The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion
The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion |
| Posted: 29 Jul 2011 04:59 PM PDT JULY 30 — With no World Cup or European Championship this year, it's been a pretty boring summer when it comes to football, and I say this without meaning any disrespect to the Gold Cup and the surprisingly boring Copa America this year. When you're a big football fan (worse if you're football crazy), June and July are pretty dire months in terms of football entertainment. Apart from fans of the bigger clubs like Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea who are lucky enough to get the opportunity to see their favourite stars "live" in action in Malaysia, fans of smaller fish (Tottenham Hotspur, for yours truly) will have to be content with catching up with the latest transfer gossip online. Thank God for the internet though. Trying to decipher what managers, players, club owners and agents mean whenever they come up with a statement regarding a player's transfer status has always been a fun riddle. But it's only fun if you're reading about other teams, and much less so when the subject is your favourite club's best player. When you're a Spurs fan, there's nothing more suspenseful this summer than watching how the transfer saga regarding Luka Modric, far and away the club's best player last season, is going to unfold. I'm sure most Spurs fans will agree with me that there's nothing we'd like more than to have Luka, aka the Little Genius, stay with us this season and help the club's ongoing progress. I'm not even going to delude myself by saying that no player is irreplaceable because while it is true that surely there is a decent or even better replacement for the Little Genius out there (like there were replacements for Michael Carrick and Dimitar Berbatov when Manchester United came calling for them a few years back — thanks for the money, you Red Devils!), finding one with a decent price in this summer of crazy transfer fees is not going to be easy. The fact that Luka was clearly the engine that kept the team going for the past few seasons he's been at Spurs further points to how hard it is going to be to replace him, and get the team to click in the same way it did with him in it. On the other hand, I'm sure fans will also understand why he's been tempted by a move to high-rollers Chelsea, where not only will he be competing in all the major competitions and most probably challenging for all the big trophies but, if reports are to be believed, will also be offered triple the wages he's now earning at Spurs. If your job is playing football, a better office and higher wages are more than valid reasons for wanting to tender in your resignation and jump ship. I've read somewhere that the crazy and astronomical wages that football players earn nowadays make it a little hard for fans to empathise with their situation. Compared to the old days where a professional football player earns wages not much higher than your usual working class man, jumping ship when a better offer comes in is much easier to understand when the fans know how much that extra £500 or £1,000 (RM2,400 to RM4,800) might mean because they earn around the same as well. But when you compare that to the current situation where that extra money is £50,000 when you're already earning £50,000 a week, which is more than what most people earn in a year, it is kind of hard to empathise. Whatever do you need that much money for, right? But still, money is money and when you can get that extra cash in, I totally understand why you'd want to. The question now is probably only of "how much" and "when" Chelsea (or the many other clubs also linked with him) will offer to justify his transfer. Having seen Spurs play hardball before, I've no doubt that our chairman will milk the transaction for what it's worth (we got about £30.6 million for Dimitar Berbatov, whom we got for £10.9 million, and more than £16 million for Michael Carrick who cost us less than £3 million), but I sure hope this transfer saga ends as soon as possible so that we can use that cash to fund our own transfer adventures. To see rivals like Liverpool, Manchester City and even the notoriously stingy Arsenal already recruiting new blood and spending money to strengthen their squads is truly not much fun when your own team does nought in the transfer market (aside from signing the 40-year-old goalkeeper Brad Friedel). But looking at the seriousness of the other teams, this coming English Premier League season might be the most unpredictable yet, and therefore the most exciting. Only a couple more weeks to go, and I simply can't wait! * The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
