[World Cup 2022] England national team, racial-national ancestry demographics — 79% White, 21% Black, no Muslims

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See also the other World Cup 2022 demographics analyses:
Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Ecuador, England, France, Germany, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Switzerland, Uruguay, USA, Wales.

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This is a summary of the ENGLAND national team at World Cup 2022 and its players’ racial, national-origin, and religious demographics. A section at the end discusses some of the findings and their themes and political implications.

(England team group (back row, left-right): Raheem Sterling, Jude Bellingham, Harry Maguire, goalkeeper Jordan Pickford, John Stones, Bukayo Saka; (front row, left-right), Raheem Sterling, Kieran Trippier, Harry Kane, Declan Rice and Luke Shaw, ahead of the FIFA World Cup Group B match. Picture date: Friday November 25, 2022.)

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Summary — origins of the 26 men on the England roster:

— 79% White (20.5 / 26)
— — seventeen of the 26 are full-White (65% of the roster).
— — Over three-quarters of the White component is of English origin; up to one-fifth of the White component is of Irish origin; non-British Isles elements are minimal.

— 21% Black (5.5 / 26)
— — Three men are full-Black (Sterling, Saka, Rashford); another six are part-Black (Wilson, Phillips, Bellingham, Walker, Trippier, Alexander-Arnold), meaning nine men of the 26 on the roster (35%) have at least partial Subsaharan ancestry.
— — One man is of recent African-immigrant origin, via Nigeria (Saka). Almost all the rest of the Black component is from the Caribbean, mostly Jamaica.

— 0% Muslim or Other (not White-Christian or Black).

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FIFA World Ranking of England as of the start-date of World Cup 2022:

5th / 211 world national-teams

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Final ranking achieved by England at the 2022 World Cup tournament:

(Top 8) / 32 national-teams in World Cup

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England National Team 2022

GOALKEEPERS

3/3 White-British

— Jordan Pickford: White. The starting goalkeeper throughout World Cup 2022. Jordan Pickford is said to be from the town of Washington in England’s North East. He kept ties to this area well into his early career this area for his early career with the local pro football club (Sunderland).

Jordan Pickford is of the Keltic Nordic anthropological type, suggestive of ancestry tied to the British Isles for a very long time.

— Nick Pope: White. From the East of England.

— Aaron Ramsdale: White. From the West Midlands. His anthropological type is Borreby, suggestive of a population-stock tied to the Germanics or Viking era.

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England National Team 2022

DEFENDERS

— Nine players: Trent Alexander-Arnold, Conor Coady, Eric Dier, Harry Maguire, Luke Shaw, John Stones, Kieran Trippier, Kyle Walker, Ben White.

— Total racial-ancestral stock for the nine England-2022 defenders: 7.75 White (86%), 1.25 Black (14%).

— Trent Alexander-Arnold: half-Black, half-White.

Trent Alexander-Arnold was born in Liverpool in 1998. His father, a certain John Alexander, is a Black man said to have also been born in Liverpool–in 1961. There are said to be ties to the USA on the England national team man Trent-Alexander’s mother’s side as well as a Scottish connection. The pairing occurs in 1990s Liverpool, apparently. (See: photo of Trent Alexander-Arnold with his parents when he was about age twenty.)

Trent Alexander-Arnold’s origins are complex enough that a genealogy site undertook an investigation a few years ago but could not determine the father’s ultimate origin. In the report, the researcher says Liverpool is “a port city with a deep-rooted Black history,” and concludes that the football player Alexander-Arnold has two Black grandparents who had “probably” arrived one of the earliest waves of foreign migration “from somewhere within the Commonwealth.” It will have had to have been between the first ship of Black arrivals in 1948 (now a celebrated high-holiday day in Britain to celebrate multiculturalism) and 1961, when the father was born in Liverpool.

Meanwhile, Trent Alexander-Arnold’s mother, says the genealogist, “may have been born in New York” and “his maternal grandmother may have been born in Scotland.” If these findings are right, Alexander-Arnold has perhaps minimal actual English ancestry.

— Conor Coady: White. From North West region of England, outside Liverpool. It is said he has one-quarter Irish ancestry, and presumably the rest English. He displays a Mediterranean-like phenotype influence, not at all outside the normal range for the British Isles.

