It was around eight in the evening when the car horns started blaring on the west side of Rotterdam. As the referee’s final whistle sounded and qualification for the World Cup was secured, crowds began to throng around the Heemraadsplein in the Netherlands’ second city, climbing into trees and setting off firecrackers in delight. But the crowds were not there to celebrate the Dutch Oranje reaching the World Cup. Instead, they were draped in the deep blue of the Cape Verdean flag, euphoric after a 3-0 win over Eswatini by the Tubarões Azuis (Blue Sharks) had sealed the tiny archipelago’s place at soccer’s premier tournament. For Rotterdam’s entrenched Cape Verdean community, it was a moment of collective ecstasy.
The qualification they were so rapturously celebrating had been partially secured by members of their own community. Five Dutch-born players had seen action in the decisive game against Eswatini, including Dailon Livramento, a Rotterdam native who opened the scoring. Like the crowds at the Heemraadsplein, the heroes who had punched Cape Verde’s ticket to North America had grown up in the diaspora, walking the same streets.
The plethora of Dutch-born players in the Cape Verdean squad reflects a broader pattern. While squads for this summer’s World Cup are yet to be confirmed, it is likely that the majority of players born in the Netherlands will be wearing jerseys other than the trademark orange of the Dutch national team. Curacao, the Caribbean island which made history last fall as the smallest country ever to reach a World Cup finals, has in recent years relied almost exclusively on players born on the shores of the North Sea. Turkey and Morocco are both expected to call up a smattering of Dutch-born players to make the journey across the Atlantic. Even the United States, one of the tournament’s co-hosts, will feature a Dutch native in right-back Sergino Dest, born in Almere to an American father.
Players representing countries other than that of their birth at the World Cup is not a new phenomenon. A quintet of Scottish immigrants were in the American squad for the inaugural World Cup in 1930, while Argentina-born Raimundo Orsi scored a crucial goal for Italy in the 1934 final. But according to a 2019 paper by a team of Dutch researchers headed by Gijsbert Oonk, a professor of global history at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the share of foreign-born players has not remained even over time. While the three pre-war World Cups featured an abundance of immigrant players, that percentage dropped between 1950 and 1994, as FIFA instituted stricter eligibility requirements that were intended to entrench national teams as symbols of nationalism. Only since the 1998 tournament has the ratio of foreign-born players started ticking back upwards, hitting a new high of around sixteen percent in 2022.
The recent increase in footballers turning out for countries other than their place of birth mirrors broader migratory patterns. The twin forces of an expanding economy during the post-World War Two boom and decolonization turned Western Europe from a net exporter of immigrants to a hub for new arrivals. The Netherlands, which as late as the fifties had been encouraging its citizens to emigrate out of fear of overpopulation, began recruiting so-called ‘guest workers’ from Turkey and Morocco in the sixties to fill gaps in the labor market. Immigrants from the former Dutch colonies of Indonesia and Suriname also began arriving in droves in the second half of the twentieth century, along with natives of Curacao, which today is still formally part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
According to Oonk, it is no coincidence that the countries which witnessed heavy migration to the Netherlands in past decades are now the same places which Dutch-born footballers are representing on the international stage. International soccer, he told me over Zoom, is a mirror to “larger power relations, larger migration settings,” reflecting the accrued legacy of decades of movement. The number of players from the windy lowlands also says something about the Netherlands itself. It is proof, says Oonk, that “we are a country of immigrants.”
Toni Varela has first-hand knowledge of what soccer means to immigrant groups in the Netherlands. Varela, a former Cape Verde international who was born on the island of Santiago before moving to Rotterdam at age four, told me in a recent conversation how he was first exposed to the sport at summer hangouts for the Cape Verdean community, where soccer competitions were held as the barbeques sizzled and parents watched on. Those mini-tournaments, he recalled, were occasions in which “the entire community came Cape Verdeans started moving to the Netherlands in significant numbers after the country gained independence from Portugal in 1975. The first arrivals were predominantly young sailors, who settled in the western part of Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port, to work on ships and send remittances back home. By the eighties, the community had grown to include their wives and children, and a tight-knit Cape Verdean community was born, with the Heemraadsplein square– nicknamed Pracinha d’Quebrôd or “square of the penniless” in Cape Verdean Creole– at its epicenter. Fittingly, the Heemraadsplein was also at the heart of the celebrations after Cape Verde qualified.
Varela was emotional as he joined the revelers celebrating Cape Verde’s qualification. “I was in tears, actually,” he says, over his ancestral homeland reaching soccer’s premier tournament. While Varela stresses that all credit must go to the current crop of players, it was arguably his generation that paved the road which has led the country to America. Under Portuguese manager João de Deus, in charge of the Blue Sharks between 2008 and 2010, Cape Verde– who until 2000 had never even entered World Cup qualifying– began scouting for talent from its extensive diaspora in Europe. Varela was amongst the players first called up under de Deus, making his debut in 2010 during a goalless draw against Portugal. Choosing to represent Cape Verde, says Varela, wasn’t a tough decision. “I’m a proud Cape Verdean, and I made the choice with my heart,” he recalls.
