Foreign Players in National Teams

25^th FIBA Asia Championship is currently being held in Tianjin, China.

One of the most significant issues widely seen and noticed in this sport event is that in most of the teams, a major number of players are not nationals of their respective countries such as Qatar, Lebanon, Jordan, etc.

We see that most of such foreign players not only do not speak the language of their respective countries but also do not live or rehearse there. If so, they could not be considered nationals of those countries by any reasonable means.

In such conditions, such sport events could not be considered as fair competitions between the nations. There should be a difference between club sport and competitions among nations. Obviously only few wealthy countries could buy players and take advantage of them while many others can not. It is far from the true spirit of sport.

I believe no team should have such merits because it is a sort of doping. They inject human bodies into the whole team instead of drugs into the bodies.

I reckon there should be specific and meticulous but non-discriminative rules for taking advantage of foreign players. I am not a sport sociologist but certainly there could be regulations in place to make the conditions fairer. For example, such players shall have got the nationality of and taken residence in a prospective country for a minimum period of time (say 10 years) before joining the national team.

As a native of Iran, I am proud that both teams at the final game of the current tournament, Iran and China, are relying only on their national players.

I sent this writing as a letter to President of FIBA.