— Eric Dier: White. There are multiple pro sports figures among Eric Dier’s ancestors and relatives back to 1940s, if not earlier still. His father was a pro tennis player; his grandfather and great-grandfather were involved in English football; his mother, too, was involved in pro sports at an organizational level, which took her son Eric Dier (b.1994) to Portugal, where he lived most of his life before age 20 (fom about 2000 to about 2014). He finally returned to England at age twenty (2014), having been recruited into the Tottenham Hotspur football club, London.

In physical anthropology terms, Eric Dier can classified as of the Anglo-Saxon type. What is known of his bio suggest s(and his ‘look’ corroborates) that he is one of the 100%-English players on the squad, without any significant foreign ties even to another British Isles ‘nation.’

— Harry Maguire: White. He came up with his native town’s Sheffield United youth organization. He has (partial?) Irish-Catholic ancestral origin and attended Catholic schools. In physical-anthropology terms, Harry Maguire’s phenotype is unusual for England, displaying notable Dinaric influence on top of a strong Cro-Magnid base. (The stylized photo used by the England national team as his profile picture do not show this so well, but others do — really any Google-Image search for “Harry Maguire” will do.)

Harry Maguire is said to qualify to play for three ‘nations’ in international play: Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and England. As of the European football’s break for World Cup 2022, he had four seasons with the prestigious Manchester United of worldwide fame, and has been team captain of Manchester United for most of that time.

— Luke Shaw: White. His personal origins are entirely in South East England, where he was born, raised, and began his football career. By age 19 (2014), Luke Shaw was with Manchester United and nine years later he is still there, alongside Harry Maguire.

Luke Shaw’s parents and all family members appear to be ordinary English people, according to pictures on social media posted by parents in 2010s. In physical-anthropological terms, Luke Shaw in earlier years appeared to be primarily of a classic-English-Germanic variant of the Nordid type, even if the stylized photo used here does not so much appear to be so. (See photos of Luke Shaw from the 2010s.)

— John Stones: White. His personal origins are in the Yorkshire region of England, where he was tied from birth to age 18/19, at which time he was conscripted up to the elite English Premier League club Everton in London.

— Kieran Trippier: One-quarter Subsaharan-Black, three-quarters White. Born and raised in the town of Bury in the Manchester area, Kieran Trippier has a classic “quadroon” look. His father (Chris Trippier, b.1966) is a mixed-race man (‘mulatto’) of unclear ancestral origin, but known to have been born in Bury. In this paternal origin Kieran Trippier is quite similar to teammate Alexander-Arnold, who also had a Black father born in 1960s-England.

Kieran Trippier’s mother is White-British, surname Lomax. She became associated with Chris Trippier in the late 1980s and their son, the England national team man, was born in 1990. It is also said that Kieran Tripper has partial Irish origin, but unclear if this is through the father’s or mother’s side. (See photo of Kieran Trippier’s parents in the 2000s during the player’s boyhood.)

An account in the Manchester Evening News by Helena Vestry (pub. July 11, 2021) identifies Chris Trippier (the father of the England player) as a bricklayer, and his wife (the White mother of the England player) as a “Costcutter cashier.” These were their jobs, at least, before their son became a millionaire sports player. The Costcutter discount-store the mother worked at was the one located in their public housing development (“estate” in British use) in Bury, England, neat Manchester. Both parents were intense football fanatics.

In the 2018-England listing for this player, it was (probably erroneously) suggested that Kieran Trippier’s Subsaharan ancestry was via Nigeria. It should be treated as undetermined; as with Alexander-Arnold, “probably” via a Commonwealth immigrant in the 1960s.

The only other Wikipedia-listed person surnamed “Trippier” is a minor politician, a David Trippier, (b.1946), White, who also happens to be from Bury, the same town as the football player and his father. Naturally this suggests a connection with the politician’s family. It actually suggests for Kieran Tripper a White paternal grandfather and a Black paternal grandmother (given that the same-surnamed politician is full-White) and the two additional White grandparents.

Kieran Trippier himself has married a White Greek-Cypriot woman and they have two one-eighth-African children (the children having about the same Subsaharan-ancestry component as Megan Markle’s child, the boy known as Archie Windsor).

— Kyle Walker: half-Black, half-White via a Jamaican father and White-English mother.

Kyle Walker’s Jamaican father, a “builder” (or construction worker in American-English), was a respected amateur football player in Sheffield, England, in the 1990s but in mid-age put in a lot of weight. (See photo of Kyle Walker with parents.)

