The Sports Leagues and Nationality Project

Players from 43 countries played in the National Basketball Association in 2023-24

The 2013-14 San Antonio Spurs were special for two reasons. Most obviously, San Antonio won the championship, their fifth in franchise history. Some NBA teams have yet to win one.

But perhaps more remarkable was the team’s diversity: players born outside the United States made up more than 50% of all minutes played for the team. Their roster included Patty Mills (born in Australia), Marco Belinelli (Italy), Boris Diaw (France), Manu Ginobilli (Argentina), and Tony Parker (Belgium).¹ While an outlier at the time, this trend has continued, especially at the top-end of NBA rosters. International players contributed 25% of the most important statistical category—points—in 2023-24, the most recent completed season. At the turn of the millennium, only 10% of scoring came from international-born players. The Spurs of 2014 were a forerunner to how rosters have since been and will continue to be shaped going forward.

International-born players competed for the majority of the team’s minutes during the Spurs’ 2013-2014 championship run.

The Wild World of Sports

This story is not just happening in the National Basketball Association, the preeminent men’s professional basketball league in the world. It is happening in sports leagues around the world at various rate—and with varying reactions. I am interested in the internationalization of professional athletes’ participation in sports leagues because the world of sport remains one of the primary signposts of the cultural norms of a given society.

There is a normative dimension underlying the work here. Call me naive, but I want to think that as a society becomes more accustomed to seeing athletes from different places and backgrounds compete on the field, rink, or court, they become less xenophobic and more open to cross-cultural coalitions. There is some evidence that these parasocial relationships do encourage positive integration. Perhaps most famously, a 2021 study found a significant decrease hate crimes in Liverpool, England after the athletic success of Egyptian footballer Mohammed Salah.² This project does not set out to study whether the Parasocial Contact Hypothesis is real or not, but it is a primary motivation for of studying diversity in elite-level athletic participation.³

Now, before diving in to a description of the project, it’s worth noting the nuance behind the main measure of diversity here, nationality. It’s very squishy, both in the sports world and outside of it. Country of birth differs from nationality which differs from citizenship. In athletic competitions where an international organization manages well-known competitions, nationality is deeply regulated. In soccer, FIFA rules stipulate that once you play one time for a country’s highest-level national team, you are committed to that country for life. National teams who violate citizenship rules can face disqualification from tournaments. Other sports, like American Football, have a less-powerful international governing body, making national identity nearly immaterial to the administration of the game. Other competitions generally fall somewhere between these two sports on the spectrum of national versus international leagues. I plan to dive into the comparative policies of sports league rules on nationality at a later date.

The Project

For each league, I will analyze the composition of the league and its franchises as measured by nationality, including how these dimensions manifest in statistical contributions during games and over time.

Nationality-related data comes from Sports Reference.

Time Period

I’m starting my analysis in Fall 1992-Spring 1993. A few things happened at this point that make it a nice starting point:

• With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Cold War was coming to an end, marking a new era in international relations, politics, and sports.

• The English Premier League broke away from the Football Association, putting it on the path to become the most-watched domestic soccer league in the world.

• Professional NBA players performed at the Summer Olympics for the first time. The United States send the “Dream Team” a collection of generational basketball players led by Michael Jordan, the first truly global superstar in the sport of basketball.

• Three years later, the personal computer went on the market, the first step toward public access to the internet.

My analysis goes through the present and I will update it at the conclusion of every season. The first edition of this study focuses on the National Basketball Association, for which I chose to use Country of Birth as the measure of national diversity. International basketball governance has rules for national competitive affiliation, but the comparatively relaxed rules make assessing nationality more complicated.⁴ Country of birth, while a distinct attribute from nationality, provides the simplest solution to measure national diversity in athletic participation at least for the NBA. In the NBA, birth country is listed under each player’s profile on Basketball Reference.

Elements of the Project

At least at this preliminary stage, this project will include a combination of maps and bar charts. All told, there are nearly 700 figures representing NBA data. That sounds like a lot, but does not even scratch the surface of what the true professionals can deploy.

Maps-Share of International-Born Players by Country

The maps show the distribution of international players (those not born in the United States) across the world as shares of the overall international-born athlete population. In this case, it shows the distribution of international-born players in the NBA from the 1992-1993 season.

In 1993, only 20 countries had athletes represented in the NBA, less than half of the number in the most recent season

Stats Over Time-Entire League

These area bar charts show how the introduction of more international players does not affect all statistical categories at the same rate. In the NBA, a good example of this positional discrepancy is comparing blocks (below) with assists

The first international-born players generally played at center, the player required to be the tallest and who typically accrues the most blocked shots over a season.

Stats-Team Comparison

These area bar charts show how different franchises have acquired and deployed international-born players on the court/field/rink. In this case, it shows NBA teams with the most points scored by international players, ordered by points scored by international-born players from left-to-right.

As will be described in a future report, Western Conference teams (minus the Los Angeles Lakers) appear to have handed more on-court duties to international players over the last 32 years.

Stats Over Time—Team-by-Team

For those interested in how teams integrated international-born players into their rosters over time, check out these area bar plots. For fun, I outlined seasons in which a team won the championship (gold), lost in the finals (silver), or lost in the conference finals (bronze).

I am a Denver Nuggets fan and this is my blog so they get priority lololol.

This is the first post in what I hope will end up becoming a robust research project. My tentative plans in the next six months or so include:

• publishing a series of team-by-team essays that detail each franchise’s history of integrating international players on the court.

• running this same analysis on the WNBA and MLB at the conclusion of their respective seasons.

• writing a comparative summary of how leagues and international organizations define nationality for the purposes of elite team athletic competitions.

Professional athletic participation has globalized over the last thirty years. It’s about time we learned more about this trend.

Footnotes

1. Tim Duncan was born in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, an unincorporated and organized territory of the United States.

2. See Alrababa’, A., Marble, W., Mousa, S., and Siegel, A.A. 2021. “Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? The Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Behaviors and Attitudes.” American Political Science Review 115(4): 1111–28. doi: 10.1017/S0003055421000423.

3. For the Parasocial Contact Hypothesis, see Schiappa, E., Gregg, P. B., & Hewes, D. E. (2005). The Parasocial Contact Hypothesis. Communication Monographs, 72(1), 92–115. https://doi.org/10.1080/0363775052000342544.

4. Joel Embiid, a top 3 basketball player in the world, provided an illustrative recent example of this complexity in the run-up to the 2024 Paris Olympic games. Embiid was eligible to play for Cameroon, France, or the United States. Cameroon is his country of birth and where he grew up. In anticipation of the Paris Olympics, Embiid received French citizenship in July 2022. Embiid then received citizenship from the United States, his country of work, in September 2022. He ultimately played for and won gold with the United States in the 2024 Paris Olympics. Unlike in soccer, he can still change his affiliation in the future.