Consider a World Cup qualifier that took place in late March in Sydney. An Australian team coached by the son of Croatian immigrants, with an attack led by a Scottish-born naturalized Australian and a second generation Sri Lankan Tamil-Australian, faced an Indonesian team in which all but one of the starting XI were born and raised in the Netherlands. Nurtured by the Dutch academy system and performing, in many cases, at a high level in club football throughout Europe and the US, these players qualified for Tim Garuda thanks to ancestral links to Indonesia, a former Dutch colony.
Indonesian footballing authorities have, for the past year or so, pursued an aggressive naturalization policy in a bid to qualify for the 2026 World Cup – a curious reversal of the extraction that the Dutch inflicted on Indonesia, a major source of agricultural and mineral wealth, through the 19th and 20th centuries. This policy of strength through Dutchification wasn’t much help on that night against Australia: Indonesia eventually lost 5-1. But the heavy defeat did nothing to dim the spirits of a boisterous majority-Indonesian crowd.
The real fascination of the contest, arguably, was in its contrast of talent acquisition strategies – Australia’s driven by immigration and multiculturalism, Indonesia’s following the boomerang of colonization. Football’s rush into a more globalized future – right when the international direction of geo-economic travel is in the other direction – is creating both opportunities and incongruities. In a chaotically deglobalizing world, soccer might now be globalization’s most persuasive argument.
International football has always involved a war for talent at some level; from Giuseppe Rossi to Declan Rice, the agonies of dual nationals choosing one path over another have stirred debate for decades. The old colonial connection works to the advantage of both colonizers and colonized. Portugal, for example, has for many years benefited from its domestic league’s status as a draw for Brazilians to naturalize players like Deco and Pepe, while African countries such as Algeria, Morocco, and Senegal have long drawn on the strength of French football, with its significant African diaspora, to make their national teams more competitive. (If the suburbs of Paris competed as a single nation, they’d comfortably be among the best teams in the world.) This two-way traffic extends to the exploitation of multiculturalism as a recruitment lever, in which receiving countries become senders and sending countries re-receive: the Turkish community in Germany delivered Turkey its current national team captain, Hakan Çalhanoğlu, but it’s also the cradle from which Die Mannschaft’s most enigmatic player this century, Mesut Özil, emerged.
The share of foreign-born players at the World Cup, to take the most obvious index of globalization, has consistently grown over the past three decades. In 1990, just 6.2% of the players at the World Cup were born in a country other than the one they represented, according to an analysis by Vox; by 2022, that share had risen to 16.5%.
Rule changes, perhaps unsurprisingly, have also helped the foreign-born national team player emerge as a central character in world football. After introducing a “clear connection” requirement in 2004 after Qatar tried to fill its national team with uncapped mercenaries who had no connection to the Gulf state, Fifa adjusted the scheme in 2021 so that players with three or fewer caps for a national team before the age of 21 can switch allegiances. This has boosted the mobility of players across borders who might otherwise be “cap-tied” by their appearance in only one or two representative matches while still developing as a player and person.
Though buying a national team outright is still (quite rightly) prohibited, countries are growing more skilled at discovering seams of eligible talent. Agents, whose own financial interests are naturally geared towards giving their clients as much exposure as possible, are becoming more aggressive in their “advertisement” of players to the federations for which they qualify.
The Indonesian strategy is perhaps the most extreme example of what’s possible under the current rules. No doubt, there’s a real advantage to be gained (in the short-term at least) from being a country in the footballing periphery with a viable connection to a place with a deep pool of talent. Still, the move to go all-in on naturalization has provoked predictable debate in Indonesia and among regional rivals about fairness, the dilution of national identity, and a potential weakening of the domestic league.
