the sociologists arrive to explain what happened. This year, the World Cup is being played in three countries that are themselves monuments to migration. The United States, Canada, and Mexico form a kind of geopolitical triangle within which millions of people have crossed borders, sought work, changed languages, changed religions, or simply tried to survive. Twenty-eight years ago, it was written that football would penetrate the United States like a god carried on the shoulders of immigrants crossing the Rio Grande. It seemed like a metaphor. It was a chronicle ahead of its time.

 

Football truly entered the United States following the routes of Latin American, African, Asian, and European immigration. It didn’t conquer America through Harvard or Wall Street, but through working-class neighborhoods, public schools, parking lots transformed into makeshift pitches, and families who continued to cheer on the national teams they left on the other side of the border. But the most fascinating case of this World Cup is perhaps not that of the United States. It’s that of Curaçao. A small Caribbean island that seems to have emerged from a postcolonial novel, featuring a national team composed almost entirely of players born in the Netherlands. Here, the racial mix transcends even the racial question. It becomes a question of geography. What is Curaçao? A Caribbean national team? A footballing offshoot of Amsterdam? A legacy of the colonial empire? A tropical branch of the Eredivisie. It’s probably all of these things at once. And it’s precisely this simultaneity that makes the phenomenon interesting. Because contemporary football has ceased to represent stable, delimited populations. It represents flows. It represents migrations. It represents family memories. It represents diasporic networks. It represents children playing for the land of their grandparents, not the land of their birth.

 

For a century, we’ve told ourselves the fairy tale that every national team was the sporting manifestation of a cohesive national identity. The reality was more complicated even then. Today, it has become blatantly impossible. A player is born in Rotterdam, grows up in Amsterdam, is coached by a Belgian coach, has a grandmother from Curaçao, and decides to play for the Caribbean national team. Another is born in Paris and chooses Morocco. Another is born in London and chooses Ghana. Yet another is born in Brussels and plays for Congo. Contemporary identities resemble less and less flags and more and more airports. France in 1998 showed the way. Morocco, a semifinalist in 2022, has transformed it into a method. Algeria draws from the French suburbs. Senegal exploits the diaspora. Ivory Coast exploits postcolonial connections. Ghana recruits from European academies. Curaçao, as we’ve said, looks to the Netherlands as a genealogical and footballing reserve. The old colonial routes have become talent highways. Of course, it would be naive to confuse footballing hybridization with the resolution of social conflicts. The clubs that produce these national teams continue to experience racism, discrimination, identity tensions, and collective fears. A goal doesn’t resolve the story. At most, it tells it.

 

We won’t just see teams. We’ll see genealogies, former colonies interacting with former metropolises, peripheries producing the talent consumed in the centers. We’ll see the passport continually negotiating with memory. If in 1998, France seemed like a historical exception, in 2026 it appears like the prototype of a now widespread phenomenon. The prophecy has come true to an even greater extent than imagined. There is no longer a single multiracial national team capable of predicting the future. The future has become the entire World Cup. And perhaps the true winner of this World Cup won’t be a single team. It will be the interbreeding itself, that great historical process that ideologues periodically try to halt, yet which instead continues to advance with the obstinacy of a striker launched into a goal. Because football, like capitalism, like the internet, and like migration, doesn’t recognize borders except for the pleasure of crossing them.

 

Then there’s another form of interbreeding, the administrative one, produced in air-conditioned offices rather than on the streets. Qatar, small and incredibly wealthy, but lacking in football tradition and demographics, has sought elsewhere what it couldn’t find at home. It has looked to more fragile countries, offering opportunities, passports, and accelerated membership. This isn’t the slow history of the intermingling that fills the great European national teams; it’s a carefully planned shortcut, where identity becomes a budget item and citizenship resembles an investment. In global football, everything has a price, even the concept of homeland. And so, for Qataris, the national team is no longer simply a reflection of a society, but the result of a recruitment policy. Not the hybridization born of history, but rather that organized by the market. It may be efficient, but it has the artificial flavor of greenhouses: it produces impeccable fruit, yet devoid of the earthy scent.

Article machine translated (and then slightly edited), from here.

 

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Luigi Guelpa, born in 1971, is a professional journalist and author. He collaborates with several national newspapers, covering foreign policy. In 2010, he won the Selezione Bancarella Sport Award with his book The Tackle in the Desert. He published The Long March of the Turtle. A Game Against Destiny (2026) for DeriveApprodi.