Kyle Walker (b.1990) is about the same age and of the same heritage as fellow defenseman Kieran Trippier. Both Kyle Walker and Kieran Trippier had working-class White-English mothers who paired up with Black men in the late 1980s. Many other players in the 2010s-2020s era, including notably many also on the new U.S. national team, share the family-origin of “Black father, White mother,” a phenomenon commented on by Steve Sailer over the years since it began emerging strongly in the 2010s.

As a millionaire pro-sports celebrity, Kyle Walker has fathered four quarter-Black children with at least two White women. In 2022, it was reported that he had married one of the mothers.

— Ben White: full-White. Roots in South West England.

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England National Team 2022

MIDFELDERS

— Six players: Jude Bellingham, Conor Gallagher, Jordan Henderson, Mason Mount, Kalvan Philips, Declan Rice.

— Total racial-ancestral stock for the six midfielders on the England-2022 roster: 5.25 White (87.5%), 0.75 Black (12.5%).

— At least three-quarters of the White stock among the six midfielders is English; most of the remainder is ancestrally from Ireland.

— Jude Bellingham: half-Black, half-White.

Jude Bellingham is the only player on the England squad with a White father and a Black mother (there are five others with Black fathers and White mothers). Birmingham origin.

Jude Bellingham’s father was a White professional football payer named Mark Bellingham (b.1976) who had a successful semi-pro career in lower tier English leagues from the about 1997 to 2017, and otherwise worked as a police officer. Jude Bellingham’s Black mother, Denise, is said to be Nigerian. She gave birth to several children with the football fanatic and semi-pro player Mark Bellingham, beginning with son Jude in 2003. (See photo of Jude Bellingham with parents.)

A German Bundesliga team gave Jude Bellingham a full pro contract in July 2020 at age 17. This was in line with German elite football’s recent drive to draft promising mixed White-Black players, a strong tendency which began to emerge by about the 2000s and reached maturity towards the later 2010s — about the time of the ethnomasochist-triumphalist Merkel Migrant episode in which German was ordered to “wave in” two million Muslims and Africans in a single year, as it it were the fulfillment of some bizarre internal moral imperative. (German football’s storied history of success had never needed part-Africans before, but by the 2010s large numbers of such players had been drafted in.)

— Conor Gallagher: White. Origins in South East England. It is said he has ancestry from throughout the length and breadth of the British Isles, Scotland, Ireland, and England.

— Jordan Henderson: White. Personal origins in Sunderland, where he grew up, where his pro career began, and where he remained to age 21 (2011). Jordan Henderson then to Liverpool where he has remained eleven years as of 2022. No apparent foreign ties; count Jordan Henderson as full-White-English.

— Mason Mount: White. Origins in the city of Portsmouth, and had ties already from age 6 to the world-renowened pro club in London called Chelsea (its youth-development program). Parents are typical White-English people.

— Kalvin Phillips: Quarter-Black. In response to repeated inquiries on his personal racial origins owing to his unusual and exotic look, Kalvin Phillips has said that he is, quote: “quarter Jamaican, quarter English, quarter Irish, and I don’t know ’bout the rest.” His mother is said to have been born an Irish citizen. His father is apparently half-Jamaican. The most-searched Google query for this player is “kalvin phillips ethnicity.”

As of 2020, it was suspected that Kalvin Phillips would play internationally for Jamaica due to his grandparental tie. That was if couldn’t make the cut for England. His advisers told him he would get chosen for the England squad after all, and so he happily chose England and so in mid-2021 was with England at the European championship tournament of 2020 (delayed one year by the Corona-Panic of 2020).

— Declan Rice: White. Two grandparents from Ireland, two of English origin. Declan Rice has been tied to London his entire life by birth, family, and sports career, from earliest age until pro career. He played for Republic of Ireland as a teenager (2015 to 2018), then switched to England at age 20 (2019).

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England National Team 2022

FORWARDS

— Eight players: Phil Foden, Jack Grealish, Harry Kane, James Maddison, Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka, Raheem Sterling, Callum Wilson.

— Total racial-ancestral stock for the eight forwards on the England-2022 roster: 4.5 White (56%), 3.5 Black (44%).

— Phil Foden: White. Born and raised in the Manchester area, Phil Foden is said to have been a lifelong fan of the Premier League football club Manchester City. He became involved with the same club himself and is still there; his entire life up to now (age 22) has been as localized to the Manchester area, from infancy to young-adulthood as a pro-sports player.

