general media Players with foreign backgrounds playing for national teams in sports

[Mesme Rize 15,681]

(If this topic is too political, please put it in the debate pit, or however it is called now. )

For awhile now, it has been a big topic in sports, especially when it comes to Football. National teams that have players with foreign backgrounds.

There are a few top teams in europe that have several of them. The current world champions france have several players that have african backgrounds and our german team have players with turkish backgrounds (Gündogan) Senegalese (Leroy Sane) and even Sierra Leone (Antonio Rüdgier)

And i wonder, is this is such a big problem? I mean yeah, it's not easy intigrating foreigners, especially if they are just here for the free money. But these players are in my opinion great guys, especially considering that they where born in germany and barely spend their lifes in the old country.

Just because they have different colors, dosen't mean they have no right to play for the country that they are proud of and that gave them everything that they have achieved, dosen't matter what certain Nazi groups are saying.

What are your views on this matter. Do you agree, or is it a bit more complicated then i think?

[Guest]

I think it does kind of defeat the point of being patriotic toward your country’s team to be honest. I mean I’m not saying it’s not fair but it is a little dumb when people cheer for their country and brag about their country’s team when the team is not even made up of players from said country.

[The Historian 515]

Do the players have a legal citizenship to live in said country? If so, you don't get to whine about them being on the team. Far as I'm concerned, if they decided to become a citizen of another country, they're now part of it. Immigration is a thing - get used to it.

[Here No Longer 5,270]

I don't see why it matters...

If somebody wants to represent their country in a sporting event, they should be able to regardless if they were born there or not. 

Edited March 21, 2019 by ~Dusky~
More detailed answer.

[SharpWit 2,472]

For me it's about being born in the country. I have a problem already with our American Football teams trading players. I love it when the Seahawks do well, but I can only get so excited knowing that almost everyone on that team isn't from the area. There's no pride to be had in them being a product of the Pacific NW because they aren't.

For football abroad, you can have any background, but I think you should have been born in the country you're representing, or at the very least have grown up in it for the majority of your life. This goes for every sport, all the way up to the Olympics.

[Divine plywood 1,232]

In general I don't mind if athletes have different backrounds or roots than the majority of the country they reprecent. If they have citizenship, it should be the only thing that matters. Tone of one's skin or where their family originates from shouldn't be an issue.

However, there's always the "but"...

For some time now, certain countries like Bahrain, Qatar and Turkey have aggressively scouted for talented foreing sportsmen/women - most notably African runners from Kenya or Ethiopia - and straight up "bought" them to reprecent their new homelands in the international arenas. This isn't anything new, but the scale of things have gotten even bigger in the recent years. And it's not only the few rich arab states that are doing this. Many European countries have made some pretty shady deals in order to get top tier athletics under their colours. Sweden for example, hasted the handling of nationality process of Ethiopian runner Abeba Aregawi in 2012- conveniently just before Word championships of Athletics held in 2013... she never lived in Sweden, not before or after she was granted citizenship. To top that, she later gave positive results in doping tests  Saddly, few bad apples spoil the whole punch

Be it steroids or bought foreing athletics, cheating is still cheating. Politics are ruining sports for good.