About

This project was inspired by a presentation about the ongoing discourse about how France's imperial history is reflected in its national team through players with heritage from current and former colonies. He emphasized the role of these players in the recent triumphs of Les Bleus.

I was intrigued by this topic, and I wanted to see how other countries have leveraged their imperial histories to recruit top footballing talent...and I knew the process could be automated.

Thus, I created a Python program to scrape (using Beautiful Soup) the roster data for each national team off of Wikipedia. The program then scrapes and records the birthplaces of the players on a given team, and this data is represented visually on the map above.

The project yielded some interesting findings that go beyond showing how imperial states pull players from current and former colonies. Other findings include:

• The stream of players who were born in former colonies but play for imperial states is counteracted by a stream of players who were born in an imperial state but choose to play for the country of their heritage
  • Zinedine Zidane is a prominant example of a world-class Algerian-born player who played for France, but Riyad Mahrez is a French-born player who plays for Algeria—and half of Algeria's national team was born in France
  • The vast majority of players on Comoros' national team were born in France
  • More players on the Suriname national team were born in the Netherlands than Suriname
• The high number of Turkish national team players born in Germany reflects German policies of labor recruitment and, later, family reunification
• Teams from countries with a relatively less-developed football infrastructure but a wide diaspora have recruited heritage players born in other countries
  • E.g. Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan

Shortcomings

• Wikipedia lacks:

  • complete rosters for every national team
  • birthplace information for every player

  These pieces of information were simply ommitted in the scraping, so they are not reflected in the queries above

• The data only looks at the birthplaces of the players, not necessarily their heritage