"Immigrant background" isn't the same thing as "naturalized."
England, France, Netherlands have a bunch of black and Arab dudes but they all (with a couple of exceptions) were born, raised, and developed as players in Europe.
The Moroccans were also born and raised in various European countries so they had to get naturalized to play for Morocco. It really cuts into the whole "underdog" story, IMO. Not fully underdogs if their best players lived their whole lives in rich European countries, are they?
First of all, what does being rich have anything to do with any of this ? USA would be underdog to Brazil and are much richer. Leicester were underdogs when winning the EPL in 2016, and being poor or rich had nothing to do with it.
Second of all, you get the Moroccan nationality by birth to Moroccan parents wherever you’re born, you do not need to get naturalised. That depends from country to country. Other countries might require you to get naturalised even if born there. In America you are considered American if born there, but that’s not the reality everywhere.
Anyway, I won’t be an asshole and will assume I understand what you mean by « naturalised » even if not correct, since all these players were considered Moroccans at birth. Reality is that you don’t get to decide what other people feel like. When you have a culture and parents from another country, you just grow up with that culture, especially if surrounded by huge immigrant communities like in Europe. It’s just the way it is, national sentiment takes time to develop sometimes, across generations. They might decide to go with country of birth, or not, one is not more or less illegitimate than the other.
Reality is that here it’s only just a matter of Europeans shitting on Africans who dare defending their country of origin, since they consider themselves to be much more superior. Funnily enough, most of the Moroccan players would not have sniffed European teams anyways, apart from Hakimi and Ziyech, so not sure what they’re complaining about.