Euro 2024 was a metaphor for Europe's dysfunctional relationship with Africa
Young stars like, Bukayo Saka, Jamal Musiala and Lamine Yamal thrilled viewers during the month-long tournament, and became symbols of debates about sociology, culture and geopolitics along the way.
The 2024 UEFA European Football Championship, or Euro 2024, concluded with Spain lifting the trophy for the fourth time. La Roja, as Spain’s national football team is nicknamed, defeated England 2-1 in the final after midfielder Mikel Oyarzabal scored a dramatic winner with four minutes remaining in regular time. Spain’s late goal was a fitting conclusion to a compelling if somewhat underwhelming tournament that saw La Roja win all seven of its matches with a splendid display of attacking prowess that hearkened back to the team’s dominant squads of the late 2000s and early 2010s.
This year’s competition, which was held in Germany from June 14 to July 14, accentuated many of the trends that define the modern game. Spain’s illustrious wingers, Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams, were two of the young sensations who left their mark on the 2024 tournament. They were also part of an ever-increasing number of European football players from African immigrant backgrounds, born on the African continent or in Europe to parents who migrated from African countries.
Many observers, including Spain’s national team manager, have described youths like Yamal and Williams as the future of a multicultural country and continent. But whether that is indeed the case, this future is one that a significant portion of the Spanish population does not want if the country’s politics are any indication.
Africa’s far-reaching influence at Euro 2024
Six or more of the 26 squad members who suited up for France, England, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland were of African descent. Players like England’s Bukayo Saka and The Netherlands’ Cody Gakpo were born on European soil to at least one parent of African immigrant origins.
No fewer than six players who made their country’s Euro 2024 roster was born on the African continent, including France’s Eduardo Camavinga (Angola) and Switzerland’s Breel Embolo (Cameroon). A handful of the athletes, like Germany’s Jamal Musiala and Austria’s Kevin Danso, might qualify as “third culture kids” who spent a part of their upbringing in a country other than the one of their nationality or their parents’ origin.
The expanding number of young European players from African immigrant backgrounds is commonly chalked up to African emigration waves of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. This is not per se incorrect but it paints an incomplete picture of the history of African diasporas in Europe. While the scale of African migration to Europe has undoubtedly increased since the 1980s, African diasporas in Europe predate the late 20th century by several decades. And that is before considering the descendants of centuries-old Black communities in countries like England, France, Italy, Portugal and The Netherlands. Invariably, it is impossible to avoid a consideration of how these trends are deeply interwoven with the trans-Atlantic slave trade and European colonization of Africa notwithstanding how uncomfortable the topic might make many people feel.
Fans, spectators and pundits noted the sizable number of players of African immigrant backgrounds at Euro 2024. GOAL previewed the tournament with a look at the players who it said were “adding African flavour” to the tournament. Deutsche Welle, the German state-owned broadcaster, pointed to the players with African roots who dazzled viewers during the tournament. After England defeated The Netherlands in the semifinal, the U.K.’s Migration Museum launched an online campaign to highlight the contributions made by players of immigrant backgrounds to England’s journey to the final.
Ahead of this year’s competition, ESPN put out a star-studded “alternate universe African Dream XI” that included fan favorites like Saka and Musiala as well as Portugal’s Rafael Leão and France’s Kylian Mbappé. A BBC Sport column titled ‘A story of human trafficking, hope and love’ exemplified how European commentators and pundits centered the gut-wrenching journey Williams’ parents made from their native Ghana to Spain in narratives about his rise to stardom and its implication for the national team and Spanish society at large. Similar stories were written about Yamal’s upbringing in a working-class neighborhood in Rocafonda, a community in Spain’s Catalonia region. Yamal, the teenage sensation whose father is Moroccan and mother is from Equatorial Guinea, was described by some as an emblem of a changing society.
In continental as well as diasporic African communities online and offline alike, many tuned into the tournament with particular interest in the players of African immigrant backgrounds. There were innumerable mentions of the substantial presence of Black players with African last names on the back of their jerseys. Overwrought references to Les Bleus as an “African” team were of course in abundant supply. I may or may not have joined in the banter by wryly describing the Euros as a less entertaining but more financially lucrative redux of the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON).
Digital spaces were full of the usual array of jokes, memes, GIFS and video clips that are posted during sporting events. Across a football-crazy African continent, it was common to see viewers root for the athletes of African migrant backgrounds, if not necessarily always their national teams. Where the football may have failed to live up to expectation, the camaraderie and social commentary among viewers more than made up for it.
