England's courtship of Wilfried Zaha and Raheem Sterling is just the start
Dual nationality is not a new phenomenon, but the England manager
will surely have to deal with a lot more of it in future
If there was a grading system for meaningless international friendlies – perhaps starting off at Meaningful Friendly, descending down through the gears of Fairly Meaningless Friendly right down to the far end and those terrible onerous Friendlies of Death in the bleak months when England have just failed to qualify for a tournament – then England's trip to play Sweden in Stockholm on Wednesday would no doubt earn a distinctly middling ranking.
It is, though, a first of a kind. With the selections of Raheem Sterling, Carl Jenkinson and Wilfried Zaha, Roy Hodgson has chosen an England squad that contains for the first time three potential debutants who could yet end up playing for another country. Of these three only Jenkinson, who has played for Finland at Under-17 and Under-19 levels, has openly pledged his future to England. Sterling, who is eligible to play for Jamaica, is still uncommitted.
Zaha, likewise, is undecided whether to opt for Ivory Coast. It is a state of uncertainty that will continue beyond this match, with only appearances in a competitive fixture considered a definitive nailing of the colours to the mast. Zaha could score a hat-trick for England on Wednesday and then go on to score the goal that knocks them out of the World Cup finals in Brazil in two years' time.
How you feel about this – and there will be plenty who see some conflict in it – possibly depends on how you feel about nationality itself in a wider context. What is certain is that we should approach the subject gently as there are genuinely difficult questions of cultural identity attached. Speaking about his footballing loyalties Zaha told the Guardian: "It's 50:50 because I was born in Ivory Coast, but all I know is England. When the time comes, I'll make a choice. For now, I just want to reach the top." Which sounds refreshingly honest and nuanced and human. Except that this is international football and it is possible for this kind of choice to become inflamed, from the fringes, by less coherent emotions.
Take for example the equally complex case of Sterling: a teenager who spent the first six years of his life in Jamaica, whose parents are Jamaican, and whose mother is said to favour her son representing the land of his birth. Hodgson's own comment last week on Sterling's failure as yet to commit himself either way was widely overlooked, but it hints at some frustration.
"Of course if you do have the option to play for two countries you can choose," Hodgson said. "He might just come to me and say 'Look, I don't want to play for you, I want to play for Jamaica'. But I hope that won't be the case. Certainly I'm hoping when he's called up here he'll be happy about that. I suppose I have the somewhat naive point of view that if you've been brought up in England and you have the chance to play for the national team that should be a very joyous occasion.I don't know that you should necessarily be looking over your shoulder to see if there are any other national teams that want to take you."
Careful, there, Roy. If there is something a little jarring about this it is the apparent analogy here with a player at the end of his contract having a shifty about to see if anybody else will take him on. Sterling's concerns are almost entirely the opposite of this. Money, for once, is not the primary concern here. Sterling's agent may or may not be pleading with him to plump for England – think of the contracts, Raheem, think of the status-boost: will somebody please think of the supermarket adverts? – but this is a man wrestling instead with more personal notions of loyalty and family.
If there is an obligation to tread with a little care here, it is worth noting that these issues are likely to become an increasingly significant aspect of managing an international team at a time when the old certainties – and the fixed point of nationality itself – are becoming increasingly blurred. Plus dual nationality has been common in the England team since the first generation of black English players in the 1970s. Cyrille Regis could also have played for France, via his French Guyanese roots. John Barnes, capped 79 times and a World Cup semi-finalist, might also have chosen Jamaica. Albeit, West Indian influence aside, there have been surprisingly few footballers taking the reverse-colonial route. Tony Dorigo was born and raised in Melbourne. Owen Hargreaves had never lived in England until he signed for Manchester United, six years after his first England cap.
The cases of Zaha and Jenkinson seem to point to a more urgent transformational force, a more generalised sense of globalism. Jenkinson has a Finnish mother.
Zaha's family came to England from Abidjan when he was four, a very London kind of story. Plus there is the nature of club football itself, a global bazaar, within which nationality starts to look slightly outmoded. Manuel Almunia was once touted, narrowly, as an unreliable overseas addition to England's domestic unreliable goalkeeping pool. Sylvain Distin could qualify for England (as well as Guadeloupe). Mikel Arteta was keen to play for England and Fabio Capello keen to have him until it emerged that the minutiae of Fifa regulations made him ineligible.
There will be more of this. Current rules demand not that the majority of a squad be English or Italian, but simply that those players qualify by being present in that country for three years before the age of 21 (Gaël Clichy and Arsenal's Denílson, for example, both count as home-grown, with the latter – currently on loan at São Paulo – also now eligible to play for England). Hence the anticipated hike in global through-traffic in the bigger clubs' academies and the imperative to sign talented players at a younger age. A generation of players currently emerging through this system in the Premier League will, in many cases, find themselves with a choice to make when it comes to international football.
Does any of this matter? It is tempting to accuse those who attach a value to provenance in international football of adopting an uncomfortably old-fashioned position. And also to point out that players have always changed trains: Luis Monti played for Argentina at the 1930 World Cup; four years later he was back playing for Italy (one losing final, one victorious). Alfredo Di Stéfano played for Argentina, Colombia and then Spain. Eduardo is as Croatian as the next man. Chris Birchall, born in Stafford, has been capped 39 times for Trinidad and Tobago and helped drive his adopted nation towards a World cup appearance.
If there is an argument against this kind of pluralism it is simply a systemic one, a sense that it is a shared footballing, rather than ethnic, identity that gives international football its basic – and in fact only – point. For the purist, international football is interesting because it represents a clash of systems, a testing of one footballing culture against another. It has intellectual rather than jingoistic interest: a macro-clash of coaching regimes, youth systems, of the simple notion of how, exactly , you're supposed to go about playing football.
This kind of interest will naturally be diluted when the boundaries become blurred, albeit at this point the notion of what is a footballing culture begins to take in the league that nurtures these players, the clubs behind them, just playing in the same geographical space. And really it is simply footballing nationality that counts, the question of where you learnt to play. The France team that won the World Cup in 1998 had four players born outside France and 11 squad members who were dual qualified. There is an argument to say what they represented best was not some rainbow notion of greater France but an unrepeatable generational success for the Clarefontaine academy, nothing more than a pool of talent brilliantly nurtured and managed.
It is probably best to see this kind of thing as an accurate reflection of the societies football entwines itself around. There will be more and more occasions in the future where choices must be made. It is a scenario Hodgson, Sterling and no doubt also Zaha will have to manage in the coming months. The depleted, lopsided England squad that travels to Sweden this week might even prove a landmark in its own way, an early staging post in a quietly inevitable reshaping of what it means to be an international footballer.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/nov/13/england-wilfried-zaha-raheem-sterling-courtship
