Soccer times are well and truly changing, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the job national team head coaches are faced with. Before, coaches selected the best players available, and that was it, but now the job is different. On top of that, head coaches must now spearhead the process of identifying the best young prospects from around the globe who could eventually represent their national team.
This task has become increasingly complex, as coaches now have to navigate the eligibility of second and third-generation immigrants, as well as players who have spent little or no time playing in their country of origin. This makes talent identification, and ultimately deciding who can represent a nation, more challenging than ever. Additionally, it creates something that seems like a hidden transfer window for international soccer, when player movement is front and center, In the past, the national teams' player pools were much more static, even if divisions were present, even within the same family.
We had some concrete examples, such as the Boateng brothers, who opted to represent two different national teams. While Jerome represented Germany from 2009 to 2018, winning the 2014 FIFA World Cup, his brother Kevin-Prince chose to play for Ghana, as they both grew up in Berlin, Germany. The brothers were eligible for different national teams through their family background, with their mother being German and their father Ghanaian, and made different decisions.
This was mainly how it worked back then: you played for who you played for, and occasionally you had a choice to make, but it was very much the exception to the rule. But, as the society we live in evolved and changed, the national teams had to adapt. The French and the German national teams are widely considered the ones that worked most aggressively in this direction over the past decades.
For instance, the German national team integrated the second generation of Turkish immigrants. A notable example is Mesut Ozil, who represented Germany from 2009 until 2018, when he retired from international football following significant backlash over a picture of him and teammate Ilkay Gundoğan meeting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Both players were part of Germany's squad at the 2018 World Cup, where the defending champions were eliminated in the group stage.
As it often happens in these situations, it became a political topic in the country, and both players were widely criticised. Switzerland, perhaps more than any other team, came to rely heavily on second-generation immigrants and built one of the most consistent national teams around Europe with a team built with this mindset. Other countries were much more conservative about relying on the second generation of immigrants in the national teams, but at one point they were all forced to shift their approach, as is happening right now across most of the nations in the world.
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