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?

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Laurie

Diana, when I said "developing," I was referring to the countries that the players come from -- in this case, Serbia, Croatia and Nigeria -- and not to where they're ending up. And Dan, you're correct. (Well, aside from the "he" part.) ;-) I was referring more to countries in the process of developing a football infrastructure than to the rich/poor issue. (I was actually hesitant to put Nigeria on the list, because so many talented players come from there. And in theory even the US could be on the "developing" list if we're talking about the way I was thinking about the issue when I wrote this post.)

And I didn't mean to offend or to lump Singapore in the same category as Togo and Qatar in 2004, importing players solely to beef up the national team. I was tossing out examples for the sake of argument, and Singapore was easy because there are several non-native-born players on the team who come from non-Brazil countries.

Personally, for what it's worth, I love seeing the smaller countries do well in international competition.

If the players (of any nation) meet the five-year requirement, then I think it's usually safe to say that most people would consider them citizens and this wouldn't be an issue. It sounds as if this is the case for most foreign-born Singapore players.

Thanks for your feedback.
Dan

I think he may have been talking in a soccer sense with regards 'developing'.
Joe

Take Puerto Rico. The island has little football tradition.. or talent.. but have, in the past year, started beating and competing with the best of Caribbean football.

How?

They use the fact that Puerto Ricans have American citizenship to field USMNT rejects that play for the Puerto Rico Islanders. About eight players on the team have only lived in PR for 2-3 years... It's legal, but is it fair? It's the other CONCACAF nations that field "truly" native players that suffer. The president of the Dominican FA filed a complaint against Puerto Rico after dropping out of World Cup Qualification to them, stating "If we really wanted, we could start naturalizing 30 Brazilians to play for that team, but it would be a shameful thing to do. It would be a Dominican team as much as this Puerto Rico would be Puerto Rican."

My point is.. it's the nations that don't shamelessly nationalize foreign players that suffer.
diana

Laurie, coming from Singapore myself, I have to explain that it's only after the foreign-born footballers who had obtained their Singapore citizenship then they are qualified to play in the national team.

Yes, I know we have footballers who are originally from Croatia, Serbia, Nigeria (like what you stated and speaking of Serbia, even our national coach is from there and I do give him credit for leading us into the World Cup qualifiers for the very first time in the history of the football scene here) but it's their choice. I know we also have one who is originally from England as well. I once read an interview that he was was happy to have settled down here (he even married a Singaporean) and does not regret it. But then it's not every single one on our national team who come from overseas. There are those who are born and bred here as well.

Yes, there was some sort of discussion of why are we having foreign-born footballers on our national team before but, as long as they feel they are part of the country, I have no issue with it. Being a born and bred Singaporean myself, I still support them. I am lucky I am witnessing a major milestone in our country's football scene. We almost came close to the World Cup qualifiers in the 70s (and I wasn't even born then). It's a big deal over here, coming from a country very crazy over the Premier League.

And Laurie, Singapore is not a developing country. We are already very developed here.
Laurie

Hana, what's funny is that I actually started to write this up as one more of those "Sepp says the darnedest things" posts and then realized it was a lot more interesting than that. I just went back and reread it and could see my own tone shift.
Hana

I have to say that my anti-Blatter impulse kicked in when i glanced at the headline. However, after reading it, I think that he makes a semi-valid point (for once...in the history of ever). That said, I still think this affects developing soccer nations a lot, lot more than World Cup regulars (I think his comment about Brazil 2014 is ridiculous). Most of these countries field teams that are almost entirely composed of players that were born there because they have a large, talented pool to choose from that play at a high club level within their own countries or abroad.

Of course there are always a few exceptions, at least this was the case in 2006, but many of these players, such as Alex for Japan, or Camoranesi for Italy, have deep roots in their respective countries, so it's not an issue. Camoranesi is very arguable actually, Mr. I don't know the words of the Italian anthem. Very interesting words he had regarding Italy's win: "I feel Argentine. But I have defended the colors of Italy with dignity. That is something nobody can take away." Then you have players like Amauri who are just trying to get called up wherever they can (Italy/Brazil in his case).

The argument gets a lot more interesting when one talks about growing soccer nations...very interesting fact about Singapore. Blatter's 6-5 solution makes a LOT more sense at the national level, rather than club, in my opinion. Or an 8-3. Or a 9-2. Or whatever random mixture of numbers suits your fancy.

Nice read, Laurie, I'm really interested to hear debate on this.
Mauro

It's a tough call.

The way things are now, everyone wins. The player gets to play on a bigger stage, the adopting nation gets a player of a level it sorely needs, the level of play for those nations is elevated if only slightly and the nation losing that player doesn't even realize it's lost another player or even cares that it lost another player.

I fail to really see the down side except that the adopting nation might be stunting the growth of their own players (much like the Premier League and La Liga) with their own imports but if it's a small nation than does that really matter? Are they really creating that much talent? Probably not.

If it gets out of hand to where a nation fields a team entirely of players not born in their country,(a la Arsenal) I could see that being a problem and the five year rule would help curb this from ever happening.

Five years seems excessive but could also make the sell a lot harder for these teams since the countries that have been recruiting players based on having a grandparent born within that country's borders and dismal football leagues don't stand a chance of getting those better players to live and play in those countries for five years should this "five year rule" come into effect.
Jon

It makes more sense than most of the things Sepp says, and it does seem to fit the *spirit* of international football better than the current system...