Sepp Blatter Thinks Too Many Brazilians are Playing for Other Countries

By: Laurie | May 16th, 2008

It’s not just foreign players in clubs that worry FIFA President Sepp Blatter. It’s also the foreign players in national teams.

His biggest concern? Those pesky Brazilians.

Blatter is alarmed by the number of Brazilians who have become eligible to play for a different country after living there as little as two years.

“I am not a prophet, but I would say we could have half the players in the 2014 World Cup (in Brazil) could come from Brazil,” he said Wednesday. “That is why we have to introduce a hurdle which is higher.”

FIFA will ask its 208 member federations to introduce a five-year residency rule at a May 29-30 meeting in Sydney, Australia.

Prior to 2004, FIFA rules said that any player could play for any country provided he had never played for another country and was granted citizenship in the new country. This rule was changed in 2004 after Togo naturalized five Brazilians to play in the African Cup of Nations, and three Brazilians became naturalized citizens of Qatar to play on the Qatari team.

The new rule said that players must have a “clear connection to that country” if they wished to play for a team outside of the country they were born in. From a 2004 article:

The rules now state a player must either have lived in a country for at least two years, or have a parent or grandparent who was born there.

And now Blatter’s position is that even this is too liberal.

As much as we like to dismiss anything Sepp Blatter says out of hand, this one has some merit. This isn’t like club play, which, like it or not, has become about fielding the best team you can buy. This is about international play, which, pretty much by definition is about fielding the best players from a given nation.

This whole issue of importing players for national team play does bring up some interesting questions, though. Most of these players do come from Brazil, which is essentially an international football factory. The country puts out far more international-level players than can ever play on its own team. Do these players deserve to play at the highest level? Should they be punished because of the country they were born in?

But if they are naturalized so that they can play for other countries, what about the players who were actually born in these countries who will be displaced by them? Do they deserve to play for their home countries ahead of imported players?

And what about the import of non-Brazilian players, particularly those from developing nations without the strong Brazilian football culture? As an example, Singapore has fielded players from Croatia, Serbia and Nigeria, among others. Should these countries be denied the skills of their native-born players just because those players have been offered a better deal elsewhere?

Or is importing talent a good compromise for smaller nations that will never have the population or training infrascructure to home-grow their own players? Does restricting imports penalize small countries?

The five-year or family connection rule seems like an interesting compromise. Five years is a long time in a footballing career. Expanding the wait period by this much would discourage players from moving to a new country solely to try to play for a different national team, but it wouldn’t have a huge effect on players who move to a country in their younger years and truly do consider themselves citizens.

What do you think about Sepp’s five-year rule? Too short? Too long? Just right? Or the wrong solution entirely?