Quote:
Originally Posted by JayTeeMe
Can you just give a guy a passport if you want him for your team? That doesn't seem that hard. I literally only watch world cups but remember being annoyed at David Regis and Thomas Dooley playing for us. Especially when we were playing Germany and they did that piece about Dooley and how he'd never set foot in the USA before joining our national team.
I don't want USA soccer to be good because we steal other countries' players. I wanna cheer for Americans out there.
Thomas Dooley's dad was in the US Army, stationed in Germany.
Its pretty weird in all honesty, but you can play for the country of your mother's birth, your fathers birth, or your own birth, or if you immigrate to another country and live their for a certain amount of time w/o having been capped by anyone else. There are several guys in Germany that were born to US service people who could play for the US. Jermaine Jones is one of those people. You see weird things popping up all over the world now. Zlatan Ibrahimovic is Bosnian, but he plays for Sweden. Eduardo da Silva is Brazilian but plays for Croatia. Giuseppe Rossi is American, but plays for Italy. Neven Subotic is Serbian, but could have played for the US, instead he plays for Serbia.
I think by and large, most players are playing for the country they feel the strongest connection to, regardless of where they are born. There are obviously some exceptions to this though, like Deco for example, who basically decided to play for Portugal because he didn't think he would get on the Brazilian team.
Stak, I dunno about Dunga, but I really don't want Klinsmann