The success of Europe’s multicultural sports teams ought not to create naiveté about the politics of migration
The “European migrant crisis” has been described as a watershed in European politics. By bringing preexisting nativist sentiments among the public into sharper focus, longstanding European fears of an “invasion” by migrants from Africa and the Middle East that were constricted to dystopian fiction novels like The Camp of the Saints became more concrete and mainstream.
It was this milieu that conceived the European Union’s Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, the framework for the bloc’s contemporary “Fortress Europe” policies in Africa that have drawn condemnation for their brutality and sadism. In recent decades, the EU and its member states have externalized their “migration management” policies to third countries like Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Niger and Senegal, despite arguments by legal scholars that they are incompatible with international norms on refugees and asylum.
Spain is a linchpin of these draconian measures that target the EU’s southern and eastern flanks, and Madrid proudly touted the finalization of the bloc’s new migration pact as one of its key achievements during Spain’s recent presidency of the Council of the European Union. The conventional wisdom that Spain has bucked the trend of Europe’s sharp turn toward right-wing populism conceals the considerable gains far-right parties like Vox and the Catalan Alliance have made, or how they have shifted the Overton window especially on hot-button issues like immigration.
In any case, the euphoric response to Spain’s impressive run to the European football championship was hardly the first instance of a triumphalist interpretation of a sporting victory. Many in France made similar declarations in 1998, 2000 and 2018, when the men’s national team won two World Cups and a Euro championship. In fact, the far right in France has grown in leaps and bounds in the decades since “Black-Blanc-Beur” entered the national lexicon following France’s maiden World Cup. The National Rally party only missed out on a first-place finish in the recently held parliamentary election thanks to a tactical alliance between the left and President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition in the second round of the vote.
Similarly, Germany’s 2014 World Cup-winning team, a “multikulti” squad with players from immigrant backgrounds, was framed by some as the face of a “new” post-reunification republic that helped the country shed some of the burden of its imperial and Nazi past. But the excitement of the national team’s success did not prevent the anti-migration backlash and subsequent advance of the far right that was triggered in large part by then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to admit more than 1 million refugees to Germany.
In The Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ nationalist Party for Freedom — which advocates a halt to immigration especially from non-Western countries — is the single largest party in the House of Representatives and part of a right-wing governing coalition. In the United Kingdom, where the center-left Labour Party returned to power after 14 years in the opposition just days before England progressed to the Euro 2024 final, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has indicated that he is open to processing asylum seekers offshore as a means of reducing the number of people crossing the English Channel on small boats, despite having scrapped the so-called Rwanda Plan. Starmer, who said during the campaign that his administration would seek to improve Britain’s post-Brexit relations with the EU without rejoining the union, also promised to cut net migration to the U.K.
Across Europe, nativism and opposition to migration is potent enough to have created a consensus in favor of restrictionist policies implemented by governments of all ideological persuasions. It is entirely possible that the sporting success Europe’s ethnically diverse teams are finding might be intensifying perceptions among some that their societies are accepting too many migrants, and further hardening opposition to the multiculturalism that they believe is a result of “mass migration.” It remains to be seen to what extent the Mbappés, Musialas and Yamals represent the future of an aging continent that the EU’s home affairs chief says needs a million migrants annually to make up for a demographic shortfall, but it is one that millions of Europeans might need to be dragged kicking and screaming into.
Media coverage of the exploits of Euro 2024’s “Afropean” stars was a lot. Again.
On the arduous journey that Williams’ parents made from West Africa to Europe via a barefooted trek across the Sahara Desert, they were detained in Melilla, the autonomous Spanish exclave on the North African coast that contains one of the EU’s two land borders with Africa. Melilla has long been a deadly migration flashpoint, and a jarring episode from two years ago that caused the gruesome deaths and injuries of scores of migrants was termed the “Melilla massacre.”
It is always nauseating to read, watch and listen to pundits and commentators valorize the immense suffering many athletes like Williams and Yamal and their families endured on their path to athletic success, and Euro 2024 was no different. Beyond the survivorship bias that is baked into such narratives and the all-too-familiar exploitation of African trauma to feed the Western gaze, tales of individual grit and achievement always take precedence over structural analyses of geopolitics.
In other words, it is far easier to celebrate one or several “stories of human trafficking, hope and love” than to interrogate a Western-led liberal international order that underprops the economic inequity and political instability — historical and contemporary alike — that compels thousands of Africans to undertake dangerous journeys to Europe in search of greener pastures. Even still, the meritocratic hubris implicit in venerating these young athletes explains the ease with which European societies render invisible countless others from similar backgrounds. Afterall, if Yamal, Saka and Mbappé can “make it,” then those who did not have no one to blame but themselves.
