International soccer’s battle for talent goes global, even as the world fractures

News Snapshot:

Consider a World Cup qualifier that took place in late March in Sydney. An Australian team coached by the son of Croatian immigrants, with an attack led by a Scottish-born naturalized Australian and a second generation Sri Lankan Tamil-Australian, faced an Indonesian team in which all but one of the starting XI were born and raised in the Netherlands. Nurtured by the Dutch academy system and performing, in many cases, at a high level in club football throughout Europe and the US, these players qualified for Tim Garuda thanks to ancestral links to Indonesia, a former Dutch colony. Indonesian footballing...