Varela helped Cape Verde achieve an unprecedented run of success following his debut. In 2013, the Blue Sharks made their maiden appearance at the Africa Cup of Nations, qualifying at mighty Cameroon’s expense, before reaching the tournament again in 2015. The squads for those tournaments were a study in how the Cape Verdean diaspora has spread, Varela and a clutch of other Dutch-raised players being joined by teammates brought up in France, Portugal, Luxembourg and Cape Verde itself. Despite their differing backgrounds, Varela says that there was a real sense of togetherness in the dressing room.
The Cape Verde roster that will appear at the World Cup is even more marked by the diaspora; all of the 26 players called up for a pair of friendly matches in March ply their trade abroad. It also bears a distinct Dutch flavor. Dailon Livramento, the Blue Sharks’ leading scorer in qualifying, grew up in Rotterdam, as did Sidny Lopes Cabral, a full-back who recently appeared in the Champions League with Benfica. They’re joined by the Duarte brothers– Deroy and Laros– both with long stints in the Eredivisie, along with Jamiro Monteiro, a set-piece specialist now with PEC Zwolle. Cape Verde’s hopes of making out of a tricky group may well rest on the shoulders of players who learned the game on wind-blown Dutch fields and streets.
The share of Dutch-raised players at the upcoming World Cup could’ve been even larger. While the former Dutch colonies of Suriname and Indonesia each came up narrowly short of reaching this summer’s bonanza, they were both significantly closer to qualifying than in any of their other recent attempts; Suriname got as far as the inter-confederation playoffs before losing to Bolivia. Both countries’ increased competitiveness coincided with a drive to recruit players born in the Netherlands who could trace their lineage back to either Suriname or Indonesia. In the former’s case, this involved the introduction of a so-called sports passport, a sort of partial citizenship allowing Dutch-born players to represent Suriname without violating Suriname and the Netherlands’ ban on dual citizenship. The new access to what Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, authors of the bestselling book Soccernomics, have dubbed “European knowledge networks” quickly paid dividends.
Indonesia and Suriname’s plan to utilize their diasporas recently hit a snag, however. Following a Dutch league game in March between Go Ahead Eagles and NAC Breda, NAC alleged that Go Ahead’s Dutch-born Indonesia international Dean James was in fact ineligible to compete in the Netherlands, as by assuming Indonesian citizenship he had lost his Dutch nationality and thus his right to work in the country.
The case quickly spread beyond James himself to call into doubt the very framework within which so many footballers from the Netherlands have come to represent other national teams. Instead of being able to appear for the country of their forefathers while still retaining the right to live and play professionally in the Netherlands (and, by extension, anywhere in the European Union), players now face the prospect of having to choose one or the other, two elements of their identity being pitted in opposition. While a Dutch court denied NAC’s request to replay their match against Go Ahead (which they had lost 6-0), it did confirm that James was technically ineligible to play, a ruling with potentially stark consequences.
According to Oonk, the expert on sports and migration, the effects of the Dean James case are likely to have a greater impact on Indonesia’s ability to recruit players than on Suriname’s. The Surinamese sports passport, he told me, does not provide the full benefits of citizenship– such as the right to vote or to own land– effectively straddling the gap between unsanctioned dual citizenship and FIFA nationality regulations. Indonesia, by contrast, have given Dutch-born players full Indonesian citizenship, making their claims to still hold a Dutch passport less tenable. And while Oonk anticipates that the Netherlands will eventually ease their limitations on dual citizenship, he says it will “not come in the next four or five years,” given the right-wing tenor of the current Dutch political debate.
Still, don’t expect the surge in lads from the Netherlands wearing the jerseys of their roots to slow down too much. Varela, the former Cape Verde international, has transitioned to coaching since hanging up his boots, and now manages Sparta Rotterdam’s under-17 team. On a recent morning at Sparta’s training facility, Varela told me that he sees an increase in players with a migrant background that he coaches choosing to play for their familial homeland at a young age, rather than first trying to break into the Dutch Oranje and switching only as a Plan B. In Varela’s observation, Morocco are leading the way in this regard. While Morocco’s recent success– including a magical run to the semifinals of the 2022 World Cup– plays a role, Varela also attributes the shift to the Moroccan FA “having their stuff together” and recruiting effectively amongst the diaspora.
As for Cape Verde, Varela believes that their bow on the game’s biggest stage could spur more Dutch-raised Cape Verdeans to play for the Blue Sharks. Playing at the World Cup “used to be a remote prospect– Cape Verde were never going to qualify for a World Cup or a major tournament,” says Varela. Now, in part thanks to the contributions of a Rotterdam-raised contingent, they have made the impossible dream real.
Inthehalfspace 