At the World Cup, as in life, football nationalises success and ethnicises failure

Every four years, the FIFA World Cup becomes the world's largest recurring experiment in multicultural nationhood. Unlike club football, international football is fundamentally about representation. Clubs are expected to recruit the best talent regardless of nationality. National teams, however, have to deal with an essential political question: who belongs to the nation? (Opens in new window)

For much of modern history, nations (Opens in new window) were imagined as communities bound by common ancestry, language or ethnicity. Contemporary World Cup squads (Opens in new window) challenge that assumption. As societies transformed by decades of immigration are sending ethnically and culturally diverse teams onto the world’s biggest sporting stage, the tournament offers a window into how modern states understand citizenship, belonging and nationhood.

The long-standing debate about how culturally diverse societies should accommodate difference sits at the centre of what the World Cup now reveals. One tradition of monoculturalism draws from the “melting pot (Opens in new window)” model that expects immigrants to gradually assimilate into a common national culture, becoming largely indistinguishable from the majority. Multiculturalism, by contrast, imagines society as a “salad bowl (Opens in new window)”, where citizens retain distinct cultural, religious or ethnic identities while sharing a common civic and political community.

The World Cup is situated directly at the heart of this distinction. At first glance, it appears to vindicate the multicultural ideal. International football does not require players to shed their cultural, religious or ethnic identities before representing the nation. Almost 25% of the players participating in this year’s World Cup were born outside the country they are representing, with some analysts calling it the diaspora World Cup (Opens in new window).

Ahead of the tournament, Australia’s Socceroos released a video (Opens in new window) in which players proudly spoke of their Kenyan, South Sudanese, Zimbabwean, Cypriot, Ugandan, Liberian, Croatian and Scottish heritage before affirming a common message: “No matter where you come from, football is for everyone.” Describing themselves as “a reflection of modern Australia”, the team consciously projected (Opens in new window) national identity as civic and multicultural rather than ethnic or ancestral.

At a time when immigration and national identity remain fiercely contested (Opens in new window) political issues in Australia and across much of the Western world, their intervention carried real political weight. It also reinforced the perception that international football has become one of the most visible demonstrations of multicultural nationhood in practice. A player of Moroccan descent can represent Belgium, one of Turkish heritage can wear the German jersey, while others with African, Caribbean or Asian family origins routinely play for England, France or the Netherlands without their ancestry being seen as incompatible with national representation.

Yet this optimistic reading tells only half the story.

The World Cup also exposes how fragile multicultural acceptance can be. After Germany’s disappointing 2018 World Cup campaign, Mesut Ozil of Turkish descent faced racist slurs from fans and media, famously lamenting (Opens in new window): “I am German when we win, but an immigrant when we lose.” Romelu Lukaku of Belgium expressed a similar sentiment (Opens in new window): “When things were going well, they were calling me Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker. When things weren’t going well, they were calling me Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker of Congolese descent.”

Both statements reveal the same uncomfortable truth that football nationalises success but ethnicises failure. When immigrant-origin players score decisive goals, they are embraced as symbols of national pride. Their backgrounds are celebrated as evidence of an open and diverse society. Yet poor performances beget questions about their loyalty (Opens in new window).

Sporting success temporarily expands the boundaries of national belonging, but defeat exposes how fragile those boundaries can be. It also reflects a broader dilemma (Opens in new window) confronting many liberal democracies: whether national identity is ultimately civic or ethnic, inclusive or conditional.

The celebration of immigrant-origin footballers shows that multiculturalism works and that diverse societies reward talent irrespective of background. However, this can inadvertently prop up the expectation that immigrants must achieve something extraordinary to earn unconditional acceptance in their adopted country.

The standards by which immigrant-origin players are judged therefore remain different from those applied to their native-born teammates. The symbolic success of a handful of sporting icons does little to address the everyday experiences of millions of immigrants whose sense of belonging cannot – and should not – depend on achieving national fame. If multicultural citizenship is to mean genuine equality, acceptance must extend beyond exceptional individuals to encompass ordinary citizens who contribute to society in less visible ways.

Even though football cannot eliminate these debates, it reveals both their possibilities and their contradictions. The World Cup demonstrates that ethnically diverse societies celebrate together after victory, but the true test of multicultural nationhood is whether they continue to recognise one another as fellow citizens after defeat. In the end, the answer to the question: “who belongs to the nation?” cannot be “whoever helps us win!”