Last summer during the World Cup, a TFC academy member caused minor ripples - really minor - by suggesting on the supperhour news that he eventually wanted to represent Uruguay at the World Cup.
Somehow during the interview it became known that the kid was born in Toronto. The fact he so brazenly suggested playing for a country other than Canada sparked debate on Twitter and supporter forums as to whether Canadian club academies should start making players agree to represent Canada as a condition of entry.
Leaving aside whether that would even be legally enforcable, it seems farfetched that an MLS club would deny an academy spot to some teenager it felt could be the next Lio Messi simply because he dreamed of playing for Argentina.
This issue is causing a stink in France right now. A huge stink actually, blowing up exponentially because it became tied up with comments by top French football officials about imposing racial quotas at club academies. The true concern in France is that kids with dual nationalities often attend French academies (or "take up space" in French academies) and turn out for French youth national sides, and then opt for their ancestoral countries internationally. Sound familiar?
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We live in times of unprecedented international migration. According to Statistics Canada, in the the Greater Toronto Area (which supplies a disproportionate amount of footballers to the mens' national team) about 76% of people over the age of 15 were either born outside Canada, or have at least one parent who was. That's a dramatic statistic. Assuming it holds roughly for those under 15, there are lots of kids kicking soccer balls around Toronto who - when it comes to playing internationally - have "options."
The current Fifa guidelines for determining a player's nationality basically come down to whether or not that player can get a passport for a given country. And passports can be easy to come by.
Fifa has two choices in this matter. The governing body could simply ride the status quo and watch international football devolve further into a situation resembling club football. That is to say, countries with the best training infrastructures and most prestigious programs aggressively recruiting the best players. And by recruiting, I mean that they find a way to get them passports or citizenship.
Or Fifa could implement some form of criteria beyond simply holding a passport. Something objective that could apply in 80% or more of cases, rendering the whole idea of "choice" in international football obsolete. Maybe it's something as simple as a birth certificate. If you weren't born in that country then you can't represent it. Applied retroactively that would immediately wipe out a huge portion of Canada's mens' national team and be supremely unfair to someone like Simeon Jackson who immigrated to Canada as a youngster.
Tying international eligibility to a birth certificate certainly goes against the grain of inclusive societies that accept and naturalize people from all over the world. But it would go a long
way toward ending the tiresome debate about "defectors" and who should be loyal to which country and why.
This debate plays out in obscurity in Canada, far below the media radar and therefore in the bigger world of football it doesn't really matter. But I'm willing to bet that the situation unfolding in France is the tip of the iceberg, as nations with huge immigrant populations and strong footballing pedigrees ponder how to deploy their resources in training the next generation. Forcing teenagers to pass some sort of loyalty test in order to get elite training hardly seems to be an acceptable solution.