On July 4, 2026, hours before France met Paraguay in the round of 16 in Philadelphia, José Luis Chilavert, Paraguay’s former goalkeeper, who faced Les Bleus in 1998, posted a message on X to former French striker Christophe Dugarry. “Christophe, you’re right. In 1998 we faced the French, and now Paraguay will face a squad from Africa,” he said, alluding to its extraordinary Black representation.
Philippe Diallo, president of the French Football Federation, quickly condemned the remark as racist, undermining the values of respect, fraternity, and diversity the sport represents. Chilavert’s racial taunt inadvertently told the truth about something far larger than a football match. Western Europe’s leading footballing nations increasingly embody their sporting identities through citizens descended from the peoples their empires once colonised and later helped rebuild postwar Europe. On the pitch, these descendants are celebrated as the nation. Beyond it, they are still too often asked to prove that they belong.
Chilavert’s intentions were unmistakably suspect. He recognised the players’ ancestry but misunderstood what it signified. The idea that immigration corrodes “national cohesion” and dilutes “national identity” rests on disowning a recent and well-documented history: Europe did not absorb African and Caribbean labour out of charity. It needed manpower to rebuild itself, and it turned to the empires it had spent a century plundering.
Britain’s postwar reconstruction leaned on hundreds of thousands of Caribbean migrants—the Windrush generation—alongside South Asian and African migrants who arrived from 1948 onward to staff its hospitals, transport networks, and factories, as domestic labour could not meet demand. France did the same with Algerian, Senegalese, and Malian workers recruited explicitly to staff its steel mills, car plants, and construction sites through les trente glorieuses, its three post-war decades of growth. West Germany’s Gastarbeiter programme brought in Turkish and Southern European labour under the same logic. Europe needed labour, while migrants sought opportunity. But the relationship remained fundamentally unequal, rooted in imperial structures that had already extracted immense wealth from these colonies. Immigrant labour became indispensable to Europe’s postwar recovery.
The debt runs further back than 1945. The Moors who crossed from North Africa in 711 did not merely occupy Iberia — they reshaped it. Modern Madrid traces its origins to the fortress of Mayrit, which Muhammad I, Emir of Córdoba, built on the Manzanares River in the ninth century. The city grew outward from that Moorish garrison for two centuries before Alfonso VI took it in 1085, and its oldest surviving church, Iglesia de San Pedro el Viejo, still carries a Mudéjar bell tower constructed by Muslim craftsmen under Christian rule. Al-Andalus, at its height, was one of the most advanced civilisations in Europe — a place where the Cordoban library assembled by Caliph Al-Hakam II reportedly held some 400,000 manuscripts while much of Christian Europe could barely read. Madrid’s origin story alone should embarrass anyone who insists Islam and Europe are civilisationally incompatible.
Postwar Morocco followed the same trajectory. Moroccan workers were recruited by treaty into Belgian coal mines from 1964, into French factories, and into the Netherlands’ industrial belt, filling jobs increasingly rejected by more prosperous domestic workers. Their children and grandchildren now wear Belgian, French, and Dutch shirts at this World Cup — not as guests but as citizens.
Long before Europe recruited African labour to rebuild its factories, it conscripted African men to bleed for it. Roughly 700,000 soldiers from France’s African colonies fought under the French flag across the two World Wars — among them Tirailleurs Sénégalais, drawn from across French West Africa. Approximately 30,000 were killed in the trenches of the First World War alone, their names conspicuously absent from the poignant war memorials that line French town squares to this day.
In June 1940, African troops who held the line at Chasselay while French units retreated were separated from their white officers by advancing German forces, brutally machine-gunned before German tanks deliberately drove over their bodies, desecrating their corpses. Four years later, in December 1944, tirailleurs who had survived German POW camps and returned home to Senegal were fired on by the French army at a demobilisation camp in Thiaroye— killed by the country they had fought for, for the offence of demanding the back pay they were legitimately owed. The descendants of men once asked to die for France are today confronted with questions their grandfathers answered with blood.
When figures such as Chilavert or Marine Le Pen question whether France’s current team is ‘authentically’ French, the irony runs several decades deep. The nation asking that question is the same one that recruited African bodies to die for it before it ever recruited African labour to rebuild it and broke faith with both groups subsequently. A team fielding Kylian Mbappé and Ousmane Dembélé is not an act of generosity. It is emblematic of a nation quietly settling an invoice that has been outstanding since Thiaroye.
The claim that immigrants — specifically African and Muslim immigrants — cannot integrate into European society survives mostly because it is rarely tested against the evidence.
Second and third-generation immigrants across Western Europe show rates of intermarriage, language acquisition, and educational attainment that increasingly converge toward native-born populations within a generation or two. This pattern is well documented in migration research, from Richard Alba’s work on assimilation to Alejandro Portes’ theory of segmented assimilation. It has held for Irish, Italian, Polish, Caribbean, and North African communities alike, at different speeds but in the same direction.
Segregation and underperformance, where they persist, correlate far more tightly with housing discrimination, employment discrimination, and concentrated poverty than with any inherent resistance to integration. Place immigrants in the same neighbourhoods, schools, and labour markets as everyone else, and the “failure to integrate” loses much of its explanatory power, because the strongest predictors of social outcomes are structural exclusion rather than culture.
