en English
Jun 23, 2026
Daron Acemoglu
Germany’s 2026 World Cup team, like so many others in the tournament, shows that loving one’s country and welcoming newcomers are not incompatible impulses. Although activists on the far left and the far right would have us believe otherwise, most ordinary people implicitly recognize this.
BOSTON—When the German soccer player Deniz Undav scored two late-game goals to clinch a 2-1 victory for his team over Ivory Coast, you would have been hard-pressed to find many German fans who did not see him as a national hero. Few cared that the Turkish-Syrian son of Kurdish Yazidi parents did not look classically German. He delivered an exhilarating triumph for the German side, demonstrating why the beautiful game commands a wider global viewership than any other sport.
