Born is one thing since everyone had parents from that countery... so its not a problem.
And you are not allowed to swap your national team.
I hope you do understand that the smaller countries or countries getting into hockey need to have imports to start on the club as placeholders until the team is strong enough to develop it's own talent. France did it, New Zealand is doing it, and Bosnia & Herzegovina are going to do it.
The Algeria Football team are from France and should be considered more French than Algerian. I mean France's football development basically made them from kids to what they are now as stars/or national players. Like Algeria, the country itself didn't do anything in developing them themselves, it's inaccurate to say that the country isn't as good as it would be if it didn't receive open borders with France. I don't understand how you can deem one acceptable and the other isn't, sounds like big double standard ideology to me.
I misunderstood you then, but still, its only Bochenski that has played official games for another country and that was back in 2007. And these guys are tied to Kazaksthan now.
I still think it`s worse in football where they don`t have any rules regarding how long you have to play in a country. The process is longer and more complicated in hockey. The Roger situation with Poland for instance would have never been possible in hockey.
I appreciate that you consider the process in hockey better than football, but for someone who watches both sports, I wish IIHF just decided to follow FIFA's rule. I love hockey more than anything I've seen in football, it's my number one sport easily, but I also understand that hockey's level doesn't come close in terms of talent to FIFA. I forgot the players names, but there are a couple really decent ones that would help Great Britain, but because they moved to USA to develop their game since the level in GB is still bad, they are not eligible to play for GB. One of the reasons why is because of that stupid "have to play at least two years before the age of 9 or something" rule which disqualifies players who want to play. BUT those players are too good for their domestic leagues, so they're stuck in between wanting to play internationally for their home country's, but can't and IIHF rarely accept exceptions.
In FIFA if a player has two citizenship's for either country and wants to play for the one he wants to play for, he just chooses them. An example of this is Diego Costa who was born in Brasil, but considers himself Spanish more, and plays for Spain. An example with the IIHF and that stupid "2 year rule" is Wojtek Wolski, he's way too good for the Polish domestic league (and he can make more money in the KHL), just played like 12 games during the lockout. He said on multiple times he wants to play for Poland, but he can't because he would have to play two years in the country to qualify for it. So Poland loses out on a potential game changing player because he cannot legitimately play for them due to very strict and unnecessary rules like this one.
if you are citizen of the countery your parents is from you should be able to play for your countery... but to swap countery you play for is just lol.
