Rugby's June internationals: what is nationality?

With the European club rugby season over, squads are out for southern hemisphere test tours, of which three marquee contests - Ireland in Australia, England in South Africa and France in New Zealand - feature six of the world's top eight nations. This inevitably arouses debate regarding players of indeterminate, dual or downright dubious nationality; I have therefore analysed the connections of each player to these six rugby nations, with apologies to Scotland and Wales.

This is a rugby blog, but the topic pervades sport and, I'm led to believe, goes beyond it: what is nationality and how is it defined? It's complicated, and people can mostly settle for that answer, but international sport needs clarity and consistency in order to be meaningful. It's very modern and worthy to be purely a 'citizen of the world', but that would be a world in which team loyalties are only bought with money by franchises, with no world cups, no Ashes and a very different Olympics.

Already today, wealthy nations use cash and passports to artificially boost their sporting reputations. Many examples occur in individual sports like tennis and athletics, but that's a topic for another day, and until then we can mentally correct athletes' flags as we see fit. In team sports the problem is more pernicious, since an incorrectly patriated player shares that flag with the rest of the group. I want to support national teams that belong to my nation; do a few bad apples spoil the bunch?

All team sports have issues of fabricated nationality: football's rich states cram national sides with Brazilian mercenaries; cricket's ring-fenced landscape leads players to difficult choices; U.S. baseball and basketball players could fill every national team, and sometimes do; but rugby's mix of post-colonial global spread, hemispheric economic skew, and - as we shall see - talent depth in three financially vulnerable island nations, creates perfect conditions for chaotic exploitation of nationality.

To make this discussion accessible to absolutely everyone, here's a point that may seem obvious but is missed by sporting ingenues: Worcester Warriors club players are not all from Worcester, or even England, which is okay because club teams are operated on commercial lines with no representative obligation; the England team, on the other hand, exists to represent England, and its players must be English or else the team need not exist. This bipartite system exists in all team sports worldwide.

The six squads analysed have been selected within World Rugby's national eligibility rules. To state this makes no contribution to the debate which I intend to address: not about what the rules are, but what they should be. Also, I don't wish to identify which nations are the worst offenders, rather to explore the various circumstances that lead to the offence. As the proudly English parent of an Aussie-born dual citizen, I have a vested interest in getting to the bottom of this!

I've included a 'B' list of England players, including the training squad and those unavailable due to injury or fatigue management, because I'm invested in the integrity of my national team and happy to air dirty laundry if it prevents accusations of bias. Let's start at the frivolous end of the scale:

The first fallacy to refute is that every player has only one nationality. Fans criticise rivals for picking 'foreigners', when in fact many players of mixed descent would be subject to criticism whichever team they chose. This first list of players, highlighting World Rugby's grandparent rule, probably made the right choice, but a couple might've been begged to reconsider if not for Jonny Sexton.

Each list is in ascending order of dubiousness of the player's eligibility for his chosen team, assessed informally by me based on a number of factors, including clarity of available information, apparent strength of connection to another nation (Taufua played age group games, then switched) and viability of actually switching team - sometimes the alternative nation doesn't even play rugby.

Even then there's a distinction between some changes which actually ought to happen and others which would just be nice in an ideal world: five players above could leave well resourced squads to strengthen the teams of Spain, Portugal, Tonga and Samoa, but should they? Well, for Fainga'a and Taufua there might be a case to answer, because in Australia and New Zealand's culturally strong expatriate islander communities it's hard to distinguish between 'descent' and parents' nationality.

These guys had a trickier choice to make, and it's notable that 9/10 chose Mum over Dad - even the exception, Vellacott, chose Mum at first... These early tables are self explanatory, and still feature players with a solid case for their choice of national team. However, I'm a believer in following your parents' footsteps, so Coleman and Ioane's respective declarations seem like missed opportunities. Note also that Mercer almost chose a third path - truly, every case has its own nuances.

Even as I reiterate that no player or nation has yet been criticised, Kiwi readers are crying foul at the preponderance of their heroes in this analysis. New Zealanders are spiky at any accusation of All Black 'islander poaching', and I agree that they receive undue criticism. As the biggest Pacific island nation, New Zealand has large and, crucially, multi-generational immigrant communities, especially from Tonga and Samoa. This gives the national team an unusually cosmopolitan image, but there are in fact very few actually dubious cases - an argument made at greater length in this piece.

This is just a short list to illustrate that some players have multiple extra options if they're prepared to get creative. Fickou was always going to choose France, but Cipriani might've unearthed an Italian grandparent if he'd known how few test opportunities he'd get during his prime, while Kruis faces a constant battle for selection in England's second row but could have 100 caps by now for his father's native Canada. I'd have no problem with either choice, because for players to take such downward steps as these (in rankings terms) strengthens weaker nations at little detriment to stronger ones.

('Move' is the player's age when he moved to his nation of choice. Sometimes 'Young' is all I find.)