Phil Foden’s parents are both White-British people with, it is said, no recent foreign ties. (See photo of Phil Foden’s parents.)

— Jack Grealish: White. It is said that Jack Grealish has three Ireland-born grandparents, one English-born. He was raised to be an Irish-Catholic, even something of an Irish nationalist by identity, despite several generations in England. He attended only Catholic schools.

Jack Grealish has spent virtually his whole life geographically tied to Birmingham, England. There he was born, raised, and spent his sports career up to age 26 (2021) with the Aston Villa club. He played for the Republic of Ireland national team in his youth career up to age 19 (2014), switching to England in 2015 as he was emerging into his own in his pro career; the England national team staff “scouted” him for that purpose, and he was willing to trade up, a good career move?

Jack Grealish’s phenotype is not characteristic of Germanic-English stock, being rather that of the Atlanto-Mediterreanean or the North-Atlantid type.

— Harry Kane: White. English mother. Two Ireland-born paternal grandparents.

Harry Kane’s mother’s father was a pro player in England in the 1960s. Harry Kane himself (b.1993) has been tied to London his whole life, including with the Tottenham football club, which is the only pro team he has ever been with permanently.

A British genealogy site investigated Harry Kane’s ancestral origins a bit (“Harry Kane’s family tree reveals footballing forefathers and overseas connections,” Find My Past UK, 2021). Despite a comparable level of ancestral-ties to Ireland as teammate and fellow forward Jack Grealish, Harry Kane identifies with England. London-raised Kane’s cultural affinity with Ireland is minimal, while Birmingham-raised Grealish’s is substantial, apparently dominant. With Harry Kane we find no ties to the Catholic church and no interest in playing internationally for Ireland (as Grealish did). In other words, Harry Kane identifies entirely with England. He also has a typically English look, of the Keltic Nordic anthropological type or a similar type.

Harry Kane married a White-English woman in 2019. They had been in a stable relationship since age 18 (2011), and are said to have known each other years earlier still than that, first through school. They now have three children. (See pic of Harry Kane with wife and young children.)

Being that Harry Kane is currently considered one of England’s best players, this case of a quaint-seeming, wholesome and “old-fashioned” relationship — in terms of type of partner, method of meeting and relationship-formation, and stability — may be worth comment here.

Harry Kane “re-created” a type of pairing common, say, a century ago and un-common today. But such relationships are seen relatively often with many of these pro-sport players. In the age of a near-hegemonic Feminism, that such relationships can still be so common among one specific subset (pro-sport players) can be explained thusly: the high-level pro-sport player male offers a re-creation of that which men (the standard man) offered in the relationship-formation market in generations past: stability the guarantee of relatively higher status — in this case via the prestige, fame, and millions of dollars in the bank with guarantees of more in income ahead. These create near-guaranteed-success relationship-formation conditions and (re-)create conditions of several generations ago in which women were actively receptive to relationships with men, sought-out family-formation, and were happy with it all.

As of 2022, before his thirtieth birthday, Harry Kane’s net-worth is said to exceed $50 million. With halfway-wise investments, sponsorships, and continued salary injections, that $50 million will likely balloon several times over in coming years. This all far exceeds whatever the White-English woman, his now-wife, would ever hope to earn alone in any job, or via any government programs, or even via virtually any other man from whom she could hope to gain exclusivity, and so the bond is iced in and the relationship ‘sticks.’

— James Maddison: White. James Maddison’s personal origins are in Coventry (along with Callum Wilson), where he also played professionally to age 20 (2016).

James Maddison’s girlfriend is a White British-origin model who uses the professional named Kennedy Alexa. As of mid-2020, Kennedy Alexa was in Los Angeles, pursuing her modeling career, when the Black Lives Matter movement was revived. The model Kennedy Alexa, very likely very bored by several months of “lockdowns” over a flu virus that was of no threat to her whatever, came out as an enthusiastic and loyal Black Lives Matter supporter, and made herself seen in trendy BLM marches in Los Angeles, according to a report by The Sun (UK) newspaper.

Soon thereafter in 2020, Kennedy Alexa shifted her career to acquisitions — she somehow managed to link up with James Maddison and they began dating by mid-2020 according to one account. A pro-sports player from back home in the UK was an excellent prospect. She became pregnant. A son was born in mid-2021. The aspiring model now has definite ties to a millionaire sports star and, in principle, a guaranteed income or claim on part of a millionaire’s assets, come what may.

