Diversity is not what's dragging down U.S. men's national team. Data proves it

USA Today

2 days ago

Whatever is wrong with the U.S. men's national team, and pull up a chair because there's lots to discuss, diversity isn't it.
That's not just an aspirational statement. There are studies to prove it. In fact, researchers who've looked at both club and national teams across the world recently found diversity actually made squads better.
"Previous research, they found a negative impact, not because of the diversity itself but how to put the team together. When you merge several players from different countries with different language, you create a barrier that makes it, at some extent, difficult to perform," said Thadeu Gasparetto, author of a paper published earlier this month titled "Multicultural teams: Does national diversity associate with performance in professional soccer?"
"More recent research is showing pretty much the opposite, where the diversity provides a set of different skills … different codes that tends to be positive.'
With less than a year until the World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico, which U.S. Soccer officials hope will be as transformative for the game as the 1994 tournament was, the "golden generation' of the U.S. men's national team is struggling. To put it nicely.
Most of their top players, led by Christian Pulisic, are playing in Europe. Several on top teams, no less. Their coach is Mauricio Pochettino, who took Tottenham to the Champions League final.
Yet the USMNT skidded into the Concacaf Gold Cup on a four-game losing streak, its longest since 2007. Then team reached the quarterfinals of the tournament, but Sunday's game against Costa Rica will be the first real test.
As players, fans and pundits look for answers, former USMNT player and pot stirrer extraordinaire Alexi Lalas blamed the team's diversity. In addition to players from across the United States, the USMNT — like many other national teams — has multiple players who were born or raised overseas.
"I've argued that the homogeneous nature of some other countries and cultures, just in population in terms of the size, are much more manageable and there's a collective understanding and, more importantly, an agreement in, 'This is how we're going to play,'' said Lalas, who makes no secret of his willingness to be a right-wing media provocateur.
'But getting 11 men to represent this great country of 350 million people and all be on the same page, that is very, very difficult.'
Except it's really not. And there is both data, and anecdotal evidence, to prove it.
Gasparetto examined six professional leagues in Europe — England, Belgium, Germany, Cyprus, Latvia and the Netherlands — between the 2015-16 and 2020-21 seasons and found that each foreign player on a team correlated with a 0.42% increase in win percentage.
'It's much more about how well or how qualified the players are rather than where he or she's from,' Gasparetto said.
His findings are similar to those in a study by Michel Beine, Silvia Peracchi and Skerdilajda Zanaj that looked at ancestral diversity and its impact on a national team's performance. "Ancestral diversity and performance: Evidence from football data," published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization in September 2023, found ethnic diversity can lead to an additional goal scored per game.
'The idea is, basically, that more genetic diversity is going to allow more complementary skills between players,' Beine said. 'Soccer is a game in which complementary skills is very important because you have different positions and these different positions, they require different type of skills. … These complementarities, these different type of skills are going to be beneficial for the team.'
Look at France. Les Bleus won the men's World Cup in 2018 and were runners-up in 2022 with a team that was a melting pot. In addition to players whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and — you get the idea — were born in France, about half the team was born in Africa or the French Caribbean, or had parents who were.
England, much to the country's consternation, endured decades of frustration after winning the World Cup in 1968. But it has reached the final at the last two European Championship and got to the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup with a multiracial team. Belgium had its best finish ever at the World Cup in 2018, third place, with a team that reflected the influence of immigration to that country in the 1950s and 1960s.
Conversely, teams that are homogenous — Iceland, for example, or Japan — don't fare as well.
'This mixing, in terms of skills, in terms of genetic endowment, we show in the statistical analysis that, over time, countries benefited from immigration flows and diverse immigration flows. … They improved their soccer performances,' Beine said. 'On the contrary, you have countries who had very little immigration flows and who have kept quite a homogeneous population … maybe they have less benefited from this.'
Soccer is a global game — and not only because it's played everywhere in the world. Players routinely move from country to country in their club careers, and that is likely to have far more influence than the country in which they were born or the neighborhood in which they grew up.
Lionel Messi was born in Argentina, moved to Spain at 13 and spent two decades at Barcelona before going to France to play for Paris Saint-Germain. Now he's in the United States, playing for Inter Miami. Do you really think him being from Rosario has more of an impact on Argentina's national team than what he learned at Barcelona?
"The evidence is very clear that diversity is something that can be beneficial. And it is a little bit overlooked by people,' Beine said. 'I think that sometimes people are not looking at the evidence. Or they are closing their eyes on what is really obvious.'
And that is that. The USMNT, much like the country it represents, is better for its diversity.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.