Next we have a first opportunity to dismiss the simplistic pub bore's notion that that nationality is defined by where you're born. Jordi Murphy is no more Spanish than Bradley Wiggins is Belgian or my sister is South African, despite the respective birthplaces of all three. Underhill and Marmion briefly teased Wales with third party eligibility, as the Vunipola brothers will later - the consequence of a soft border that can only be rectified by full devolution, but that's a rant for another day.

Shields' case is fresh and controversial, but the dispute relates to the timing of his selection with respect to England's rules on players employed overseas; were he already playing for Wasps there would be far fewer headlines, but he'll debut for England first. His move age is high, but with English parents he need not move at all as far as I'm concerned. The deeper issue is that those parents made their own childhood moves the other way. That's the problem with defining nationality based on the birthplace of parents or grandparents: it creates a circular argument.

Now we invert the scenario, with players representing the nation of their birth despite both parents hailing from elsewhere. If that elsewhere is Guadeloupe or Algeria this seems an excellent choice; I also respect Mo'unga's decision not to favour one parent over the other; but it would be nice to see Nigeria's pack boosted by three top recruits. Then come a procession of players lost to the islands of their heritage in favour of stronger nations, but with birthplace on their side I can't begrudge them.

Well, not all of them... McGuigan was a junior Irish representative so it's a shame that he switched. As for Kepu though: having spent your teens and early 20s in NZ, playing junior internationals for Tonga, no doubt to your proud parents' delight, why then play for Australia, even if you were born there? There's some muddled thinking here, coupled with a blasé sense of entitlement among the wealthier national boards. I'm still not quite saying it's wrong, but it doesn't seem entirely right.

These players of both overseas birth and mixed parentage at first seem only tenuously attached to their rugby nations. Ranking them by move age seems to clear the confusion: Te'o's Englishness definitely seems like an afterthought, and Harrison is just as bad when you consider that his dad made a young move of his own in the other direction; the top five moved much younger, and have every right to set aside their connections to weaker nations - or, in Carbery's case, to play safe.

This seemingly concentrated collection of England B players in fact features the incumbent national captain in Dylan Hartley. His case more than any other has me sitting on the fence: New Zealand born and raised, he must have been a handy player already in order to fixate on a future in English colours; does he just really love his mum, or did the precocious teenager identify a smoother path to test rugby by migrating north? I've almost grown to accept him just as his career enters its twilight.

It's time to talk about residency. Nobody truly believes that World Rugby's residency rules for players with no birth or family connection to a nation are sufficient. The minimum period has risen from three years - absurd - to five - still paltry, and even that hasn't taken effect yet. I believe that, for a player to qualify purely on residency, he should have lived in the country from a young age. This is a sliding scale and it's hard to draw a line, but I'm going to anyway: if you move to a country before you're a teenager, then you've a decent case for representing that country as an adult.

There are plenty of players who qualify this way, so first I've listed those who had to choose between three nations. If there's a conflict between your birthplace and your parents' nationality, then it's even more understandable to choose your nation of long term residence. There's also the issue of where or how you became a rugby player: despite the potential of his Kiwi-Samoan background, Tui was a latecomer to rugby - all the more reason for Australia to claim him. Redpath, though, surely owes a great deal to his international scrum-half father Brian, so I disapprove of his choice.

Then there's the Vunipola brothers, a seriously complicated case. Look, the short answer is that they've every right to play for England, and it's arguably the least controversial choice. Nonetheless, I would just love it if they had chosen Tonga, like three generations before them, and what a boost it would be to the team! This despite the fact that they weren't born there, and the father whom I want them to emulate wanted them to choose Wales instead. Like I said, complicated...

More U-13 immigrants here, but simpler cases. Along with Tui and Timu previously, we see a growing trend of Kiwi children becoming Wallaby adults. Such migration is commonplace regardless of rugby, like the natural flow from Tonga and Samoa to New Zealand; when it happens this young, there's no scheming to boost future national teams. We also have our first Fijians: not party to the ancestry based discussion up to this point, we'll see more of them now that residency is the key factor; it's a sad final chapter where money defeats national pride - even the Kerevi case doesn't feel right to me.

Some folk argue that the reason length and age of residency is important is because international sport should reflect a nation's ability to produce players using the systems it has in place, physically, on its shores. I don't feel that way: I don't think that rugby test matches, for instance, should directly reward a country's sports science program, salary structure or coaching facilities; instead, since I find my definition of sporting nationality somewhere in the grey area between genetics and culture, the significance of residency is more to do with how it makes a player feel about his national identity.

This is a digression from purely residence based cases, but they are equally egregious. I can't believe that a player in his 20s, having lived in South Africa his whole life, suddenly feels loyalty to a nation thousands of miles away based on the birthplace of just one of his four grandparents.