— Marcus Rashford: Black. Caribbean origin. Marcus Rashford’s father’s origin-country is Jamaica; his mother’s is of the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Their son, Marcus Rashford, was born in Manchester in October 1997, several months after the Tony Blair victory (May 1997) signaled the consolidation and expansion of the kind of open immigration policy symbolized by the baby born to Black-Caribbean parents in Manchester that same year. (See also: the entries for England-born-and-raised Team-USA players Carter-Vickers and Antonee ‘Jedi’ Robinson. These and others have biographical-chronological tie-ins with the Tony Blair election of 1997 and themes related thereto.)

Growing up in Mancehster, Marcus Rashford entered Manchester United youth-development system (age 8) and remains with that club even as of 2022 (age 25). He has a White-English girlfriend.

— Bukayo Saka: Black. Parents are both Nigerians who arrived in England in the 1990s, under the Tony Blair New Labour government and its pro-multiculturalist immigration policy.

Media accounts of Buyako Saka’s family state that the parents were, quote, “economic migrants.” (And allow me a side-note here which shall stand without comment. The population of Nigeria in 2022 is 210 million; the White-British-origin population in England is today 43 million.).

Bukayo Saka’s Nigerian parents are of the Yoruba ethnolinguistic group and are Christian. A few years after arrival, a son, Bukayo Saka, was born (2001). Tied to Greater London his whole life but of African family and cultural origin, the elite and highly developed English football system took in Bukayo Saka. Arsenal (London, Premier League) gave him a place in their youth-development system, already at age 7. Bukayo Saka is still with the club Arsenal at age 21.

Bukayo Saka and Raheem Sterling are the only two players definitely zero ties to England before the 1990s.

— Raheem Shaquille Sterling: Black. Born in Jamaica in 1994 to Black-Jamaican parents. Raheem Sterling’s father is said to have been murdered in high-crime Jamaica in 1996. The mother was able to immigrate to London in 2000 with the boy, this too after the New Labour immigration ramp-up began, allowing easier foreign immigration.

Raheem Sterling has some family ties to the USA via a grandmother, who is said to have urged the name ‘Shaquille’ for the baby when it was born in 1996, after the U.S. basketball player popular at the time (see also: “Shaq Moore” on the U.S. National Team).

Raheem Sterling in youth had behavior problems, including being expelled from school and sent to a remedial school for several years. In 2014 he went to court for allegedly assaulting a girlfriend (a mixed-race model). He was recruited into elite football as a youth and has been with top Premier League teams since age 18, about ten years now — as he soon turns 28. His bio fits better than almost any other on the England-2022 team into the stereotypical view that holds in the USA of what a pro-athlete is: entitled attitude, legal problems, who perhaps would have been involved in crime if not being made a millionaire by a sports league.

Now for something that may surprise you: In June 2021, the Queen of England bestowed upon Raheem Sterling the title “MBE” (a royal title carrying considerable prestige) for, quote, “services to racial equality in sport.” Whatever that means. (That Raheem Sterling got an MBE for such a thing, at such an age (26), is not at all a good sign of the state of the nation, of England, as I would evaluate it.)

— Callum Wilson: half-Black?, half-White? His father is definitely Jamaican. His mother, by most sources, is White-British. Born (1992) and raised in Coventry, England (the same origin as his White teammate James Maddison, who is several years’ Callum Wilson’s junior).

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Manager: Gareth Southgate, White of English origin, East England. His ancestry evidently is drawn from population-stocks that have been associated with Britain for millennia, as his phenotype ranges between the “Keltic Nordid” and “North Atlantid” types.

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SUMMARY, racial origins of 26-man England National Team 2022

— 79% White (20.5 / 26)
— — seventeen of the 26 are full-White (65% of the roster).
— — Over three-quarters of the White component is of English origin; up to one-fifth of the White component is of Irish origin; non-British Isles elements are minimal.

— 21% Black (5.5 / 26)
— — Three men are full-Black (Sterling, Saka, Rashford); another six are part-Black (Wilson, Phillips, Bellingham, Walker, Trippier, Alexander-Arnold), meaning nine men of the 26 on the roster (35%) have at least partial Subsaharan ancestry.
— — One man is of recent African-immigrant origin, via Nigeria (Saka). Almost all the rest of the Black component is from the Caribbean, mostly Jamaica.

