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.

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.

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.

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.

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.