How World Cup nations in Group F have benefited from immigration

The World Cup draw always throws together groups to catch the eye. 

There’s the traditional ‘group of death’, where at least one big name will shuffle home early. There are groups that throw up assorted historical and political intrigue, like the foursome of England, Iran, USA and Wales. Often there is ‘the group everyone wants’, usually when there is a weak host: hello, Group A.

This World Cup has provided another group with some intrigue: Group F, featuring Belgium, Canada, Croatia and Morocco. These four countries have no significant on-pitch history with each other: there’s only been one game between any of them at a major finals, when Belgium beat Morocco 1-0 in 1994. Canada have never played Croatia. Belgium have never played Canada. Croatia and Morocco have only ever played one friendly, in 1996. 

But what those nations have in common is immigration. All four are living examples of how the movement of people around the world can enrich society generally, but in these cases football teams specifically. 

Morocco’s squad features 16 players either born somewhere other than Morocco, with foreign family backgrounds or who have learned their football elsewhere. Hakim Ziyech and Noussair Mazraoui are among a few players born and raised in the Netherlands, Achraf Hakimi was born and raised in Spain, Romain Saiss was born in France, while Ilias Chair was born in Belgium.

Belgium’s colonial past means they have a number of players, most notably Romelu Lukaku, Michy Batshuayi and Youri Tielemans, who come from Congolese families, while Amadou Onana was born in Senegal, Jeremy Doku’s family are Ghanaian and Yannick Carrasco’s parents are Portuguese and Spanish. 

Canada are perhaps the biggest beneficiaries: 22 of their squad have immigrant backgrounds, from the Trinidadian parents of Atiba Hutchinson, Milan Borjan who was born and raised until he was a teenager in Croatia, Jonathan David was born over the border in New York to Haitian parents and of course, most prominently, Alphonso Davies was born in a Ghanaian refugee camp to Liberian parents and moved to Edmonton when he was a child. 

This Croatian squad is perhaps less reliant on immigration than in previous years, but the influence remains. Dejan Lovren was born in what is now Bosnia and grew up in Germany, Mateo Kovacic was born in Austria and Mario Pasalic was born in Germany. 

Objectively, nobody could suggest that immigration has been anything other than a positive for the teams in Group F. But as we all know, in reality, it is rarely as simple as that. 

“Football has always been a sport in Canada that immigrants had a big role in,” says Stephen Hart, the former Canada national coach who is perhaps better qualified than most to speak about this subject.

Hart comes from Trinidad but moved to Canada in the late 1970s, initially just for university and without much intention of pursuing a career in football. But he got more and more into the game, played for nearly a decade in his adoptive land, then entered the national team system in 1997. From that point, he coached at most youth levels, before eventually taking charge of the men’s national team full-time (after a couple of interim spells) in 2009. 

As a man so invested in the national team, Hart beams when asked if he is proud of Canada making it to their first World Cup since 1986. He’s proud of the achievement, of course, but he seems just as proud of the players that have made it there. 

“A lot of people worked over the years and couldn’t get it done,” he says. “But those people contributed to this end product. 

“We have a team that more reflects the demographics of the country and it also reflects more than ever before the demographic of those who play the game. It’s fantastic.”

Even though Canadian society is so heavily influenced by immigrant communities, it hasn’t been a straightforward process to ensure the team reflects that. 

Hart points to Holger Osieck, a German coach who was the national team’s assistant manager in the late 1970s, then returned in 1998 to take the top job. As well as winning the Gold Cup in 2000, Osieck helped set up a more organised national youth system to bring more kids into the game which, either by design or happy accident, a lot of the time meant that it was kids from an immigrant background. 

“We started to see more of an influx of not only coaches but players getting to be seen, a better scouting system, a little more money in the programme and it just started to sort of blossom from there.”

Hart is at pains to emphasise that he was one of many who was doing good work in the Canadian youth systems at the time, but along with another foreign coach, the Algerian Otmane Ibrir, Hart helped to bring players of immigrant backgrounds into the system, which was partly a pragmatic choice and partly an ideological one. 

