In Berlin, October 2010, the German National Soccer Team comfortably defeated the visiting Turkish national squad in a 3-0 victory. This was not a typical "home" game for the Germans, however. Spectators of Turkish-descent packed the 74,244-seat stadium. Turkish names could be found on both rosters, including three Turkish-German athletes sweating for Turkey. The exceptional case was Mesut Özil, a third-generation migrant whose grandfather migrated from northwest Turkey to West Germany in 1970. He chose to play for the German national team a year earlier and received considerable scorn from the Turkish press for his decision. 79’ into the game, Özil got a through ball and scored it. Strikingly, he shot the ball with doubt. He did not celebrate the goal with mates. He did not do his typical fist-pump. He did not even smile. He seemed to be more sad than happy when he scored against Turkey. Though overlooked by scholars of ethnicity and sport history, the choices and behaviors of soccer players can structure and reflect social relations and personal identities. In today’s meeting, we want to explore history along with individual and community observations, and examine how Turkish-German soccer players pick their citizenship, based on the 2000 German dual-citizenship restrictions, and their national team. This presentation explores how and why Turkish-German players experience and attribute significance to the activity of playing for a national team. It explains that the players frame their social behavior against the backdrop of ethnic and cultural identity all the while the player and spectator relationships formed through the player’s specific choices and behaviors strengthen definitions of ethnic and communal belongingness. The analyses and cases derived from original and published data may well serve to the larger field of Sport and Ethnicity Studies a subtle reminder that the emotions and mechanics of athletes are constitutive and reflective objects of ethnic and communal identities. The second-generation athletes ultimately provide a unique lens though which to understand important and relevant themes regarding Middle East in Europe, including ethnicity, identity, laws, migration, and minorities.