After Spain’s victory against England in the men’s UEFA EURO 2024, it’s time for the women’s national teams to shine in 2025. This summer, Switzerland is hosting the EUFA Women’s Euro with national teams advancing through the elimination brackets until the final showdown between England and Spain on 27 July 2025 in Basel.
Is a diverse team a better team?
A quick glance at names from the team rosters will show that some national teams, such as France, have more diverse ancestral backgrounds than others. In a 2018 tribute to Nelson Mandela, President Barak Obama even used the French men’s team, newly crowned World Cup champions, as an example of the power of diversity within a society. Was Obama right? What if this diversity could create an edge? Can diversity make national football teams more competitive? Researchers at the University of Luxembourg wanted to test their theory, using the tools and methods of economics.
In their 2023 paper “Ancestral diversity and performance: Evidence from football data”, Professor Michel Beine, Dr. Silvia Peracchi (UCLouvain) and Professor Skerdilajda Zanaj test their hypothesis that ancestral diversity among players on a team can affect performance positively. Looking at football national teams from the UEFA affiliation, performing in World Cup and EUROs in the years 1970-2018, they set out to develop a sound statistical analysis that would establish a causal link between how diverse the teams were and how well they played. This means that researchers wanted to prove that diversity was a factor that led to better team performance.
Insights from the field of migration economics
Researchers built a measure of ancestral diversity using surnames to infer the players’ origins. This measure then became the main variable of interest in the econometric analysis. The researchers’ method, called an instrumental variable approach, helps isolate the effect of ancestral diversity from other unobserved factors that could correlate with team diversity and therefore could bias the results.
In the first stage of the analysis, it predicts team diversity based on population diversity one generation before (the instrument) and other variables. In the second stage, it uses this predicted value to look into how team diversity affects performance. The idea is that higher diversity in past immigration increases the diversity of second-generation migrants who would currently qualify to play for the national team of their parents’ adopted country.
Departing from existing literature on diversity and performance, the researchers did not study club performance because clubs, like Liverpool FC, Paris Saint-Germain or Real Madrid do not adhere to nationality-based constraints like the national teams. Clubs could easily implement diversity-boosting strategies through player transfers, while national teams, apart from some naturalisation strategies and dual-citizens, are limited to players who hold a certain nationality. The research shows that teams with a higher degree of ancestral diversity overall exhibit higher diversity in the various forms of skills required in football, such as speed, height, and power of technical ability. The researchers also demonstrate that easier relative access to nationality for second generation migrants boosts the diversity of the national teams, and therefore their performance.
The cross-country diversity variation in the EUROs 2016. A general pattern appears with Eastern Europe teams presenting lower diversity levels, whereas Western Europe teams show higher levels of diversity, likely reflecting accumulated migration inflows over the recent decades.
An effect limited to team sports
Researchers found that, holding all factors other than diversity constant, a one-standard-deviation increase in diversity on a team leads to an increase of more than one goal difference per game in a given national team. These results are robust, having been controlled for coaching quality, population size and GDP. Intriguingly, the phenomenon is unique to team sports. When the researchers ran a similar analysis for individual performance sports such as athletics, ancestral diversity had no role to play.
Going deeper into the diversity effect, the researchers sought to determine the channels through which the positive impact occurs. A homogeneous population will result in a team with relatively homogeneous physical traits and skills such as height, speed, movement coordination, dribbling, and tactical skills. The opposite will be true for a diverse population, where there may be a better pool of potential players for the different positions (goalie, midfielders, forwards, etc.) depending on the physical characteristics that are necessary.
Researchers tested the effect of complementarity with data extracted from individual player characteristics in the FIFA video game from 2017 to 2022. They found a positive and significant correlation between teams’ diversity and variation in the FIFA player attributes like body mass, attacking statistics, broad skills and movement. Simply put, an ancestrally diverse team is also one with players that complement each other’s skillsets.
Score one for diversity
So whether you’re shouting Allez les Bleus, Auf geht’s Deutschland!, Forza Azzurri!, Heja Sverige!, ¡Vamos España!, or backing another team this summer, remember that there’s more at play than just tactics and talent. Economics research suggests that ancestral diversity, shaped by a country’s migration history, can give national teams a real performance edge. While it won’t predict the outcome of every match, the positive effect is clear and measurable. Amid polarising and political debates on migration, this empirical and objective study reveals an often-overlooked truth: diversity can help nations compete, and sometimes, even win.