“We actively began seeking out these players,” he says. “You wanted the programme to be successful so that you can have future programmes. Yes, there was some ideological background to it, but a lot of it was just that you wanted to have good teams and you wanted to have the better players involved.”

Inherent with bringing in players from different backgrounds is that they bring in different styles of play. 

“We were aware that we have a huge Latin population that plays the game differently. You have players coming from Caribbean backgrounds, from African backgrounds, from European backgrounds, Eastern European: everybody played the game in how they saw it and in their way. And that’s always difficult because you don’t have time. You know, people want results and they want it now.”

There’s a line of logic to suggest that when a player selects their international team, they might be even more committed to it than if they hadn’t because it’s an active choice rather than just an accident of birth. Sure, some will choose the team because it’s their best chance of international football, but others will choose based on stronger sentimental reasons. 

There’s a story about Romain Saiss that illustrates the point. Saiss, the former Wolves defender who moved to Besiktas last year, was born in France to a Moroccan family. Particularly important to him was his Moroccan grandfather, who was one of the key factors in Saiss deciding to represent them at international level. 

In 2017, Saiss was picked for his first Africa Cup of Nations, but Morocco lost their first game to DR Congo. If they lost their second to Togo, they were going home. Just before that game, Saiss’ grandfather passed away. He was told that he could go back to France if he wished, to be with his family. But he decided to stay, decided to continue on the path that his grandfather had set him on when he was younger. Saiss ended up scoring the crucial goal in a 3-1 victory. It was, if nothing else, proof that representing a country can mean just as much, if not more, to players who weren’t born there. Saiss is Morocco’s captain at this World Cup. 

Romain Saiss is Morocco’s captain at the World Cup (Photo: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)

Plenty make the opposite choice. Nacer Chadli was born and raised in Belgium, to a Moroccan family, but he elected to play for the former. 

“I was going to choose Morocco but the [Belgium] manager invited me to come visit the group and see how I feel,” he told The Guardian in 2015. “I didn’t want to rush the decision – if I joined I didn’t want to regret it – but I went for a look and was 100% certain I wanted to play for Belgium. I still love Morocco but there was something there I wasn’t sure about, so thought about it and changed.

“There was some pressure from Morocco for me to commit but with Belgium there was no real pressure and it felt like the right thing to do.”

It should also be emphasised that these choices are frequently not easy and they suffer significant criticism from the side they have opted against taking. For Dutch-Moroccan players like Hakim Ziyech and Noussair Mazraoui, both of whom were born, raised and played all their football in the Netherlands until moves to Chelsea and Bayern Munich respectively, they can face significant pressure to choose the land of their birth. 

Ruud Gullit got involved in this debate a few years ago when he tried to persuade some Dutch-born players to pick them over Morocco to no avail. “The family pushes you to play for Morocco,” he lamented in 2017. “So therefore there was no choice. I think they have no choice.”

Johan Derksen, a former player turned Dutch journalist, is one of the more prominent voices who suggest that players like Ziyech and Mazraoui essentially have a duty to choose the Netherlands. “You are welcomed, more or less adopted as guests,” he said in 2021. “Your parents came here because they could have a better life here than in Morocco. You have trained here and benefited from all the social security in this country. Everything you’ve built here is partly owed to this country.”

That was said in a debate with Nordin Amrabat, the former Watford midfielder who, like Ziyech, was born in the Netherlands to a Moroccan family. 

“Behind every choice is a different story,” Amrabat said. “You can‘t generalise. The choice is getting harder and harder, too. Morocco is getting better. My little brother [Sofyan] had a little doubt, but that went after he went to a Morocco match. It’s only two or three players who can choose between Morocco and the Netherlands. There’s often no choice. Often it’s Morocco. If you’re not asked [to play] for the Netherlands…”

Sofyan Amrabat tussling with Croatia’s Luka Modric (Photo by Michael Regan – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)

And yet, the welcome is not always with open arms. There’s a common thread whenever you speak to anyone involved in teams with a significant immigrant background: when you’re winning, everything’s fine. When you’re losing, it’s the immigrants or those born elsewhere that are blamed. Mesut Ozil’s famous words upon his retirement from international football apply everywhere: “I am German when we win but I am an immigrant when we lose.”

