If you’re watching any of the World Cup, but don’t generally follow soccer, you might sense a certain cultural disconnect between the names on the backs of the jerseys and the countries they play for.
Bukayo Saka and Eberechi Eze, for example, are big stars playing, not for the Nigeria of their parents, but for the England of their birth.
Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams are young but already iconic figures, and — their names notwithstanding — they play for Spain.
Alexander Pavlovic and Nathaniel Brown are not typical German names. You wouldn’t assume Ousmane Dembele and Rayan Cherki are French, or that Manuel Akanji and Granit Xhaka are Swiss. Anthony Elanga and Dejan Kulusewski play for Sweden. You get the idea.
This is diversity with a higher profile than usual. But it’s also diversity with an element of subversion. For the next month, an untold number of Americans will be tuned to an open celebration of some of the very people their government is telling them to fear, hate, and, yes, deport. The World Cup will be a festival of cognitive dissonance, where stereotypes will be crushed, and where any claims of white supremacy will be exposed as patently absurd.
The faces can be as incongruous as the names. On almost every major team, most of the world’s human skin tones — from chalk white to deep ebony — will be on brilliant display, free of any helmets, facemasks, or anything that might obscure the hairstyles, tattoos, and multiple camera angles available to the television audience.
And every shot of a smiling face that isn’t white — either on the field or in the stands — can be thought of as a middle finger directed at ICE.
Even the sportscasters will be active participants in the subversion, just by doing their jobs. For their whole careers, they’ve covered these same players at the club level, routinely referring to them as “Romelu Lukaku the Belgian,” “Alexis MacAllister the Argentinian,” and “Jamal Musiala the German.”
The more matter-of-fact the commentators and analysts sound on the air, the more they serve to normalize the diversity. Kylian Mbappe is a generational talent and a national icon for France, but nobody in the broadcast booth will be talking about his Cameroonian father or Algerian mother. He’s French, and that’s all the world will ever see him as.
You might even say that the sportscasters are — witting or not — modeling a transcendent theory of nationality, one that values citizenship and national identification, rather than just bloodlines and birthplaces. That this model is diametrically opposed to the one on offer from the current U.S. regime goes literally without saying. They don’t have to say what is already so obvious.
Which brings me to Folarin Balogun and the U.S. Men’s National Team (USMNT). I was writing about Balogun, I swear, even before last Friday when he scored the two goals against Paraguay that secured him an indelible place in U.S. sports history.
He had already caught my eye as perhaps Stephen Miller’s worst nightmare. A superb athlete, more masculine than Pete Hegseth will ever be, Balogun is a walking advertisement for birthright citizenship.
He was born in New York to Nigerian parents, which makes him a child of the Fourteenth Amendment. So even though his family moved to England when he was still a baby, Balogun is indeed an American citizen, and there’s nothing Stephen Miller can do about it.
Not that he isn’t trying. The case for destroying birthright citizenship is before the Supreme Court even as we speak. Yes, the justices have appeared rightly skeptical of the arguments, but we’ve come to expect disappointment from them.
Balogun was groomed from age 8 in the English soccer system. He was a valued prospect in England’s youth pipeline, where he excelled at every level. Three national teams — England, Nigeria, and the U.S. — all had a possible claim on his services, and all wanted him. He chose the USMNT.
To be sure, patriotism was never going to be his motivation. As good as he is, any future with the star-studded England front line was highly unlikely, and he isn’t the first sports figure to switch teams in search of playing time. The USMNT is a smaller pond, but he’s now one of its biggest fish.
And after Friday’s performance, when both his visibility and his market value surely spiked, who is going to say he doesn’t belong? If his career now takes off — if he lands with a club like, say, Tottenham Hotspur or Borussia Dortmund — sportscasters the world over will routinely refer to him as “Folarin Balogun the American.”
And Balogun is hardly the only USMNT member of mixed heritage and geography. Antonee Robinson grew up in England, Sergino Dest in the Netherlands, Malik Tillman in Germany. Tim Weah’s father was once president of Liberia. To Stephen Miller, these people can’t possibly be American, yet there they are, representing all Americans, including him, on the world stage.
As it happens, the World Cup overlapped last week with another extraordinary sports drama playing out in the NBA Finals. Even in a sport as American as basketball, the headlines were dominated by Victor Wembanyama, a Frenchman whose father is Congolese, and by OG Anunoby, yet another Englishman born of Nigerian parents.
Still, for all the diversity now on glorious display, I can’t say we’re in for a happy ending. While I’d like to think the social benefits of diversity are self-evident, the record says otherwise. The World Cup only lasts a month, and any accrued good feelings will likely evaporate quickly.
Too many Americans have grown skilled at compartmentalizing their heroes, and they’re accustomed to rooting for people they’d otherwise despise on sight. One part of their brain accepts diversity as long as there are goals, baskets, or touchdowns involved. The other part wallows in received eugenic nonsense that makes them resent anyone who doesn’t look like them.
Only in America could a guy like Folarin Balogun be a hero one day and deported the next.
Comments
Post a Comment