The cynicism of these decisions is tempered by the fact that they are made in two stages: players move north to play European club rugby due to the financial rewards; then, wishing to play test rugby but ignored back home in favour of domestic (or simply superior) players, they make the switch. Most have to serve a residency period first, but these four and others like them simply dig out grandma's birth certificate. Those World Rugby rules need a tweak: surely two grandparents as a minimum, rather than just one, would tighten this loophole?

Back to those relying purely on residency, and an age bracket which softer folk than me tolerate, arguing that only adults know their minds enough to swear allegiance to a nation. I reckon Pocock felt well and truly Zimbabwean before he set foot in Australia. You can argue that his talent would be wasted on the largely amateur African nation but that's dangerous: lesser rugby nations remain lesser if so treated; no player is too good to represent his nation. Georges Best and Weah played football for Northern Ireland and Liberia, never experienced a World Cup, and rightly so.

Mtawawira is the second and last South African squad member to feature here - by far the fewest of the six nations under the microscope, perhaps for three reasons: their rugby clubs can't afford to recruit foreigners, so residency rules don't tempt the selection panel; there's no natural migration from other rugby nations, so virtually all Springboks have South African parents. More pertinently though, this proud nation just wouldn't tolerate it: Mtawawira barely overcame South Africa Rugby Union's attitude: "He's not South African, so why should he play for us?" Bravo, SARU!

The Zimbabweans are anomalies, whereas the really sad trend here sees the Pacific islands drained of talent. It's great that rugby provides an opportunity for islanders to go overseas, achieve success and share the financial rewards with their families. What's despicable is a system that at best assists, and at worst obliges, these players to abandon their national allegiance and adopt the colours of a foreign country in order to maintain contractual security. If all these guys flew home to join their proper national squads in international windows, what great world cups we would have!

There's another subdivision to come, but I defy anyone to argue that these migrations, made from ages 19-20, in any way justify the later selection of the players in question to represent their adopted nation of residence. The two Fijian wingers in particular represent a disturbing trend, and Australian commentators give them nicknames like 'Fijian Flyer', actually celebrating the foreignness of blokes who've been poached to play for a foreign country. Then there's the practice of picking guys, even just once, so that they can't play for their natural team. It's downright pathetic is what it is.

Atonio and le Roux are the first France internationals we've seen in a while, and the last, for which credit is due: uneasy at the recent presence of yet more Fijian wingers and a South African full-back in the national team, the French federation imposed an additional eligibility rule; now you need a French passport to be selected, thus demanding serious decisions from those who've simply been playing in Le Top 14 for a few years. This is a precedent which other boards must follow: instead of abdicating responsibility to World Rugby, try on some national pride for size - it might suit you.

I've no problem with players moving overseas to further their club careers in the most lucrative way; often it's nations with rich clubs that suffer, filling their leagues with overseas talent at the expense of internal development. I'm indifferent to the nations who export players overseas, then choose not to select them; they spite themselves in a way, but more talent rises to fill the vacuum. What I can't stand is when these mercenaries switch allegiance to 'achieve the dream' of playing test rugby; if it's your dream, then go home, and play for your own nation.

Finally we reach the realms of the truly absurd, and forgive me if my tone abandons mere anger for outright apoplexy. For the love of all that is good and logical, why oh why have these players made the decision, in their mid-20s, to play international rugby for an entirely foreign country? The answer is money, I know, and once again I've slightly more sympathy for the Fijians, but this only transfers my ire to the nations who exploit them. Why can't Wasps, or the Rebels, or whoever, offer these guys contracts but also encourage and assist them to pop home for internationals once in a while?

Ireland though, after a hitherto largely background presence in our rogues gallery, have surged late to take the cake: Roux, Stander and Aki have been lured with cash from the southern hemisphere, allocated to provincial squads and selected for the national side three years later; they call them Project Players, the Irish federation is directly implicated and it's an absolute disgrace. Bundee Aki, born and raised in Auckland, debuted for Ireland aged 31, his seven siblings no doubt utterly bemused back home. I fail to see how this insult to the very concept of nationality benefits anyone.

The rules need to change, especially for residency. I advocate a maximum move age of 12 and a minimum residency of 10 years, but any improvement would be welcome. They should tighten the grandparents loophole, and a provision can be made for players to reverse decisions made under the old regime - or serve a weaker nation, if eligible, when a strong one discards them.

However, even if all this happened it wouldn't suffice, as what we've learnt here is that nationality is so complicated that a set of rules can never define it. National federations must take responsibility for the integrity of their representative teams: before selecting a player, don't just ask "Is it legal?" but "Is it right?" - "Is this guy one of ours?" If in doubt, give someone else a chance, because another nation might need the first player more, for longer, and have a more legitimate claim on him.

Likewise, players should have more self respect: I'm not operating in their elite sport environment, and god knows we all want the best for our families; but I still couldn't do it, I couldn't play for any other country but my own, and I don't understand how they can. If a player doesn't feel that national boundaries and national pride are such a big deal, then maybe test rugby isn't for him.