U.S. World Cup soccer team demographics

Corrected: There are 23 players on the U.S. World Cup soccer team. Allocating partial shares by parent's ancestry (e.g., Jonathan Bornstein is half white and half Hispanic), by my calculations, the team is 57% non-Hispanic white (13.0 players), 33% black (7.5), and 11% Hispanic (2.5).

This is pretty similar to the demographics of the squad in 2006. I think there were about 2.5 Hispanics and 6 blacks. So, the USA team has been getting blacker but not more Hispanic. Hispanics have been underrepresented on the last two World Cup teams versus their share of the U.S. population, which is pretty interesting.

Blacks are quite heavily represented, considering how few African-Americans show much interest in soccer. Of the 7.5 blacks, two have African last names, one is of Haitian descent, two have ancestors from Trinidad, and another from Jamaica.

The foreign-born make up 9% (2), which is less than I expected. All four players who have whole or part Hispanic background are American-born. The immigrants are a Scotsman and a half-Jewish Brazilian. More than a few players appear to have foreign-born parents.

Quibbles:

- I'm counting the son of Haitians as black, not Hispanic (I assume that Hispanic has to have something to do with Spain).

- I'm counting the guy born in Rio de Janeiro, Benny Feilhaber, who has a Jewish father from Europe and a Brazilian mother, as non-Hispanic white on the grounds that Brazil is not a Spanish-speaking culture.

- I have Clint Dempsey down as unmixed white because that's what he's implied to be in articles, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's not exactly true.

By the way, here's an excerpt from my 2006 American Conservative article on the World Cup, "One People, One World, One Sport:"

Soccer is by no means a bad sport to play. It’s fun, good exercise, cheap, and, unlike basketball or football, it doesn’t help to be 7-feet tall or 300 pounds. In fact, soccer shares many virtues with hiking, but there are no hiking hooligans and nobody calls you a nativist boor if you don’t watch Sweden v. Paraguay on TV in the World Hiking Cup.

The American professional classes have learned that soccer is a terrific game for small children. In comparison, tee-ball generates farce, while Little League baseball inflicts humiliation on rightfielders who drop fly balls, strike out, and get picked off. (Not that I’m bitter or anything.) Via random Brownian motion, a soccer team of tykes is almost guaranteed to stumble into a few goals. (That’s why college robot-building competitions typically feature soccer matches.) When my five-year-old would trot off the field after one of his AYSO games, which he spent discussing the Power Rangers with his opponents while occasionally swiping at the ball as it rolled past, he’d brightly inquire, “Did we win? How many goals did I score?”

To us Americans, a kids’ soccer game doesn’t look all that different from the endlessly ineffectual endeavors of the scoreless 1994 Brazil-Italy World Cup final in the Rose Bowl. Similarly, because we can’t recognize quality soccer, we’re as happy to root for our women as our men. We were ecstatic over America’s victory in the 1999 Women’s World Cup of soccer. We’d beaten the world! When cynics pointed out that the world, other than China and Norway, doesn’t much care about women’s soccer, well, that just made us even prouder of how liberated our women are, compared to those poor, oppressed women of Paris, Milan, and London, whose consciousnesses haven’t been raised enough to want to trade in their Manolo Blahniks for soccer spikes.

  

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer