Who are you supporting?

[Mame Biram Diouf]

 

 

 

 

 

born and raised here yet dont support the national team

shocking

truss

''aff teams only''

smh

Whats wrong with Africans supporting other Africans

 

 

Born here, live here, raised here, favourite league is the Pl, work here, adopt a more english and westernised culture all year, then every 4 years come summer you are this new born African who disregards supporting England at all, 

 

Nothing wrong with Africans supporting other teams

 

I am talking about this whole ''lol @ england'' thing people do whether they be supporting the country their parents or grandparent are from or the newest hipster team

 

Just doesnt make sense to me

 

I am sure Welbeck cares about Ghana and will be supporting them too, but he also realises who gave him the chance to get where he is and where he lives etc and will put on an England shirt and give his best

 

 

Where is your family from?

 

 

 

Mumbai 

[yhyh]

OI

 

IAM GASSED

[The Infamous]

Lol stop reading when jack said season tickets blah blah

[Captain Planet]

Ghana is where my heart is, I knew this when I was near reduced to tears following last WC.

I don't feel that love for England, maybe the fact that I have a strong attachment to Ghana aids that too.

England is actually nothing to me, infact London carries more weigh in my heart than England qualified by the disparity between the city and the rest of the UK.

2nd team I'm backing is Ivory Coast just because of the wife though I do feel some way.

After that I couldn't care less, just want to see good football.

[cambridgebanteer]

Iran... Worst team in the wc. Having nightmares about Messi, kun and di Maria gona do to us. Kind of stuff you should only shows on TV after 11pm, them post post watershed rape scenes

[Afroman]

 

 

 

Dont think you man understand the true nature of supporting a national team, where you're emotionally involved and desperately want them to win. Its far more than football, its national pride. There is no Way a black geazer from london can feel that national pride for brazil. Although you may want em to win, you wont be emotionally involved like an english bloke will be for the three lions. You wont be reduced to anger, tears, or frustration. And you wont experience that euphoric buzz when england win and you are surrounded by your fellow countrymen all going nuts. COME ON ENGLAND!!!!!

 

This isn't about football, you're talking about national pride and a lot of people don't have that because for whatever reason they feel as if they're not fully accepted or part of the nation.

 

The same man that struggle to grasp this are often the same ones that vote BNP / back the EDL, how's that for irony.

 

 

I wish I left it and didn't go back and read the last page. I bet this thread is full of howlers like this.

 

Such a stupid thing to say; anyone who reads this and can't see through it's ignorance should be embarrassed.

 

 

This isn't ignorance, it's based on real life but  I'll elaborate for you.

 

What we're talking about here has very little to do with football, it's a societal issue that just happens to manifest itself when an event takes place that brings into question the notion of national pride. 

 

There are a lot of people of ethnic origin born here who don't feel as if they're an accepted part of this nation, that isn't even up for debate it's just a fact. From experience these people tend to feel that way as a result of the way they've been treat or received by people who claim to be the real English people, ie white english people.

 

The problem is this creates a vicious cycle because people who live here that express they don't have a sense of national pride are then held up as an example of multi cultural Britain not working by the very people who are at least partly responsible for making them feel that way in the first place, which then reinforces the feeling that they aren't really accepted here.

 

the problem I have with people like Phil is that rather than understand why people feel the way they do they just write it off as bollocks which does nothing but reinforce people's ill feelings.

 

What's ignorant, stupid, or embarrassing about that?

 

posd

[ag.]

if england do well i'll be firmly on di 3 lion bandwagon

as will basically anyone else that says they cant support ingerluund

[O Fenomeno]

After Saturday Night

It feels like 2002 all over again

So Brazil for me 1st then Africa followed by Argentina/Uruguay(£££)

[zoot]

can't see england getting very far

 

[Seydou]

300 k you man. Ffs

[Guest28]

300 k you man. Ffs

[Afroman]

 

300 k you man. Ffs

 

[Thizz]

Jokes but that was 10 years ago.

[Guest Chelsea Jack]

Lol stop reading when jack said season tickets blah blah

 

that was phil boy

 

but out of curiosity have you ever been to anfield?

[O Fenomeno]

Need to find out where they do a flag which contains the map of africa.

[Nidge Weasle]

just hung the flags out!

 

bring it on

 

 

/

 

one of my locals got a complaint from the council for only hanging England flags.  what a joke

[time_bomb]

just hung the flags out!

 

bring it on

 

 

/

 

one of my locals got a complaint from the council for only hanging England flags.  what a joke

 

sounds like daily mail type gas to me, the guy probably didnt wanna spend any money so used it as an excuse

[Nidge Weasle]

its a new family and they've spent alot doing the place up, flags everywhere and now theyve added mini ones of all the other teams.

[Zizouz]

just hung the flags out!

 

bring it on

 

 

/

 

one of my locals got a complaint from the council for only hanging England flags.  what a joke

 

nah that's some A grade trolling

[Nidge Weasle]

i swear down bruv!

[kerser]

Can't beleive it has come around already! I am supporting england, Ghana and would also like to see Belgium do well

[Flojo]

'The imagined nation of millions is never more real than as a team of eleven named individuals', wrote Eric Hobsbawm.

 

That may need updating for the age of tactical squad rotation, but the football World Cup remains the most popular international celebration of nationhood. That makes the 2014 World Cup a global showcase for how generations of migration and integration have reshaped national identity as a civic ideal.

 

Strikingly, two-thirds of the footballers at the World Cup are migrants.

 

Of the 736 players selected for the tournament, no fewer than 478 (65%) live and work outside the countries whose shirts they wear, while just 258 play at home, according to British Future analysis of the thirty-two World Cup squads.

 

This migrant-majority World Cup mostly tells a story of skilled emigration, reminding us that migration is also a game of two halves.

 

Only Russia takes an entirely insular view - the only country to pick a World Cup squad of 23 from players who all live and work at home. And even they are overseen by Italian coach Fabio Capello, the former England manager.

 

The England squad are a close second to Russia when it comes to playing at home not away - with 22 English Premier League players joined by a goalkeeper based in Scotland, Fraser Forster, who made the short trip from Newcastle to Glasgow's Celtic.

 

But England tops the league for receiving the skills of the World Cup migrants. One in six World Cup footballers live and work here: 119 players, including 97 who will play for twenty-seven other World Cup teams, placing England well ahead of Italy (63), Germany (58), Spain (51) and France (37) as hosting World Cup migrant players. So fans of at least one club in some corner of England will surely retain a parochial interest in the foreign fields of Brazil right up to the final whistle, however England fare, unless there is an Italy v Russia final, or the only other teams without an English connection (Colombia, Ecuador and Switzerland) were to upset all of the odds.

 

The England team itself is the product of integration, rather than immigration. Raheem Sterling came to England from Jamiaca as a five year old. That at least eight of his 22 English-born team-mates are the sons or grandsons of migrants simply reflects the demographic pattern of modern

 

England: ESRC research shows that over a third of the population of England have at least one parent or grandparent who was a migrant from outside Britain.

 

The migrant heritage of our Three Lions includes the Irish roots of Wayne Rooney, the Spanish heritage of Adam Lallana, and Phil Jageilka's Polish refugee grandparents of Phil Jagielka, who arrived in Manchester during the second world war. Jageilka's father first learnt English when he started school.

 

Nobody finds anything remarkable about the everyday reality of our multi-ethnic England team. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is a third generation Brit, whose Dad played for England a generation ago. Indeed, when Mark Chamberlain scored his first goal for England in 1983 he would have been the first black player to score for England, except that Luther Blissett had scored twice earlier in the same match. Perhaps the least known Three Lions story of integration is the mixed heritage of England's rising star Ross Barkley, who revealed that his  Nigerian grandfather could have made him eligible to bring his Scouse talents to Nigeria's Super Eagles, had he not chosen to play for England.

 

You do need not be born in a country to wear its shirt with pride. 83 World Cup footballers (11%) were not born in the countries they represent - more than one in each of Hobsbawm's XI.  Many more are the children and grandchildren of migrants.

 

Australia's Socceroos are an entirely home-grown bunch. Only Dario Vidosic was born abroad, and he arrived as a one year old from Croatia when his father went to play soccer in Melbourne. The names of born and bred Aussies such as Mark Bresciano, Eugene Galekovic, Massimo Luongo, Ryan McGowan and Matthew Spiranovic now tell the story of Australian integration.

