Immigration and the World Cup

Alphonso Davies

Alphonso Davies became the first male to score for Canada at a World Cup which completed a remarkable journey for the Canadian international. Davies was born in a refugee camp in Ghana, to Liberian parents who fled the civil war in their home country. When Alphonso Davies was five, he and his family immigrated to Canada. They lived in Windsor, Ontario, before settling in Edmonton, Alberta.

Davies became a Canadian citizen in 2017 and on the same day he was added to the senior team camp. He made his debut at the age of 16 making him the youngest player ever on Canada’s Men’s National Team.

The camp at which he was born was established by the United Nations’ High Commission for Refugees and he is now a UN ambassador. ‘For me joining the UNHCR was a big moment in my life because I wanted to show not just myself on the podium but that refugees are human beings and, given opportunities, we can be footballers, doctors. 

'We’re human beings as well. I feel like people have a negative say when people hear the word refugee. I want to change that to a positive thing.’

Inaki and Nico Williams

Inseparable throughout their lives, Inaki and Nico Williams headed to the 2022 World Cup - but on different teams: with Inaki representing Ghana, the country of his parents’ birth and Nico representing Spain, the country of his (and Inaki’s) birth.

In search of a better life before either of their sons were born, mother Maria and father Felix made the treacherous 4,000-kilometre journey from Ghana to the Spanish enclave of Melilla.

They did some of the journey in the back of a crowded truck, the rest of it by foot, crossing the sands of the Sahara Desert in temperatures of 40 and 50 degrees Celsius.

Maria, meanwhile, was pregnant. They were arrested upon arriving in Melilla but were granted political asylum and travelled to Bilbao, where Inaki was born. The family eventually settled in the nearby city of Pamplona and eight years later Nico was born.

Morocco

Morocco who shocked the world with their run to the semi-final had the highest number of foreign-born players in this year’s World Cup, with 14 players having acquired Moroccan citizenship through ancestral connections. Most notably star player Achraf Hakimi who scored the winning penalty to knock out his country of birth, Spain in the round of 32 with an audacious paneka penalty. Hakimi was born and raised in Spain to Moroccan parents, making him eligible to play for both countries; however, Hakimi chose to represent after not feeling at home in Spanish set up “"It was not for anything in particular, but for what I felt, because it was not what I had at home, which is the Arab culture, being Moroccan. I wanted to be here."