The Black World Cup

With less enthusiasm than ever before, I’ve tuned into a few games in the World Cup, which currently grinds on.

Coming into a match around the half-hour mark has sometimes been a confusing experience. Because once or twice I’ve been unsure which country is which. I’m not up on what colours every international team wears, so I’ve had to go by the players themselves (unless the commentator or TV graphics help).

The thing is, a large number of them are Africans. Seemingly no matter where the country is located on the globe. The USA, Canada, Qatar, South America, the Western European teams of course, they all appear to have a large number of black players.

In one sense, well done those players! They have escaped their basket case continent and have reached a pinnacle of sporting excellence by being picked for the national side of the country they now reside in.

But is this not negating the entire idea of the World Cup? When Jules Rimet set up the tournament in 1930, he couldn’t have imagined it 96 years’ later looking as it does now. Not just because back then it consisted of 13 countries and lasted two weeks (now it has a ludicrous 48 teams, many mediocre, and stretches over five-and-a-half weeks).

The World Cup represents the wider world, as well it might. It should be noted, though, that blacks are over-represented in football compared to the general population, just as they are in the music industry (and the paranoid schizophrenia and street crime industries). What it shows, most obviously in terms of European teams like France, England, Belgium, Netherlands and Germany, is how those countries have been demographically transformed, especially in the last three decades.

Does the average football fan in those countries give equally full-throated backing to the players as he did 30 years previously? Impossible to say. But we can pontificate that they’re not allowed to be less enthusiastic – in fact the Elite probably insist that they should be more enthusiastic nowadays, lest they be guilty of a racist ‘thought crime’. Football has become, well, a political football – and supporting multiracial teams a status signifier.

This is also true of women’s football, which is pushed incessantly by legacy media like the BBC. You’re a bad person if you don’t like it. Me, I prefer to watch Level 10 men’s football, which is of a much higher standard than women’s international football. I admire these female athletes for aspiring to glory, and wish them every success, but my hackles go up when I’m told that the standard is vastly higher than it actually is. I don’t take kindly to those who mouth things they know are not true, and I never do so myself. Women’s football is pushed purely because of their gender – that is an irrefutable fact.

This men’s World Cup (as some media outlets now refer to it) is a strange spectacle for some of us in our fifties. To the younger generation it probably seems completely natural that, say, Switzerland has numerous black players. And of course commentators and pundits will never point out the radical demographic transformation of Europe that’s occurred in an historical blink of an eye. It would not only be career-ending to go within a thousand miles of race, but they could be strung up on a lamppost by a James O’Brien and Emily Maitlis tag-team.

Commentators will go on uttering lines like ‘Canada are looking good tonight…’ without noting that Canada are looking rather different to a few years ago. But why would they? It’s been the political class who have transformed the country and given them a squad that is minority native-Canadian. The rest of us just have to pretend to ignore it, or pretend we like it, or pretend that what has happened is completely natural.

What was quite fun was Norway’s official squad photo, which has them all in Viking dress in front of a Norwegian fjord. Advertising website Famous Campaigns calls it ‘a crafted celebration of Norwegian heritage’. Norway is probably one of the few Western European nations who would ever dare to do this, or actually be able to nowadays (it seems that only one of their squad is non-white). Imagine the pandemonium if the majority-ethnic England squad posed in bowler hats and suits! Or the almost entirely non-European French squad, with striped jerseys and onions around their neck! How crackers would that look? There would be offence taken from all quarters – and then some.

Football great Pele once predicted that an African team would win the World Cup by the year 2000. He was wrong, and it may never happen that a team based on the continent of Africa will win it, but it surely won’t be long before a team that entirely consists of African players does lift the trophy. We’ve come close a couple of times already. If and when that happens, what do we say? Will any newspaper sports writers make any reference to the fact at all? Will any newspaper political commentators? Should they? How important is it?

I would say that at best it’s a shame. It seems to me to be a good thing that the Japanese national team is entirely Japanese. It just seems more right, more natural, more worth celebrating. It offers a more precise evaluation of a nation’s talents. Was not the World Cup a more authentic competition when countries’ teams weren’t racial melting pots? Perhaps I’m old-fashioned.

This article will likely seem archaic to anyone reading it in 50 years’ time (it may do now to some readers). I would bet my last pound coin, though, that the West of 50 years’ time will be an unsettled, divided, unfair and disconsolate place, even more so than at present – and that will have largely been caused by the mass migration that has given us national football teams that are, you could say, ahead of their time in reflecting the places they represent.

Russell David is the author of the Mad World Substack. 

If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee or sharing this piece with your friends – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!

Please follow and like us: