According to Spain’s leading internet basketball mag Solobasket, Tau Vitoria got Pete Mickeal a Bulgarian passport in order to sign another U.S. citizen, Gerald Fitch, as an import player to the team, as only two are allowed to play per team in Spain’s ACB (The other player would be John Lucas III.)
I would like to know what qualifies Mickeal to get a Bulgarian passport. Can he trace his roots back to the country or has he been married to a Bulgarian woman for some time? Is Rock Island, Illinois, a Bulgarian enclave within the United States? Probably not … but someone knows someone in the Bulgarian Ministry that can help him out, as long the cash flows (Rumor has it that such a passport costs around <!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:””; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> €200,000). At least I assume that’s what happened in the cases of players such as Priest Lauderdale, Bryant Smith, Ibrahim Jaaber, Roderick Blakney and Keydren Clark.
Lauderdale and Smith at least stayed in the country, played for Akademik Sofia and were supposed to dress for national team play as well (though they never did and left town quickly), while the other guys mentioned above may never have set foot on Bulgarian soil before getting the passport.
Blakney and Jaaber recently represented the Bulgarian national team in some games, but it’s still strange to see these guys in the Balkans (FYR Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina have also naturalized US citizens) and the Caucasus (Georgia) although having no real connection to the country’s people, culture and traditions.
Many basketball fans are witnessing this kind of procedure, and certain teams’ GMs openly support this kind of “shpiel” to cheat the rules set by the local leagues, but no institution is stepping in to stop this foul play these days. When football player Ailton, a Brazilian striker that once played in Germany, announced that he would play for the Qatari national team (Qatar has a long history of naturalizing players and giving them Arabic-sounding names to hide any previous affiliation with other national teams), FIFA stepped right in and denied the request by stating: “FIFA’s emergency committee ruled on Wednesday that players must have a ‘clear connection to that country’ if they wished to wear the colors of a nation other than the one of their birth.”
But this was solely about playing for a national team, not a club team, so FIBA would have no jurisdiction over specific rules and regulations regarding “extra-community” (The word is being used in Spain – Extracomunitarios) players in Europe’s national leagues. We can expect more US citizens to get Eastern European passports through loopholes as long as the shady governments of the respective countries are granting these kinds of requests.
I’m proposing that the European leagues make pressure to require a certain number of local players to be on the court, which would diminish the number of Bosman-A/B/Cotonou/Import players on most rosters. Most larger European leagues already restrict the number of Import- and Bosman-players, but rules should be made even stricter to secure playing time for local players who are lacking, due to the potential fielding of five US players with various passports at a time.
Also, I would suggest copying the FIFA rule regarding naturalization of a player. A player that received his European passport after the 18th birthday should be treated differently than one who has had a passport since birth. It would make this whole passport-buying phenomenon rare, and a possible new league ruling could look like this: Six local players (nationals or the so-called homegrown players) on the roster plus two non-European players and four Bosman-A players (only one of them naturalized). This kind of change won’t be coming anytime soon due to the financial crisis, though.
With US players demanding less money compared to most European players, teams will argue against rules like these because of the enormous financial straits they are currently experiencing. Only time will tell if the leagues or ULEB itself are going to react, and for now we will be watching Petko Mihailov along with John Lucas and Chris Fitch in the ACB playoffs or Ibo Dzaberov alongside Brandon Jennings and Andre Hutson in Italy. I’m just wondering if these guys will give Bulgarian TV an interview in Bulgarian (“As sam Bulgarin, be!”) once they win the championship…
I’m out like Hristo Svetijakov.
written by Kristian Santiago
