With the Republic of Ireland we have many English/Scottish even German born players declaring for Ireland(Selcuk Tidim/Patrick Kohlmann), this week Ciaran Clark has declared (Former England under 19 captain) and rumours about that Mark Noble of West Ham (Former under 21 England Captain) has declared. Obviously anybody playing for Ireland is great but when they have played for another nation is a bit much, what do you think in Germany when this happens?
International debate!
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With other words: if they cannot make it for England, they are looking for an Irish grandma and join the RoI squad. Don't think that is that good neither for the youngsters in the Republic nor the League of Ireland teams.
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If you play in the League of Ireland you will never play for the Republic of Ireland, every 4 or 5 years one gets called up to the squad but this is just a token gesture. The question is do you sacrifice a good team for pride?? Im not so sure. I dont mind if you are English, Welsh, Spanish playing for Ireland but I think if you already play for another country you should stick with it. Are there any German players who have played for other nations?
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Are there any German players who have played for other nations?
There are a lot of players in the world who possibly could have played for Germany. After 1945 many Germans settled in Argentina and other Southern America countries. You can still tell from their family names sometimes. Such as Gabriel Heinze.
And of course we have a lot of young folks whose parents came to Germany as "host workers" (do not know the english term). They were born in Germany and could play for us and some do, but often they play for the country of their parents. Most often Turkey (Hamit & Halil Altintop, Nuri Sahin).
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Totally different scenario compared with Germany imho. Most of the German players were born in Germany and played only for German teams.
Doesn't matter where your parents from but your first choice of a national team should last for a lifetime.
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Reklame:
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Didnt Kevin Prince Boateng do this with Germany and Ghana?
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He never played for the german national team (otherwise he would not have been allowed to change) but for all youth teams.
In his case, he simply wanted to play the world cup and as it is very hard to get in the german team he decided for Ghana.
In fact, since we have such a "multi-kulti society" here we have a lot of players who could play for two or more countries. In the actual roster of our national team Klose and Podolski could have played for Poland, Gomez for Spain, Özil for Turkey... Thats the curse/bless of having many foreign nationalities living here. I like it, because I think our team profits a lot, but there are a lot of users even in this forum, who hate the team for that fact.
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Jermaine Jones played a few friendlies for Germany, then he changed to play for the USA.
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Does that mean he has been capped by two different countries? Very wrong!
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It was possible because he only played in exhibition matches, like Glory Hunter wrote.
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Reklame:
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Does that mean he has been capped by two different countries? Very wrong!
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Didnt Kevin Prince Boateng do this with Germany and Ghana?
you can change the country you are playing for, if you didn't play for the adult team (till age 21) .
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you can change the country you are playing for, if you didn't play for the adult team (till age 21) .
You can even change the national team if you played for the adult team. If you only played friendlies for the adult team, you can still change the national team.