Economically, the evidence is even more compelling. OECD and national studies have consistently found that, over their lifetimes, immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in public services in most Western European states, particularly if they arrive at working age and enter legal employment. Food, music, fashion, and language absorb immigrant influences until they cease to seem foreign. Doner kebab has become more popular than bratwurst in Germany; chicken tikka masala has long been described as Britain’s unofficial national dish. The fans singing along to French hip-hop artists’ MC Solaar, Booba, and PNL celebrate the same integration of North and West African heritage into French cultural life as when France erupts in jubilation after one of Zinedine Zidane’s mesmerising goals. Cohesion was never under threat. Only the boundaries of national belonging were being renegotiated.
The French superstar Kylian Mbappé’s father is Cameroonian, his mother of Algerian Kabyle descent. His teammate Ousmane Dembélé’s father is Malian, while his mother is of Mauritanian and Senegalese descent. England’s Bukayo Saka is the son of Nigerian immigrants. Spain’s teenage prodigy Lamine Yamal has a Moroccan father and an Equatorial Guinean mother. Belgium’s Jérémy Doku is of Congolese descent. None of these players are stand-ins for Africa, masquerading as Europeans, as Chilavert’s framing implies. They are French, English, Spanish, and Belgian — born in Bondy, Ealing, Esplugues de Llobregat and Antwerp — who carry African ancestry while proudly singing their national anthems beneath their flags.
FIFA does not classify players by race, but independent tallies compiled by journalists and analysts converge on the same picture. Of France’s 26-man squad, 21 players are of African descent. England has 15, the Netherlands 14, Switzerland 11, while Belgium and Germany each field 9. Across Europe’s traditional football powers, players of African descent are no longer a minority within the squad but are close to being the squad.
Argentina offers a revealing case of selective immigration. It fields the only squad at this World Cup without a player widely recognised as Black or of African descent. That is not incidental. Afro-descendants made up more than a third of Argentina’s population in 1800; by 1875, under President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s programme of European immigration and demographic engineering, they had been largely written out of the national census, even as it admitted Italian and Spanish settlers in vast numbers. Later president, Carlos Menem, notoriously declared that “in Argentina, Black people do not exist; that is a Brazilian problem.” Argentina did not achieve homogeneity by avoiding immigration. It did so by deciding which immigrants to admit and which populations to erase.
The backlash is not new. France’s 1998 World Cup-winning squad, which included Zidane, Vieira, Desailly, Thuram, and Karembeu, was affectionately called “Black-Blanc-Beur,” or Black-White-Arab. Yet Jean-Marie Le Pen, then leader of the National Front, dismissed it as not truly French. Twenty-eight years later, his ideological heirs have found a white Paraguayan goalkeeper willing to voice the same prejudice.
The “great replacement” theory, the spurious claim, popularised by Renaud Camus and now mainstreamed across segments of Europe’s far right, that non-white immigrants are deliberately supplanting native Europeans depends on treating demographic change as conspiracy rather than the ordinary outcome of low fertility rates, longer lifespans, and labour markets that have spent seventy years actively recruiting the very workers they now claim to fear.
It also depends on forgetting how those migration patterns came into being. European colonialism did not merely extract wealth from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean; it profoundly disrupted the economic and political systems that might otherwise have reduced the pressures to emigrate. From the Congo’s rubber regime, whose human toll historians estimate in the millions, to the arbitrary partition of West Africa and colonial economies designed to enrich Lisbon, Paris, Brussels, and London rather than Kinshasa, Dakar, or Accra, empires produced inequalities that long outlived colonial rule. The wealth gap that propelled many Africans towards Europe was manufactured across a century of colonial extraction, then blamed on the people it displaced.
Gordon Allport’s contact hypothesis, developed in the 1950s, holds that prejudice diminishes when groups interact under conditions of equal status, shared goals, and institutional support — precisely the conditions a national football team provides, whatever else is happening in the surrounding society. Teammates who share a locker room, a wage bracket, and a common objective for years are a controlled experiment in exactly the kind of contact Allport predicted would erode bias, and French, English, and Belgian fans have spent decades cheering for exactly that experiment without necessarily recognising it as one.
Henri Tajfel’s social identity theory explains the backlash differently. Perceived threats to group status become especially potent during economic insecurity. The far right’s fixation with “replacement” and loss of historical privileges reflects a deeper status anxiety fuelled by deindustrialisation, automation, financialisation, and widening inequality far more than immigration itself.
Mbappé is no less French because of his Cameroonian and Algerian roots. Nor is Yamal any less Spanish because his grandmother crossed from Tangier on a ferry. Integration has never required people to erase one identity or one history to embrace another. It means enlarging the “we” until more than one history can live within the same person.
Chilavert wanted to strip France’s team of its Frenchness, as though Frenchness were a racial inheritance reserved for whites. Instead, he exposed history’s long shadow. The national teams of France, England, Belgium, and Spain draw upon the labour, the sacrifice, and now the talent of peoples whose continent was partitioned in Berlin in 1884.
Far from signalling European civilisation’s decline, they embody one of the inevitable consequences of its imperial past. History is not merely a record of the past but an inexorable force that shapes the present. The players whose African ancestry the far right still regards as incompatible with European nationhood are not intrusions into Europe’s story. They are its continuation. Whether we are witnessing the twilight of an old Europe or the birth of a new one is a question only history can answer.
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