Jon Bright (London, OK): OurKingdom lost a chance at a hatfull of easy metaphors for Salmond's rise and Brown's fall on Saturday when the football results went against Scotland and for England. (Of course Brown is Scottish - but the politician who once declared Paul Gascoigne's goal against Scotland in Euro 96 his greatest footballing moment will know that, politically speaking, it pays for him to support England).
Denied my chance at a bit of easy copy, I was almost despairing of writing about sport at all, when I came across this (slightly old) story in Everything Ulster - FIFA have, apprently, suggested that players born anywhere in Ireland (i.e. NI or the Republic) should be free to choose which of the two sides they play for. As EU notes, this is tantamount to abandoning the idea that footballers should generally play for the 'nation' they are born into.
Football isn't, as a general rule, really that interested in politics. But it does have an uncanny knack of highlighting political problems. The UK, because of its exceptional status within FIFA (normally only nation-states recognised by the UN are allowed to form 'national' sides - we, of course, are forming four) seems to come across them more frequently than most. And here FIFA are getting, probably unwittingly, into a key philosophical battleground. What is a nation, after all?
The above dispute arose because Darron Gibson, born in NI, has nevertheless elected to play for the Republic. Why shouldn't he be allowed to choose? On libertarian grounds, there seems to be a strong case for someone being allowed to make their own minds up. International football is full of examples of players choosing countries, of course (though they are only allowed to choose once). But the system functions on the general premise that most people want to play for where they were born: international football is inconceivable without the idea of national loyalty.
However, the fact that FIFA must have rules on which nation players can play for seems, peversely, an admission of a tacit assumption that these nations actually don't really 'mean' that much - the idea that if footballers were not forced to play for the country of their birth, many of them wouldn't. International tournaments would simply turn into another version of club football: players feigning some institutional loyalty, but generally congregating around those teams which have the highest chances of generating rewards (whether in terms of money, or winners medals).
Is this assumption correct? It makes a lot of sense to me. But doesn't it say something about the cohesiveness of today's 'nations' that they exist only, in footballing terms at least, because of rules enforced by the governing body?