As if to underscore the self-serving nature of this celebration of individual triumph, the support that accompanies it is conditional and its terms are unilaterally determined. The retired French striker Karim Benzema’s quip that “… if I score, I’m French, but if I don’t score, or there are problems, I’m an Arab” neatly underlined the dilemma these athletes face, as did a similar remark by the former German playmaker Mesut Özil that “I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose.” These athletes from immigrant backgrounds, who must contend with lingering suspicions of dual loyalty, are expected to show gratitude for their European citizenship by winning football games and conforming to established norms of patriotism, humility and all-around respectability. If they don’t, everything including their sense of belonging to European societies is fair game for scrutiny.
There are too many historical examples to draw upon, but one was the barrage of racist abuse directed at Saka and two other Black players who all missed penalty kicks in England’s shootout defeat to Italy in the Euro 2020 final. In March, German defender Antonio Rüdiger — who is Muslim and partly of Sierra Leonean origin — launched legal proceedings against a former newspaper editor who accused the player of supporting jihadist extremism in a social media post. Germany’s national team coach denounced a survey which found that 21% of its respondents wished to see more white players on the team but it was a reminder of some of the thorny issues Özil raised when he quit the national side six years ago. It also indicated that the sense of pride many Germans felt in the national team and the nation’s role as host of Euro 2024 was far from universal.
The French national team’s place as a lightning rod in debates about the country’s legacy of racism, empire and colonialism could be the subject of an entire Ph.D. dissertation. The team’s poor performance at Euro 2008 and the 2010 World Cup, in addition to several controversies in the 2010s involving its players, triggered a racist backlash that endured for several years. Several Black players on the French national team were targeted with racist invective after their own penalty shootout loss to Argentina in the 2022 World Cup final.
During Euro 2024, Mbappé and his teammate, Marcus Thuram, courted controversy when they remarked publicly on France’s legislative election. Their statements drew the predictable riposte for the two players to “stick to sports” that has rarely ever applied and which few people actually believe in but athletic establishments nonetheless continue to defend as a norm. The squad is regularly held up as a Rorschach test onto which societal beliefs about race, multiculturalism and social identity are projected, particularly if the team makes headlines for underperformance on the field or the indiscretions of its members.
Where football and geopolitics intersect in Africa-Europe relations
My attention was drawn last week to a new report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace titled “Why Europe Needs Africa.” It talks about, among other things, the “converging interests, compatible visions and potential synergies” that the authors argue should drive cooperation between the two continents. While reading the report’s contents, I constantly thought about the parallels between sports and geopolitics and the connectivities that unite the two.
For one, the relationship between migration and football players of African descent representing European nations is an allegory for the pattern of economic interaction between the two continents over the past 500 years. In this formation, Africa has been a major source of the natural resources, raw materials and cheap labor Europe has depended on for its consumption and prosperity. For good measure, there is an increasing rate of diaspora players choosing to represent the countries of their parents’ origin over the ones in which they were born and/or raised, which could be analogized to the “reverse brain drain” argument and remittances outflows that some (excluding me, to be clear) say would accelerate Africa’s economic prosperity.
The concept of a “brawn drain” — a depletion of athletic talent from impoverished countries in Africa and other parts of the “Global South” for the benefit of richer nations, typically but not exclusively in the West — has emerged in recent decades as a way to explain the interplay between sports and labor migration. Arguably, there are distinctions between this phenomenon and the children of African immigrants suiting up for European national teams — these athletes haven’t always been born in Europe or moved there with the express purpose of becoming European sports stars, given the low odds involved — but it is certainly the case that there is a perseverance of interconnected global patterns and networks that date all the way to the Atlantic slave trade and persisted through the period of European colonization of Africa and the “post-independence” era.
As for intra-European debates over the continent’s relationship with migration, the tension between its contemporary politics and Europe’s economic and demographic future will endure for the foreseeable future. Frontex, the EU’s border agency, will continue to push its frontiers deeper into Africa as the bloc and its members expand the externalization of their “Fortress Europe” provincialism. Discourses about Les Bleus as the French Football Federation's “Foreign Legion” will continue for many more years to come, as will exhortations that young football stars of African immigrant backgrounds represent Europe’s multicultural future or “great awokening,” depending on the perspective involved.
European athletes of African descent will go on to more acclaim and might power their teams to more success in international competitions that will win them the admiration of millions in their countries. That will not by itself resolve anxieties around migration to Europe from Africa and elsewhere. But it certainly indicates that the burden of adding modern dimensions to more than five centuries of engagement between the two continents will continue to be placed on individuals who did not ask for it.