Kerim Frei has decided that the Turkish International team is his preference and is in line for his first cap on 15th August - 3 days before the start of the new season http://www.turkish-football.com/news_read.php?id=3059
You gave me a fright there ! Cottager - I love how you find all this information on Fulham from so many different sources. Must take hours - much appreciated.
He probably either has a parent from each of Switzerland and Turkey (likely, as I believe Frei is a Swiss name and Kerim is Turkish?) or a grandparent. Players usually choose either the best nation (in footballing terms!) or the team they have more chance of getting into.
That's exactly what I hate about international football. The whole point of it is to represent your country. If you asked Frei what nationality he is what would he say?
Frei was born in Austria, raised in Switzerland and has a Turkish father and Moroccan mother, so it makes more sense for him to play for Turkey than it does Switzerland - a country he left at the age of 16 to join Fulham anyway. The good thing for us is that he didn't decide to represent Morocco, so we're not going to lose him to the African cup of nations.
To be fair, Fulhamireland, some players choose to play under a flag of convenience while others wait to see if they get a chance with the country that they genuinely see themselves as belonging to. I recall that Bobby Zamora was offered the chance to play for Trinidad and Tobago (I think) at the 2006 World Cup, but decided to wait and see if he ever got a chance with England. Frei might be picking the country that offers him the best prospects, or he might be reflecting his own sense of identity. Probably the likes of us will never know which. Fulhamish is right that, from a Fulham perspective, it's good news that he's gone for a European option rather than African. I seem to recall some fuss a year or so back when Dalla Valle decided to stop playing for Finland's junior teams in order to leave his eligibility for Italy still open. The Finn's weren't impressed! Mind you, on the basis of his performances in the last year, I'm not sure how impressed the Italians are any more.
I know that's the case Captain but I don't think it's right. Personally if I was somehow eligible to play for some other country I wouldn't. I'm Irish therefore I would only represent Ireland. We've had a lot of as Liam Lawrence described them as 'fake Irish' players playing for us over the years and I don't like it. Jermaine pennant said he would consider playing for us if he didn't get an England chance. Maybe I'm being selfish but I'd rather have Irish players representing Ireland. I don't understand how some players can play for a country and then suddenly decide they aren't that nationality any more they are a different one?
Ireland do seem to get the ****ty end of the stick in that respect. I always found it funny that Andy Townsend (who I bloody hate as a pundit, as a side note) played all those games for Ireland yet has the most obvious cockney accent. Let's not forget Ryan Giggs. He could've played for England but chose Wales, that took guts!
Or Tony Cascarino, the half English-half Italian Irishman. The thing about Giggs was that he was never actually eligible for England, he represented England at a schoolboys tournament as because he was going to school in England. He was more eligible for Sierra Leone than he was for England.
Haha, Tony Cascarino is a good one! As Irish as Spag Bol! And I didn't know that about Giggs. Remember when Almunia was talking about playing for England? That would've been silly.
As was Mikel Arteta, both clearly Spanish. That's what I really don't like about how easily people can switch nationalities. Marcos Senna is Brazilian born to Brazilian parents, raised in Brazil and has 28 caps for Spain. It's crazy!
There's a bit in Cascarino's autobiography saying how, late in his Irish career, he discovered that he wasn't eligible to have played for them after all - his Irish mother had skeletons in her closet concerning her biological parents, or something like that. He hadn't known when he was approached, and she never said anything until years later. But it isn't entirely straightforward. When I lived in Scotland I knew people who regarded themselves as Irish Scots (or vice versa) - born in Scotland but from families who retained a strong sense of their Irish roots. Ray Houghton (born in Glasgow) may well be a good example of that. Strictly speaking, the four home nations could poach each others players much more, but they have an agreement not to. As all four are from the same political entity, FIFA would be happy for any brit to play for England, or for Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. The four associations have agreed a criteria (place of birth or parents p-o-b, I think) that is more exactly than FIFA requires to stop wholesale poaching from going on. In the late 80s/early 90s Scotland wanted to pick Nigel Spackman who was then starring for Rangers and who was clearly surplus to England's requirements but backed down when they realised that it could mark the end of the deal and them seeing their best talents being plucked away from them. I think the above is correct. I haven't checked any of my facts, but I was living in Scotland when the Spackman thing happened and that's my memory of it from the time.
I know there is a lot of people who consider themselves to have a dual-nationality but if you play for one at an under-age level surely that's saying that you are the nationality of that country, then when it gets to senior level you switch. It doesn't make sense to me.
I think it's a prestige thing. Turkey are a marginally bigger footballing country than Switzerland, though the Swiss played the 2010 WC and Turkey didn't. The USA has both been the victim, and beneficiary of it. Top striker Giuseppi Rossi from Valencia was born and raised in New Jersey, but refused to play for the USA opting instead for Italy, which has offered him few chances to actually play. But who would you rather play for: USA or Italy? On the other side, Scotland-born but USA-raised Stuart Holden (Bolton midfielder) plays for the USA rather than his home country. Everyone's looking for the bigger, better deal.
He has a Turkish Father and Moroccan Mother but was raised in Switzerland so has Swiss nationality. I think he was born in Austria. With all of those permutations and not one half decent footballing nation...
Actually Giggs never had the choice (remember a tabloid article with an associate of Giggs' who said that Giggs had told him he would have chose England if he could.....which explains his lack of commitment for us). Ryan Giggs was born in Cardiff, as was both of his parents. Only moved North because his father went to play Rugby League for Salford. He played for England schoolboys because that's where he went to secondary school, captained them actually. If his father had gone and plied his trade in another European country he would have qualified for them, but there are different rules of eligibility in the UK because of our unique situation of having 4 football associations (4 nationalities) within 1 nation state.
And without wanting to blow my own trumpet, I raised the different rules for British nations thing yesterday as well. Thanks, though!