— 0% Muslim or Other (not White-Christian or Black).

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Commentary and political implications

England national team noticeably Whiter than 2018: Reason?

Comparing the England squad selected for 2022 with the England World Cup squad of 2018, we see that the 2022 roster is Whiter.

In fact, excluding the forwards, the England roster in 2022 is 90% White!

• In 2018: 63% White and 37% Black;
• In 2022: 79% White and 21% Black.

• In 2018, there were only eleven men on the (then-) 23-man roster of full-White-European origin (48%);
• In 2022, there are seventeen men of the (now-) 26-man roster of full-White-European origin (65%).

White players went from less than half to about two-thirds of the tea, (full roster).

Some “national teams” representing England in recent years, stacked with foreign-origin players of varying degrees of ties to England proper but no ancestral-ties to Europe. Many of these teams far “underperformed” in international play, below their theoretical skill level. ‘Weaker’ teams with stronger senses of unity and purpose — stronger national-feeling and the kinds of esprit-de-corps that comes with from fellowship with countrymen and kinsmen — were able to beat England. Because of ideological conditions in today’s England, this kind of commentary was not able to be made directly in the mainstream, though it appeared all over on indirect channels online, as the basic analysis was not absurd or hard ot notice.

The White-English component of the “England” team is considerably “up” in 2022 (as mentioned, excluding the forward position the roster is 90% White), which one might interpret to be a case of the managers being well cognizant of the problem and carefully selecting not just eligible players “best on paper,” but leaning more on those with national feeling, who will give England the kind of boost other national teams’ players have been known to get from that old nationalistic and fraternal feeling that is inherently less likely among a random group of individuals.

Echoes of migration policy: 1970s to 2000s

Many of the players selected for the England roster for World Cup 2022 were born in or near the early days of the Tony Blair prime ministership in the late 1990s. This chronological alignment and a certain common biographical detail to many of the players suggests a theme I think relevant to the whole team, and as the team symbolizes England in some way also relevant to the nation and political conditions in it over the past quarter-century.

In the 1990s, the Tony Blair people, then called “New Labour,” represented a kind of proto-‘Wokeness’ in excess of concurrent mainline-social-Leftism in the USA at the time, in excess of with the Clinton people were up to to at the same time.

When, in 1997, New Labour burst through he gates, they got in on the votes still of White “Old Labour” supporters, people who were for a labor- or working-class politics that they saw as benefitting themselves, and in many cases voting Labour for similar reasons to why they support their football club (because they’d always done so, because their friends do, because their fathers had before them). Alongside this “Old Labour” base, though, was an emergent coalition of diversity, immigrants, feminists, LGBTQs, and ideologues and social-engineer do-gooders. Many of these latter sorts brought in ideological imperative that demanded, and got, a considerably looser immigration policy.

The immigration ramp-up that began suddenly in the late 1990s, overseen by New Labour, rekindled a largely moribund British National Party (a small ethnonationalist party) in the 2000s, which it began putting up some impressive electoral performances. Eventually the same sort of mood led to Brexit in the 2010s. The BNP and Brexit were two counter-movements rooted in or tied to a (usually-)implicit White-British ethnonationalism (as was the ephemeral existence of the so-called English Defence League). Alas they were too weak and too contained by the system and by circumstance to win any decisive victory. Now well into the 2020s, what does England really have to show for it all?

England’s political situation today is uncertain and tentative, from my perspective as an outsider a slow-moving tragedy. The clown-car that let out a sad little cavalcade of three underwhelming prime ministers in quick succession this year symbolizes it about as best as anything can — “poetically,” you might say — better as a one-off scene than even than any of the interesting findings of this long study on pro sports players’ personal origins. The third figure to flop out of the clown car is a South Asian Hindu near-billionaire and political-schemer, holder of dual-citizenship with the USA and maintainer of quite recent ties to India. This man, now called Prime Minister, helped take down one of the earlier clown-car emergers, a wild-haired man with buffoonish tendencies and government-by-publicity-stunt philosophy. This other man had been easily snookered into pushing draconian “lockdowns” for most of two years over a moderate flu virus. (This all does sound like something from some dystopian futuristic-fiction that might have been written fifty or one hundred years ago about a comically disastrous decline in British national fortunes.)

