Dave Hanratty

It just hasn't really landed with the public, but it's quite a cool list.

Yeah, that was pretty good.

John, you liked Miguel Delaney's piece.

Yeah, so there's 1,248 players at this World Cup, 292 of them playing for countries they weren't born in.

We really were ahead of the times, actually.

put to our benefit Curacao 26 man squad 25 of them born overseas probably nearly all in Holland I'd guess yeah Miguel made it in that same piece he was talking about the coaches got together at some UEFA FIFA conference in December yeah

And it was very interesting.

The coaches, and this was not the case with the Irish teams, you know, for just similar kind of culture, same language, very closely aligned.

But these coaches have noticed splits in the dressing rooms between players born in their countries and then the children of the diaspora.

The Iraq coach, Graeme Arnold, very open about how such groups used to sit at separate tables.

And they started insisting on one big table to try and work against it.

So that's been an aspect of it.

And that was never the case in the Irish dressing rooms.

And what seems to be happening here, Miguel reckons, is unlike, you know, Ireland, it was very much jack out there.

You know, Ireland just has that natural diaspora.

All the immigration were a particular case.

But...

They're like, you know, started with the French and Clairefontaine, Spanish, England in particular, the academies, Dutch academies.

So basically, a lot of the big European countries have become factories.

And a lot of these same countries have lots of immigration.