The World Cup has prompted important conversations about belonging and identity.
Another question deserves equal attention: why does the geography of football itself remain so uneven?
There is a moment that often passes unnoticed during every major international football tournament. A player stands for the national anthem. The jersey he wears belongs to one country, yet the memories, traditions, and family history that shaped him often belong to another. For most spectators, this is simply the reality of modern football. For others, however, it raises deeper questions about migration, identity, history, and belonging.
Among Eritreans, such moments are especially familiar. When Amir Abdallah Yunis, an Australian-born footballer of Eritrean parentage representing Sudan, scored at the Africa Cup of Nations, many Eritreans celebrated his achievements with unmistakable pride. Although he wore the colours of Sudan, he remained, in the eyes of many, one of their own. His declaration, “I am a proud Eritrean,” carried significance precisely because sporting representation and cultural identity are not always identical.
Alexander Isak evokes similar emotions. Born and raised in Sweden, he represents the Swedish national team while openly embracing his Eritrean heritage through his family. His success belongs to Swedish football history, yet it is also celebrated throughout the Eritrean diaspora as evidence that cultural identity can endure across generations despite migration.
These stories reveal something fundamental about international football. National teams compete under a single flag, but many players carry multiple histories simultaneously. Football therefore becomes more than a sport; it becomes a window into the unfinished legacies of migration, empire, and belonging. This observation invites a broader question: how did Europe become the undisputed centre of world football?
The answer cannot be explained solely by superior coaching or stronger football traditions. Europe’s dominance rests upon decades of institutional investment, world-class youth academies, financial concentration, scientific innovation, and commercial expansion. Yet these developments also unfolded alongside a much longer history in which European powers accumulated wealth, labour, and resources from societies across Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
Modern football is not colonialism. Players exercise agency, contracts are voluntary, and European clubs generate enormous value through coaching, medical science, infrastructure, and elite competition. To equate today’s transfer market with colonial conquest would ignore important historical differences. Nevertheless, examining football through the lens of unequal exchange reveals striking structural parallels.
Every year, Europe’s leading clubs recruit gifted young players from Africa, South America, and other parts of the Global South. These athletes often achieve extraordinary personal success, securing careers that would have been unimaginable within their domestic leagues. Yet while individuals prosper, the overwhelming share of football’s commercial value remains concentrated elsewhere. Broadcasting rights, sponsorship agreements, merchandising revenue, media exposure, and transfer profits continue to accumulate largely within Europe’s wealthiest football institutions.
The global organisation of football does not simply reflect historical inequalities; it also reproduces them through the extraction of talent. Elite European clubs operate sophisticated, multi-million-dollar scouting networks that identify promising players in West Africa, South America, and beyond at increasingly younger ages. As a result, domestic leagues in many developing nations struggle to retain their brightest talents long enough to build competitive sporting institutions or sustainable commercial products.
This creates a structural imbalance. Many leagues across the Global South become exporters of football talent rather than beneficiaries of it. Supporters in Dakar, Buenos Aires, Cairo, or Lagos often watch locally developed stars achieve global fame only after they have departed for European clubs. In many cases, fans must purchase expensive foreign broadcasting subscriptions simply to follow players who first emerged from their own communities. Local football culture is transformed into a globally marketed European commodity.
The question, therefore, is not whether migration benefits individual players. It clearly does. The more important question is why the institutions capable of transforming athletic talent into extraordinary economic value remain so geographically concentrated.
These inequalities extend beyond economics into questions of identity and belonging.
For many players from Europe’s post-colonial diaspora, football becomes a constant negotiation between multiple identities rather than a choice between them. They are frequently expected to act not only as elite athletes but as other people with immigrant backgrounds; they also have to act as cultural ambassadors, symbols of national success, and sources of financial support for extended families.
Their visibility, however, is often accompanied by heightened analysis. Players may be celebrated as national heroes after victory while being reminded of their immigrant origins after defeat. Public acceptance can prove far more conditional than legal citizenship alone would suggest.
Few contemporary footballers illustrate this complexity more clearly than Kylian Mbappé. As France’s most recognisable player, he embodies both the French Republic and the broader history of post-colonial migration. His career demonstrates how modern European football has been profoundly shaped by communities whose histories extend far beyond Europe’s borders.
Other players express these layered identities differently.
During the 2026 World Cup, Swedish midfielder Yasin Ayari chose not to celebrate after scoring against Tunisia. The gesture resonated because it acknowledged that sporting competition sometimes intersects with family memory and ancestral attachment. Similarly, Alexander Isak’s public embrace of both his Swedish nationality and his Eritrean heritage illustrates that dual belonging need not be experienced as a contradiction. For many members of Europe’s diaspora, identity is not a choice between two homes but the ability to belong to both simultaneously.
Some players have taken this even further.
Achraf Hakimi, Riyad Mahrez, and Iñaki Williams all developed within European football systems before choosing to represent Morocco, Algeria, and Ghana internationally. Their decisions do not represent a rejection of Europe. Rather, they demonstrate that ancestry, memory, and emotional belonging continue to shape sporting identity even within an increasingly globalised world. Football therefore functions as more than entertainment. It is a living archive of global movement.
Every tactical innovation, every transfer, and every dual-national debut reflects centuries of migration, political transformation, and cultural exchange. The movement of players mirrors the movement of peoples. Ambition travels alongside memory, and opportunity alongside history.
No historian can confidently predict what world football would look like had colonialism never occurred. Counterfactual history remains inherently speculative. What can be observed, however, is that today’s geography of football reflects historical processes extending far beyond the game itself. The concentration of financial power, elite infrastructure, and institutional influence within Europe emerged alongside centuries in which political and economic power became similarly concentrated.
Football’s greatest significance therefore lies not in its ability to transcend history but in its capacity to make history visible. Beneath every national jersey may reside a story stretching across continents, generations, and empires. The modern game reminds us that while players cross borders with remarkable ease, institutions, wealth, and opportunity remain distributed far less evenly. Yet memory, identity, and history continue to travel with those who move, ensuring that every match carries echoes of journeys that began long before the opening whistle. Essentially, every match is more than a contest of nations; it is also a reminder that the past continues to shape the pathways through which talent, opportunity, and belonging move across the world.
