BRAZIL TOPS THE PLAYER EXPORT LIST BUT CROATIA IS THE REAL WINNER
Sean O'Conor
We live in a globalised world and football is more cosmopolitan than most industries.
A team's squad made up of players from its country alone is the exception rather than the rule. Many Asian, European & North American sides are now a smorgasbord of talent from around the world.
In England's Premier League for instance, the average first team squad has 13 different nationalities, ranging from seven at Sheffield United to 18 at Brighton & Hove Albion.
When it comes to sending players abroad, it is little surprise who is at the top of the tree.
The CIES Football Observatory, a research body based in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, has studied 137 nations’ domestic leagues and found that with 1273 footballers plying their trade in 79 countries outside their homeland, Brazil is comfortably the world's No.1 exporter of soccer talent.
Brazil is of course a football-mad country with a big population and a domestic league which struggles to keep up with the European ones and increasingly even Major League Soccer, where FC Cincinnati have just snapped up the highly-rated 21 year-old striker Brenner from São Paulo.
While Pele famously never played in Europe, today it is unthinkable that the next Maradona, Messi or Ronaldinho will not pack their bags and cross the Atlantic.
For a brief period at the end of the 1940s overseas stars flocked to Colombia's El Dorado league but in 2021 South American clubs have a business model based on selling players overseas.
For Brazilian teams, exports are estimated to form around 40% of their income.
It is easy to forget just how far CONMEBOL clubs are behind UEFA's. According to David Goldblatt in his book The Age of Football,
“If the European football industry is worth something in the region of $25 billion, South America's is probably just 10 to 15 per cent of that.”
The new kids on the block in the form of the CSL, J.League, K-League and MLS are poised to overtake.
And yet, even if their domestic game is not much cop and their national team has not won the World Cup since 2002, Brazil's brand still scores.
The seleçao's trio of Jules Rimet trophies between 1958 and 1970 and Pele's star turn stamped the idea of footballing fantasy in the world's mind and that trope is alive and kicking in 2021.
World Cup wins in 1994 and 2002 with workmanlike sides perpetuated the Brazil is best motif, although their last flair-filled national team was almost forty years ago - in 1982 when Zico, Falcao & Socrates briefly dazzled before exiting stage left in the second round.
In his book Futebol, Alex Bellos wrote, "The phrase Brazilian footballer is like French chef or Tibetan monk. The nationality expresses an authority...whatever the natural ability."
An agent confided to him, "It is much easier selling for example a crap Brazilian than a brilliant Mexican. The Brazilian gets across the image of happiness, party, carnival, irrespective of talent."
For that reason in 2021, Brazilian expat footballers play in more countries, 79 in total, than any other nation's exports:
But are Brazilians still the best footballers, as the world seems to think?
Not if their national team is anything to go by. When it comes to clubs, the picture is brighter. Brazilian teams have won four and lost four FIFA Club World Cup finals, beaten only by Spanish clubs' seven wins and one loss.
On an individual level, comparing players is notoriously difficult and there is no consensus on a method of ranking.
That said, one established outlet, Germany's Transfermarkt, has been rating players for 20 years and has only one Brazilian player in the world's top 20 today - Neymar, second only in value to Kylian Mbappé.
However, the figures belie some facts. By a coefficient comparing players to population, Brazil is actually second to bottom of the top ten exporters:
What is striking is how two relatively small nations (populations of four and seven million respectively) are by some distance the most prolific shippers in world soccer.
FIFA currently ranks Croatia 11th in the world, 19 places above Serbia, but pro-rata, these two lands are producing more players than larger and richer countries like England or Germany.
Serbia, who have never got beyond the group stage at the World Cup, is exporting players to more countries (60), than more recognisable footballing nationalities like the Spanish (56) or Dutch (51).
They are both punching far above their weight. When the Croats defeated England in the 2018 World Cup semi-final, a nation of four million had beaten one of 56 million at a game they had invented, which was no mean feat.
Then they lost to a nation of 67 million in France. Only in 1950 did a smaller country reach the final - Uruguay, population 2.2 million.
2018 was no flash in the pan. Croatia had long supplied the cream of the Yugoslav national team and right after independence, a Euro '96 quarter-final and France '98 semi-final confirmed the power of the chequerboard shirts.
Croatian and Serbian clubs are in the second string of European clubs however, unable to compete realistically with the big five leagues. UEFA's 2020/21 club coefficient ranks Croatia only 18th and Serbia 16th in Europe.
Red Star Belgrade (Serbia)'s Champions Cup victory of 1991 remains a lone triumph for the former Yugoslavia although Partizan Belgrade (Serbia) did reach the 1966 final.
Dinamo Zagreb (Croatia) won the Inter-City Fairs Cup in 1967 but the best Croatian clubs have achieved in the Champions League is Hajduk Split getting to the quarter finals on three occasions.
A poor domestic league will always force talents like Luka Modric or Nemanja Vidic to emigrate, but there still must be something in the Balkan water to produce so many footballers.
Football is certainly top dog in Croatia and Serbia but they also play basketball, handball, ice hockey and water polo to a high standard and have produced tennis legends like Goran Ivanisevic and Novak Djokovic.
Croatian sport is not nationalistically funded like it was in East Germany. In 2017, it came bottom of the 28 EU nations for government subsidy, receiving only 0.2% of the national budget, yet the following summer Hrvatska reached the World Cup final.
So despite rather than because of state intervention, Croatian kids play a lot of sport and its small population may paradoxically work in its favour.
For the same reason regional cities tend to outperform capital ones at club level (fewer competing distractions), smaller nations which specialise in one sport can outperform larger ones. Uruguay is an interesting parallel.
Add to that a Mediterranean climate, borders with five countries and proximity to others' ideas, a strong footballing heritage and a patriotic population and therein may exist the Croatian recipe for overachievement.
Football clearly is a passion there. In their 2009 book Soccernomics, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski found that by comparing viewing figures to households with televisions, Croatia was the No.1 country in the world for watching football on TV.
They also noted Croatians' love of their national sports teams in general and suggested a link with their hard-fought recent independence.
Indeed, there is not a little nationalism connected with football in the former Yugoslavia, as anyone who has witnessed one of their teams in person can confirm.
At club level the various cultural identities subsumed into Marshal Tito's state never forgot their differences and in the early 1990s fervent fandom morphed into anti-communist hooliganism, paramilitarism and finally civil war.
The fiery clash between Dinamo Zagreb and Red Star in 1991, which ended up in a mass brawl, is often cited as one of the triggers for the break-up of Yugoslavia.
Today the fighting has long ceased but the passion remains. However, with the increasing financial might of Europe's big leagues, there is no prospect of Croatia's or Serbia's clubs challenging the hegemony.
As with Brazil, concentrating on the national team while exporting their best talent seems the only option for Croatian and Serbian football going forward. They will not win the Champions League but there is always the next European Championship or World Cup to aim for.
One question the CIES study begs is whether there is a link between player exports and national team success, but looking at the composition of World Cup-winning squads, that is one for another day and another algorithm:
Half a century ago the seleçao inspired the world. Red Star's stadium the Rajko Mitić has been colloquially called the Marakana since 1964 in honour of the Brazilian original.
So while the land of Pele continues to be a byword for footballing brilliance and the biggest distributor of footballers around the globe, we should also doff our caps to two small and relatively unsung Eastern European nations, who have also scattered their soccer seed to the four winds.
Manchester United's Brazilians
© Sean O'Conor & Soccerphile
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