General Discussion

In this way, they avoid having to comment on the obvious diversity in sports teams, and even spend a lot of time explaining why sports instead display their version of "race realism." Of course, they miss the point entirely, especially for a sport like soccer. The top level soccer teams (especially in Europe) are so diverse because they have built-in systems for finding talent everywhere, not ruling out any possible source of talent. The systems that require diversity initiatives (i.e., US colleges and occupations) require them precisely because they systematically exclude sources of talent and merit rather than cultivating them. Ironically, this is also the main problem with US soccer, and one of the reasons US soccer - with a population of 300,000,000 - can barely qualify for the World Cup on occasion and is middling compared to much smaller countries. The US youth soccer club system is so expensive that it systematically excludes talent, especially from Latino immigrant populations.