For Indonesia, there are at least precedents to guide this great experiment in mass naturalization. Building on the historic migratory links between the two countries, Japan had a measure of success with naturalizing Brazilians like Marcus Tulio Tanaka and Alessandro “Alex” Santos in the 1990s and 2000s, before the J-League and domestic player development became strong enough to reduce the dependence on naturalizations to make the national team competitive. Interestingly, “haafu” or half-Japanese players like Zion Suzuki are now an increasingly important part of the national setup, which perhaps demonstrates the different stages the quest for talent can cycle through.
At the other end of the spectrum is China, which attempted to follow the Japanese model by naturalizing foreign-born players like Elkeson, Fernando, and Nico Yennaris in a failed quest to qualify for the 2022 World Cup; the policy has now largely been abandoned, with China reverting to domestic development. The key to Japan’s successful transition from a naturalization-focused national team to one anchored in more “conventional”, homegrown playing strength – a corollary to its emergence into a genuine global power on the field – has been the popularity and growth of the J-League. How far China can progress with a domestic league that has had its ambition and financial power clipped in recent years remains to be seen. The promise of naturalization is just as often false as it is firm.
Being a country that people want to visit can also offer advantages, even if their distribution is unpredictable: US star Yunus Musah, for instance, was brought up and nurtured as a soccer talent largely in the UK but qualifies for the US thanks to him being born in New York while his mother was on vacation. Having all of these advantages at once, of course, gives a country unique recruiting strength, and owing to the growing heft of MLS this is the category to which the US, along with the UK, France, Spain and Portugal, now unequivocally belongs.
Canny exploitation of the eligibility rules might help smaller footballing nations be competitive but in the long run it’s the richest and most powerful countries that will probably reap the biggest rewards. The current USMNT is unmistakably a team born of this moment’s global tussle for talent: Antonee Robinson, Folarin Balogun, Cameron Carter-Vickers, and Sergiño Dest are all foreign-born and -raised, while other regular fixtures in the team like Gio Reyna, Tim Weah, and Ricardo Pepi have experienced, to differing degrees, the difficulties involved in choosing a single sporting nationality as a player eligible for multiple teams.
Reyna is, of course, the son of US legend Claudio Reyna, and despite being born in England and nurtured by the German academy structure, the way he tells it there was never any doubt that he would play for the USMNT.
Debates over naturalization and the pitch to dual nationals have waxed and waned over the years, but in the US they were perhaps never stronger than during the reign of Jürgen Klinsmann, a staunch Europeanist famous for his disrespect of MLS. Klinsmann’s selections were notable for drawing extensively on the dividend of America’s projection of military power – and people – across the globe. US military bases became an unlikely recruiting ground for the US: Jermaine Jones, John Brooks, and Timothy Chandler were all born to US service personnel stationed in Germany and rose through domestic German football but each went on to represent, to varying degrees of distinction, Klinsmann’s USMNT.
Though “military brats” have featured less frequently under Gregg Berhalter and Mauricio Pochettino, the unmatched global projection of US military power – especially in Europe – does offer an additional potential selection advantage that no other national team can boast. Birthright citizenship, the constitutional guarantee that gave Musah a US passport, needs no justification, but improved national team depth is perhaps the only good argument for militarism, in any context.
How much longer some of these advantages will exist for is another question. With Donald Trump threatening to pull back the US security umbrella over Europe, his administration actively pursuing an end to birthright citizenship, and federal immigration authorities viciously targeting the Latino community, a traditional source of playing strength for American soccer, the USMNT is facing a future in which the next generation’s Musahs and Joneses – and perhaps even Reynas and Pepis and Weahs – simply won’t exist. Meanwhile all three branches of the federal government have united in an effort to make this country as xenophobic and inhospitable to foreigners as possible in the runup to next year’s World Cup.
A nation that’s been a great beneficiary of football’s booming cosmopolitanism is now doing its best to strip itself of its own unique advantages, withdrawing into a form of sporting autarky. The US, given all its natural strengths and the sheer variety of unusual recruitment options available to it, should be at the head of the global scramble for soccer talent in the years ahead. Under the country’s current misdirection, that seems less and less likely.
