It’s the summer of 2001. Ben and Florence Balogun, a Nigerian couple who live in the U.K., are visiting Brooklyn, N.Y. But at the end of their trip, they run into a huge snag: Florence is seven months pregnant, and the airline she’s about to board with decides it’s not safe for her to get on the transatlantic flight back to London. The Baloguns don’t have much of a choice — they have to stay in New York City until the end of Florence’s pregnancy. The waylaid couple and their son, Folarin, fly back to London a couple of months after he’s born.
Fast forward to this summer, and Folarin is one of the breakout stars at the 2026 World Cup, tearing it up for the United States men’s national team. He wouldn’t even be allowed to play for the U.S. were it not for the accident of his being born in Brooklyn and the bedrock U.S. policy of birthright citizenship. The current iteration of the U.S. men’s team is probably the strongest squad the country has ever fielded and has a chance to make some real noise in the latter rounds on its home turf. But many of the U.S.’ key players are eligible to play for the team because of the futbol-ing world’s quirky, expansive interpretations of “nationality” — a single grandparent was born in country X or a parent who was born in nation Y. (Balogun, for example, is also eligible to play for the national teams of Nigeria and England.)
Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
But if the quadrennial World Cup is always a circus of (mostly) good-natured national pride, it seems that every cycle some country goes through a public freakout — oh my bad, reckoning — around the dissonance between how it imagines itself and the players actually representing it on the soccer pitch. Back in the 2000s, nativist segments of the French public were apoplectic as they watched matches featuring their preposterously talented national side, which was heavily made up of the sons of Arab and Black people from Africa — the long, futbol tail of France’s colonial machinations.
Now it looks like it’s the U.S.’ turn this time: the Department of Homeland Security, which is actively carrying out President Trump’s hardline anti-immigration agenda, put up a post celebrating the USMNT on X that read: “OUR SOIL.” above a photo that showed three players in USMNT soccer kits captioned “DEFEND THE HOMELAND. ONE NATION. ONE HOMELAND. ONE TEAM.” Oops! Turns out, two of the three soccer-playing dudes in the picture had immigrant backgrounds; according to Politico, almost half the U.S. men’s national team have roots in other countries.
We Americans are famously provincial about our sports, and there’s a tendency to paint soccer as an effete pastime enjoyed by liberals and foreigners. But a really deep run in the tournament by the U.S. this go-’round would likely upend a lot of soccer skepticism here and mint untold numbers of new domestic footie diehards. For Trump, who has always been drawn to the pomp and pageantry of sports, the visibly inconvenient diversity of a successful U.S. squad is already complicating his administration’s attempt to paint the team’s wins and his policies as part of the same political project. If he had his way — the Supreme Court is set to rule any day now on his executive order doing away with birthright citizenship — Folarin Balogun, the leading scorer (as of this writing) on the men’s team in this tournament would not even be here. It’s nowhere near the most consequential contradiction in Trump’s nationalist conception of America, but do the other more important ones have nearly as many eyeballs on them?
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ON THE POD
Speaking of who gets to be American: By the time you read this, we might have a ruling from the Supreme Court in that closely watched case on birthright citizenship. Some 32 other countries – most of them in the Western Hemisphere – offer citizenship this same way. But our guest, the writer and editor Daisy Hernandez, says that what’s been happening in the two countries that do not — namely Colombia and the Dominican Republic — could augur what’s to come here in the U.S.
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The World Cup always scrambles’ folks footballing and familial allegiances: people root for their favorite players even if they’re playing for other countries; they root for the countries their grandparents came from even if they’ve never been; they root for the teams of the family they’ve married into; they root for the team repping their former colonizers to lose. (Bonus if you’re the source of their football frustrations.) We wanna know: who are you rooting for and when did you start rooting for them? Leave us a voicemail — you might even hear yourself on the pod!
Written by Gene Demby and editedby Dalia Mortada
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