Why Would Manuel Almunia Want to Play for England?

We’ve covered the Almunia for England question once before, but it’s been re-ignited by the Spaniard’s impressive performance for Arsenal in the Champions League semi-final vs Man Utd last week.

He becomes a British citizen (through five years residency) in July 2009, at which point he’d be 100% legal to play for England. Arsene Wenger is keen on the idea, Fabio Capello seems open, and Almunia himself has suggested he’d love a crack at playing for England.

The arguments for and against seem to split roughly down the line of nationalism.

There are those who feel it’s unethical to have someone adopt a country, and who feel a little piece of the England football team dies if Almunia wears three lions on his shirt. They have a point, but let’s be careful not to over-react. The FA will not suddenly have a plague of bulldogs descend on Soho Square to deal with just because a naturalized and not native-born goalkeeper plays for England.

There are also those who fee that we should take full advantage of every player we can possibly get our hands on. It’s definitely worth pointing out the example of Deco, who’s Brazilian born and raised but qualified as a Portuguese international through residency. It’s doubly worth pointing out that Deco was part of the Portuguese teams that knocked us out of both Euro 2004 and World Cup 2006. If everyone else is doing it then why can’t we?

That feels more than a little mercenary to me.

In a lot of ways my answer to this debate is that it doesn’t really matter. Naturalized players who are good enough to play a role for England are few and far between. So selecting Almunia doesn’t mean we’ll suddenly be selecting every other foreign-born Premier League player. It’ll be mostly a one off (unless Mikel Arteta makes it to January 2010 without playing for Spain).

The more important question is: Why would Manuel Almunia want to play for England?

Does he not read the papers? Has he not seen what we do to England goalkeepers? Every mistake is over-analyzed to the point of paranoia and we’re not happy until we’ve detroyed the current England #1’s confidence. Ask Paul Robinson, David James and Scott Carson.

Manuel Almunia has a nice little gig right now playing for Arsenal. He gets to impress in the Champions League and doesn’t come under microscopic scrutiny every time he conceded. Why would he want to give that up?

So for me, the biggest argument against letting Manuel Almunia play for England is that he’s dumb enough to want to do it.