International soccer’s battle for talent goes global, even as the world fractures

The talent acquisition strategies of big and small nations alike has changed markedly in a chaotically deglobalizing worldConsider 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. Continue reading...

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