 

The European players most often talked about in their national media as symbolising the changing face of the nation - such as Germany's Mehmet Ozil or Belgian captain Vincent Kompany were also mostly born in the country they represent. As Ozil has said: "I am third generation in Germany: my father grew up here. Turkey will always be a special country for me but I did not doubt my decision to play for Germany - ever".

 

So was Italy's Marco Balotelli, born in Palermo, though he couldn't represent his country at youth level until receiving citizenship on turning 18.

 

Perhaps unexpectedly, it is the USA team whose foreign-born players have sparked public controversy this year, even though four of its five German-born players were the sons of US military personnel. Former coach Bruce Arena has been among those to criticise coach Jurgen Klinsmann, suggesting that he may be seeking the Germanification of Team America.

 

But there are losers as well as winners from World Cup migration.

 

The country of birth most likely to be rejected by a World Cup footballer, to play for somebody else, is France. No fewer than 25 French-born footballers will represent other teams in Brazil, ahead of Germany (14) and Brazil (5). The sole English-born player to play for another country is the Lambeth-born Middlesborough striker Albert Adomah. Having lived in Ghana until he was nine, and who has seized an unlikely chance to play at a World Cup for the Black Stars.

 

16 of the Algerian squad of 23 being born in France. This partly reflects an active Algerian strategy of diaspora recruitment, broadly similar to that which took the Republic of Ireland to several World Cups.  But do the number of French-born players in the Algeria, Cameroon, Ghana and Ivory Coast sides also say something about the shortcomings of French integration?

 

Cameroon player Assou-Ekotto, born in Arras, France to a French-born mother, thinks that it does. He has spoken about his surprise at finding that his black British Tottenham team-mates naturally think of themselves as English.

 

He told the Guardian that  "the country does not want us to be part of this new France. So we identify ourselves more with our roots.  Me playing for Cameroon was a natural and normal thing. I have no feeling for the France national team; it just doesn't exist. When people ask of my generation in France, 'Where are you from?', they will reply Morocco, Algeria, Cameroon or wherever. But what has amazed me in England is that when I ask the same question of people like Lennon and Defoe, they'll say: 'I'm English.' That's one of the things that I love about life here."

 

France has done rather less with the inclusive patriotism of its World Cup and European champions of 1998 and 2000 than many had anticipated.

 

Yet the French 2014 squad does again capture the story of migration to France. Two of its players were born abroad - and more than half of the French squad have migrant heritage. Lille midfielder Rio Muavba's father had played at the 1974 World Cup for Zaire. But Muavba's own birth certificate reads "born at sea", as he was born, without a nation, on a boat, as his parents fled the Angolan civil war in 1984, before the family was granted refugee status in France. "I grew up in France, and I am French", Muavba said, when turning down the offer to play for Congo instead.

 

The story of World Cup migration is also one of journeys from the global south to the north. Three-quarters of those representing non-European nations (324 out of 437) are footballing migrants.

 

Just 9 of the 115 players for African countries play in their home countries. The Brazilian hosts have only four players based at home.

 

European national teams have a more even balance of those who earn their living abroad (154) or at home (145). The English, German, Italian and Spanish squads are mostly based home-based as, outside Europe, is the Mexican team, with just eight players based outside Mexico.

 

Bosnia's squad tells a more recent story of a diaspora scattered by civil war. Five of its members were born abroad. Another five were born in Bosnia, yet were youth internationals wearing the shirts of adopted countries - Holland, Canada, Germany - before choosing to play for Bosnia.

 

The European country to benefit most from migration into its football team is probably Switzerland, with six foreign-born players, including four from the former Yugoslavia, and another half a dozen players of migrant heritage.

 

Swiss football fans certainly feel that they have developed a much less predictable and more creative attacking football team - but the recent referendum shows that it hasn't resolved the country's anxieties about immigration.

 

Perhaps that Swiss experience captures a strange 'double life' of immigration. For the next month, the popular press across Europe will be packed with stories about migrants - just as long as you turn to the back-pages. 'Immigrant' tends to be a term we reserve for the unfamiliar, unknown foreigner - which may be why we seldom notice that so many of our football heroes are immigrants too.