Politics and policy can and do change the nation, even when people don’t quite remember when or how or why — just as was said about the unfortunates who fought the 1914-1918 war in Europe, after two or three years, soldiers interviewed said they didn’t remember what the international dispute had been in 1914 that they were fighting over, but there they were in the trenches and with the gas-masks and all. New Labour’s entry into power in 1997 is, I can only assume, mostly forgotten now by the non-political majority. The 1990s-nostalgists out there will perhaps remember it, along with David Beckham in his young-prime, the Spice Girls, Harry Potter before it became a mega-industry, and other such things as that. The “Tony Blair historic election win” will surely get on that film reel.

New Labour’s policy led to years on end of huge numbers of new immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, a spigot that, once turned on, takes on a certain momentum of its own. The England World Cup team in 2022 have several cases of this in action (and remember that for every top-level elite pro athlete there are thousands of ‘regular’ people).

The most blatant (if that is the word I want) of the England national team’s immigrants is Bukayo Saka, whose parents were well-off Nigerians of some kind who arrived during the early Blair period. A pair of Nigerian “economic migrants,” in any case, would not likely have been gained entry before New Labour.

The New Labour government and its pro-immigration ideologues were printing off more residency visas than ever imagined before at the time the Saka family arrived from Nigeria. Later it emerged that New Labour strategists had held meetings to plan and maintain the ramp-up of non-European immigration, which they told each other was necessary to punish the British people for their various supposed sins, and create a locked-in majority for their brand of politics and cultural pressure to undermine White-racism and sexism in Britain — immigration was a moral-imperative, a purpose of the state itself!

(The original political party, Labour, had emerged from the strong working-class political socialist movements of the late 19th century, but by the 1990s it was turning decisively against the native working class; it had nearly fully morphed into something else, the label “Labour” alone remaining but they helpfully updated it with the addition of the word “New.”)

The players on the England team with foreign-origin fathers and White-English mothers, such pairings are theoretically possible in all eras, but these particular ones all happened in this particular era with these particular political and ideological conditions. In other words, they were responding to incentives created by forces much larger than them.

The immigration story of course doesn’t start in 1997. By circa 1980, there was considerable radical-dissident energy on a rising nationalistic-Right, similar in some ways to the discontent of the 2010s that produced the unexpected “Brexit” result, except the circa-1980 version was generally leaner, meaner, younger, hungrier, more morally serious, and more confident of their purpose and success. What were they so unhappy about? In part, what they saw as a government policy of putting Britain on the path towards becoming a heavy-immigration state and favoring the immigrants over the natives — immigration ramped up in 1997, but was already in a position to influence British politics by the late 1970s. Numbers were lower than today’s except in certain localized areas, but the trend was clear — that, and the Englishmen of the 1970s and 1980s were still in easy living-memory contact with an era of an all-White England and frankly preferred it.

The politicized men among the English dissidents circa 1980 had a fair audience listening to their calls that disaster lay ahead, that the nation was being betrayed by an incompetent or hostile elite, who were in part using migration policy, “refugee” policy, racial policy, and foreign policy (especially vis-a-vis the “empire”) as weapons. These dissidents identified the system with an interpretation that is increasingly mainstream today, even if still not a powerful political force in its own right. The difference between then and now: forty years on, that system is much more powerful, refined, consolidated, and experienced at managing discontent, at controlling and coopting dissident currents. And to be frank, one of the major strategies involves pro sports!

To return to that energy in the late 1970s and into the 1980s in England. It had caused a surge in the political-fortunes of the National Front political party, which rose out of nowhere in the 1970s and stood at the cusp of making real breakthroughs. The movement was then coopted by the sudden rise of Margaret Thatcher, who used their talking points and siphoned off their voting strength. In office, she did not pursue anything like the aggressive policy the radical dissidents had demanded.

Mrs. Thatcher, for all her possibly good or possibly bad, sort of muddled things along and, viewed from a few decades later, appears to have simply kept the seat warm for when the sharp knives of New Labour had their day, which came in 1997. That is a cool quarter-century ago as of the time of World Cup 2022.

Flash forward another quarter century, and then a second, and a third. Those three jumps take us to the end of this century. What of England then?

If we extrapolate forward, there could be a time when only a small minority of the “national team” will be of White-English origin. If this be not desirable, would they make racial-national-ancestral quota to keep teams truly national? Would ideological conditions allow that? Current conditions would not. But this ball is out in the open, waiting to be carried forward by an attacking player. Who is the “national team” representing? Who is eligible and why? What is a citizen? What is the nation?

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