Don't mention the Warne

The nearest that Warne has probably got to his Prussian ancestors in the past is his fondness for unsophisticated food - Hamburgers and Berliners (doughnuts) - but no doubt he will soon embrace the works of Goethe and Schiller in place of 'Hello' magazine and substitute Wagner for Kylie on his iPod.

Shane is no more German than the Queen of England (and Australia) is - oops, maybe not the best analogy, but you know what I mean! So what's going on? The Warne case is an example of a growing blurring of nationality in sport - especially the adoption of national flags of convenience to further individual sporting ambitions.

The most expensive seat in cricket

There are some aspects of English cricket that are so surreal that you wonder if you have strayed into a parallel universe - or at least into the same sort of upside-down logic zone that Alice found through the looking glass.

The wonderland that is English domestic cricket is one in which staggering amounts of money are generated from ticket sales - a large proportion of the proceeds of which is then passed on to help feather the nests of players who can never turn out for the England national team.

A seat at the Oval for the England vs India One Day International costs as much as £85 - surely the most expensive seat for a day's cricket anywhere in the world. The match has been a sell-out for a year, so there is no shortage of well-heeled fans to stump up the cash.

The money from these matches goes to the England Cricket Board (ECB), which then passes a proportion of the loot to the 18 First Class counties - such as Shane Warne's Hampshire. The counties then recruit foreigners to shore up their teams in their search for a trophy.

So English cricket fans are quite directly helping overseas players fuel their bank accounts and enhance their skills whilst, incidentally, keeping young English players out of county teams.

Cricketers adopt nationalities of convenience

Under European employment law anyone with a passport from a European Union (EU) country is entitled to employment in any other EU country in the same way that a national of that country is. So if Shane Warne gets his German passport he will no longer be an 'overseas player' at Hampshire, but the equivalent of a British player. Next season the counties will be restricted to one overseas player - so if Warne becomes 'German' that will allow the county to recruit another player from abroad to play alongside him - probably Warne's erstwhile Aussie team-mate Stuart Clark.

This has been going on for years and most counties have non-Englishmen on their books, especially South Africans, masquerading under a variety of EU country passports. At the international level the same goes on - although it is a little more complicated.

Kevin Pietersen, born and bred in South Africa, had to qualify to play for England, as had a number of southern Africans (rather more understandably) in the Apartheid years before him. Pietersen is a South African who chose to be British rather than play for the country of his birth and citizenship - and the rules have allowed him to do this.

Buying foreign sportsmen is increasingly common

It is no exaggeration to say that Pietersen's principal motivation for becoming British and qualifying for England was financial. There is far more money in English cricket than in South African and a player of his talent was assured not just a lucrative central contract from the ECB but huge amounts of money from promotions and endorsements.

I don't blame KP one bit for taking the action that he did - sportsmen have short careers and it makes absolute sense for them to maximise their earnings whilst they can. But Pietersen's case, and similar examples in English county cricket and other sports, suggest that there is a growing and worrying trend of sportsmen being able to adopt nationalities as it suits them.

We are all aware of the case of African athletes who become citizens of countries with which they have not even the most tenuous connections to further their careers and to enhance their earning potential. Some national football teams are packed with players who did not grow up as nationals of the team that they play for.

Will Beijing 2008 be a watershed on nationality?

The Beijing Olympic Games could be the first in history where a significant number of the medal winners will have been induced to compete for a country by cash offers they couldn't refuse.

We will hear the national anthems of some states ringing out in the stadium to salute athletes whose only reason for running under their flag was that they were given money to do so. In short, nationality will have been negotiable - the athlete is a mercenary who sells himself to the highest bidder.

How long before this enters others sports in a big way - could we, for example, see a football World Cup winning team of players with no original connection to the country for which they play?

Far fetched - maybe, but remember that many members of the successful Irish team in the recent cricket World Cup had rather dubious Irish heritages.