 

If World Cup migration is unlikely to settle the politics of migration, it could yet alter the destiny of the World Cup.

 

The fans in the Maracana will fear that Diego Costa's decision to choose to play for Spain instead of his native Brazil could come back to haunt them if the hosts were to meet the World Cup holders.

 

Tonight, Brazil will need to be wary of the two Brazilian-born players in the Croatian squad. Striker Eduardo da Silva is a naturalised Croatian and has said he will sing both anthems before the game tonight. But any goals he scores will count for Croatia.

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/staggers/2014/06/world-cup-tournament-nations-and-migrants

[Flojo]

Beer in hand, a U.S. fan wearing a Landon Donovan jersey walked down the stands, closer to shouting range. A few feet away, U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati stood on the field before an exhibition game against Turkey at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, N.J.

 

“He’s a legend,” the fan said, his voice rising. “How do you sleep at night, Sunil?” The twenty-something fan raged on about coach Jurgen Klinsmann’s decision to cut Donovan from the World Cup team before shouting, “They don’t even speak English!”

 

They are the dual nationals, most notably the five German-Americans on the team — Jermaine Jones, Fabian Johnson, Timmy Chandler, John Brooks and Julian Green. Four are the sons of U.S. servicemen. All were raised in Germany and English is their second language.

 

Then there’s Mix Diskerud, who has an American mother but grew up in Norway. Aron Johannsson, born while his parents were studying in the USA, was raised in Iceland.

 

Countries relying on players who grew up elsewhere is not a new, nor American, phenomenon. “It’s a process other nations went through 10 to 20 years ago,” Klinsmann said, citing 1998 World Cup champion France, as well as Germany in the previous two World Cups. “Now it’s happening more and more with the United States. It gives us a new dimension.”

 

Look through the rosters of the 32 World Cup teams in Brazil, and dual nationals abound. Mexico has two players born in the USA on its squad. Iran has an American-born defender who plays for Vancouver in Major League Soccer. Spain, the defending World Cup champ, features Diego Costa, who made the controversial decision to pick La Roja over his native Brazil.

 

Though three of the seven dual national players were courted before Klinsmann took over the program, there has been a subtle, and not so subtle, undercurrent about the Germanification of the American team throughout his tenure.

 

When Klinsmann cut Donovan, the face of American soccer, and added 19-year-old Green, a promising unknown with 31 minutes of U.S. game experience, the critics took aim on social media and soccer message boards.

 

The crossfire, and the code words, sounded like a debate between Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow. Should a player with little connection to the country take the spot of someone who came up through the American system and helped the team qualify for Brazil? Will a player raised elsewhere fight for the flag and care as much as someone raised in red, white and blue?

 

“I understand the point; I don’t agree with the point,” Gulati said. “What would one do? Say to the coach, you can only pick players who have been here for 25 years and have certain roots? Well, I’d be talking to a coach who has roots somewhere else if I made that sort of statement.

 

“My very strong comment about it is that four of the five [German-American] players we’re talking about here are American citizens by nature of having an American serviceman father. If Bruce Arena or anyone else wants to tell me they have less of a right to play for the United States, we strongly disagree.”

 

Arena, who coached the 2002 and 2006 teams, doesn’t think relying on dual nationals is good for the growth of the game in the USA.

 

“I’m a big believer in the American player and producing them out of our system. I think that ultimately is what will develop the sport in our country; not on the field but with the consumer”

Arena said. “When they can recognize our players and who they are and where they came from, they’ll be more supportive of the sport, and that’s a big plus in terms of marketing. When we do it with randomly selecting people from all over that really have no connection, I don’t think it hits home with people we want supporting our sport and our national team.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's interesting looking at how players born outside the nations they represent are being received, especially in the case of America because the majority of them are children of servicemen which you would think would buy them some leeway. 

[Tee]

 

just hung the flags out!

 

bring it on

 

 

/

 

one of my locals got a complaint from the council for only hanging England flags.  what a joke

 

nah that's some A grade trolling

 

 

 

tbf i have hered stuff like this before

 

& this year i aint seen much flags

 

/

 

 

some school cant say happy christmas any more due to complaints/religion

 

have to say happy holidays or something like that