Romelu Lukaku repeated that sentiment in his Players’ Tribune article from 2018: “When things were going well, I was reading newspaper articles and 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.”

“From the get-go,” says Hart, when asked if he suffered from that problem when he was Canada’s coach. “I don’t think this is ever going to go away.” He brings in a Canadian example from outside football. “The Ben Johnson incident at the 1988 Olympics. All along, Ben was Canadian, and as soon as the situation happened with the drug scandal, he immediately became Jamaican.”

Hassan Bahara is a Dutch-Moroccan journalist who wrote extensively on this subject in 2018, when a team with a heavy influence from the Moroccan diaspora became the first to qualify for a World Cup since 1998.

“The population can be very welcoming to players like Ziyech, but it also has its limitations,” he says. “And those limitations become clear when the team doesn’t do well: that’s when you hear ‘we’ve given our national team and our pride over to foreigners’, or boys who are in name Moroccan but don’t have the same attachment as somebody who was born in Morocco, grew up in Morocco, knows the society, speaks the language and is 100% outwardly and inwardly Moroccan.

“There is often a question of why they choose their background over where they were born and grew up. ‘Where does their loyalty lie?’”

For the Belgian team, there is a slightly uncomfortable backdrop to how immigration has benefitted their team. 

Belgium’s colonial past is, to use considerable understatement, extremely grim and the damage done to Congo by King Leopold and his contemporaries in the late 1800s and early 1900s is still felt to this day. 

The issues following independence in the 1960s created years of instability and ultimately drove thousands away from what was by then known as Zaire, many of whom settled in Belgium. Youri Tielemans’ mother is one of those. Batshuayi’s parents, too. Lukaku’s story is slightly different given that his father, Roger, was a professional footballer, but his family still emigrated from Congo. Christian Benteke was actually born in Kinshasa, but his family fled when he was three to escape the Mobutu dictatorship. 

Romelu Lukaku is of Congolese descent (Photo: Peter De Voecht / Photo News via Getty Images)

The Belgian FA, partly in response to their disappointing showing as co-hosts at Euro 2000, realised they had to harness this burgeoning immigrant population if the team was to become any better. Their former technical director Michel Sablon, the man credited more than any other individual with facilitating the ‘golden generation’, employed an anthropologist called Johan Leman to figure out the best way of integrating these communities into the national football team setup. 

“The idea was, OK, we will not find employment immediately for all these young people,” he told Grantland a few years ago. “Not that all people would become engineers. But you can create hope and sport is one of these instruments. You can create role models in such districts… [and] also role models with some significance for the people outside.”

The result of that was the huge number of concrete pitches and football cages that emerged across Belgian cities in the mid-2000s and has meant that a generation of footballers grew up learning technical skills and a way of playing that is entirely different to what came before. It’s difficult to definitively say that this directly led to the ‘golden generation’, or even to that generation being so diverse, but it’s almost certainly a factor. 

The work continues today, too. In 2017, the Belgian FA launched a project called ‘Everyone On The Field’, designed to welcome and incorporate refugees and asylum seekers arriving in the country and get them playing football. A few years later a sort of successor to the cages initiative, the ‘Red Courts’ project, was launched, which will see 40 municipal courts built around 2005-2006 renovated and the surfaces replaced with red 4G pitches, each named after a great Belgian player. 

Inevitably, there is concern that the next generation of young Belgian players will not reach the levels of this one. It’s not reasonable to think that they will. But at the very least, it looks like the Belgian authorities are doing their best to help. 

The teams in Group F are not the only ones to benefit from immigration and a more fluid football world. Indeed, of the 831 players at the World Cup, 137 — roughly one in six — were born in countries other than the one they are representing. 

But this group — Morocco, Canada and Belgium in particular — are probably the most prominent examples of teams that have become richer because of their diverse societies. They are reflections of both their countries and their respective diasporas, which isn’t just a sociological positive, but a footballing one, too. 

“We wanted to change the outlook of the game, the style of play,” says Hart. “We wanted to change the way the game was being played.”

(Top photo: Gonzalo Arroyo – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)