FRIEDRICHSHAFEN, Germany — Every four years the World Cup takes the world by storm, setting new TV viewing records worldwide. This year’s early stage Brazil-Croatia match reached an audience of 47.4 million in Brazil alone. Largely due to statistics such as these, football is touted as the world’s most popular sport, capable of defying language and cultural barriers in its unification of players and fans from even the most remote corners of the planet. Eric Hobsbawm went so far as to write that “the imagined nation of millions is never more real than as a team of eleven named individuals.”

Football is commonly — and half-seriously — referred to as a religion, because of the near-spiritual fervor it inspires as well as its massive fan base. There are an estimated 3.5 billion football fans worldwide. By comparison, the number of Roman Catholics is estimated at 1.2 billion.

However, religions can be divisive. World history shows us that clefts between factions and sects are ubiquitous to organized religion. Football falls prey to the same traps as any other real or pseudo-religion; despite FIFA’s emphatic and high-profile anti-racism campaign, the truth of the common epithet “the beautiful game” is still lessened by controversy and vehement disagreements over players’ national identities. Who deserves to represent a country? What is it that makes a player French, or Algerian or Brazilian? What constitutes national identity and the right to represent one’s nation?

A full two-thirds of players officially named for the Brazil 2014 World Cup live and work outside the country that they represented on the pitch. French players are astonishingly likely to desert their birth country; 16 of Algeria’s 23 players were born in France, and the total number of French-born players in the tournament is 46, only 21 of whom actually play for France.

According to FIFA, strict guidelines have been imposed to avoid rampant player poaching and fiscal exploitation by wealthy nations. Amidst the scandal of Qatar’s alleged bribery in order to secure the 2022 World Cup bid, corruption on an international scale is the last thing FIFA wants, and it makes its representation requirements very clear:

“Any person holding a permanent nationality that is not dependent on residence in a certain country is eligible to play for the representative teams of … that country,” explains the official statute.

More interestingly, players who are entitled to represent more than one association [country or nation] under the terms above must fulfill at least one of the following requirements:

“1. He was born on [the country/nation’s] territory;

There is little to dispute, then, in terms of official regulation. Critics, however, draw attention to the fact that the unifying effects of football rarely extend beyond the pitch, despite multiple accounts of diversity in national sports teams positively influencing everything from political attitude toward immigrants to team performance.

These critics certainly have strong ground to stand on. Teams are becoming increasingly diverse, yet conservative right-wing anti-immigration political parties are gaining ground across the European Union.

In terms of diversity, football teams vary in their proportion of multiple passport holders; the Argentine squad has 24 dual-nationals, while the Ecuadorian and South Korean teams have none at all. One article calculated the effects of removing “foreigners” from teams, defining a foreigner as someone with at least one foreign-born parent, and finds that while many squads such as Brazil remain wholly intact and even gain members, others such as France and current champions Germany would be decimated without migrant players.

The political arena of the EU is tending toward the very opposite ideal. Many strong European powers saw historical wins for far-right political parties, most notably in the U.K., Austria, and Denmark, and most significantly in France. The French Front National, with its brazen anti-globalization and anti-immigration platform, is an open critic of the EU and has already made multiple proposals to British politicians to form a Euro-sceptic alliance aimed at destroying the EU from within.

In an altogether different vein, the United States, with its pro-immigration left-wing and anti-immigration right-wing political factions exchanging increasingly violent blows, has also been implicated in the migration debate. U.S. American columnist Ann Coulter recently published an article expounding on concept of football as a symbol of the United States’ moral decay.

“If more ‘Americans’ are watching [football] today, it's only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration law. I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time,” she wrote, in the heavily criticized and gleefully parodied June 25 column.

In a recent Guardian article, Sadhbh Walshe suggests that the United States has much to learn from the diversity of its national football quad. If the ethnic and racial composition of Congress were to more accurately mirror the nation it is supposed to represent, the United States’ strict immigration policies might be a little more realistic. Walshe alludes to the difficulty of celebrating a national identity that is premised on birth nationality or citizenship. The born-and-bred brand of U.S. nationalism does not reflect the diversity of the sport in which this very same nationalism is finding its roots, she argues.

But the difficulty of defining the words “foreign” and “migrant” is its own gentle satire of the controversy around the racializing of teams. If we cannot define who is a migrant and who is not, how do we even begin to discriminate between the two?

Football, especially the World Cup, certainly has the ability to thrust racial and ethnic minorities into the public spotlight, but it remains to be seen whether the unity fostered by this sudden prominence will have lasting effects in political and social spheres. Perhaps football can become a model for the structure of democratic governance, instead of representing past ideals-based conflicts and perpetuating current ones. It remains to be seen whether political representatives will be able to diversify as effectively as football teams have. In the meantime, each and every member of Germany’s champion squad will no doubt continue to celebrate their success, individual heritage being of little consequence in a shared World Cup victory.