Who cares about the U20 team? No one. It makes the federation no money. No funding comes from the event. Hosting the event brings in no revenue. No one actually cares about the U20 event. The U20 team only exists as a potential feeder for the senior team, the senior team is the only team that matters, which Peeters may or may not some day participate in. Namejs brought up some stat like some ridiculously high percentage of U20 players never represent the senior team. I forgot if it was 70 or 80.
Ok, let's break down Peeters from the federation's perspective then. He's not a ready made player. He's not guaranteed to ever play. There you go. That's all the analysis there is. And I already did that analysis above but your selective reading filtered it out.
Children deciding to change nationalities has never been a point of contention for me. Ever. I never bitched about unfair federation practices when we lost kids to Switzerland, or when Estonia lost kids to Finland. I was unhappy. I wish it had been otherwise. But I never even pretended to equate it to the old practice of federations naturalizing foreign league imports. You only think they're the same because you do whine when Belarus loses kids to Russia. So you want to lump it in as being the same as Canadians getting Korean citizenship etc. Where the "real" categorizations lie is some meaningless philosophical question. For me, kids deciding something and adults deciding something is different. For you, they're exactly the same.
The Steffler boys both had Austrian citizenship prior to coming to the country through their mother, but I don't get the sense that would phase your promulgation of a narrative.