| The decline and fall of Scottish football Posted: 29 Jul 2011 04:52 PM PDT JULY 30 — In 1967, Celtic became the first British team to win the European Cup, beating Inter Milan 2-1 to immortalise themselves as the "Lisbon Lions." A week later, cross-city rivals Glasgow Rangers were narrowly edged out by Bayern Munich in the final of the European Cup Winners' Cup. Three years on, Celtic almost repeated their feat of 1967 before falling at the final hurdle with a 2-1 defeat against Feyenoord, and in 1972 Rangers secured their first European trophy with a Cup Winners' Cup final victory over Dynamo Moscow. The "Old Firm" of Celtic and Rangers have always been the dominant forces of Scottish football, but they weren't the only ones to enjoy success on the European stage as Aberdeen — managed by a young Alex Ferguson — claimed the Cup Winners' Cup in 1983, beating no less an opponent than Real Madrid in an exciting final; even provincial Dundee United reached the Uefa Cup final in 1987. There's no doubt about it. Back then, the leading Scottish clubs were on an equal footing with nearly every other nation in Europe. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Scottish football is now in a dire state, vividly illustrated by Rangers' 1-0 home defeat to Swedish side Malmo in the Champions' League qualifying round on Tuesday night, a result that will surely lead to them dropping out of the competition when the second leg is played next week. The lack of fanfare surrounding the start of the new Scottish Premier League campaign is another indication of the sport's decline north of the border (yes, apparently the new season is already underway... I didn't really notice either). A similar fall in standards has affected the Scottish national team. Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, the vociferous and good-natured Tartan Army of Scotland fans routinely graced the final stages of World Cups and European Championships with their boisterous presence. Even if their team largely underperformed, never progressing beyond the first round of any major tournament, at least they got there; that has changed now, with Scotland failing to qualify for any final series since the World Cup in 1998. So what has gone wrong? Why has Scottish football, at both club and international level, been transformed from a major force into a nondescript irrelevance in the space of 25 years? To provide a simple answer: It's all about money. Between the Sixties and Eighties, when the majority of revenue brought in by clubs consisted of matchday earnings such as gate receipts, Scottish clubs could hold their own thanks to the healthy attendances they regularly attracted — especially Celtic and Rangers. But when the English Premier League, Serie A, La Liga and the Bundesliga jumped on the satellite television bandwagon in the early Nineties, the Scottish game was quickly left behind. This was due to the fact that the potential television market for Scottish football is inherently smaller than many of their European rivals as a result of the country's significantly lower population size. Whereas advertisers and broadcasters in England, Italy, Spain, France and Germany know that they can capture the interest of a nation containing at least 50 million people, the population of Scotland is around 10 per cent that amount, at around five million. That makes Scottish football far less lucrative commercially and, within a few years of the satellite revolution in the early Nineties, Scottish clubs were earning significantly less, in comparative terms, than their rivals in many other European nations. Rangers and Celtic were initially somewhat insulated due to the combined effects of their huge pulling power within the country, the large crowds they attract on a weekly basis, and their regular qualification for the Champions' League. But it was only a temporary respite, and the relative drop in television income suffered by Scottish clubs eventually caught up with even the Old Firm, reducing their ability to attract top class players and leading to the financial problems that almost saw Rangers go into administration last year. Two remedies have been proposed: Allowing Rangers and Celtic to join the English Football League or Premier League, which would make commercial sense but would be met with resistance by many supporters from both sides of the border (not to mention Fifa), or allowing the biggest clubs to leave the SPL and join a newly-formed "Atlantic League" alongside leading teams from other secondary European markets such as Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. While both of those possible ventures would significantly benefit Rangers and Celtic (and anybody else who might be invited to join the Atlantic League) by immediately increasing the television revenues they could command, it wouldn't do a great deal for the Scottish game as a whole — can you imagine how much the SPL would suffer if Rangers and Celtic weren't even in it? But ultimately, something has to be done and the Atlantic League is probably the best option — Rangers and Celtic are too big to remain hamstrung by the commercially lightweight SPL for much longer, and there are plenty of clubs in Sweden, Belgium and so on who are facing similar predicaments (big club, small domestic league) and would find a new league covering seven or eight territories equally appealing. Until then, the Scottish football will stutter on, with increasingly poor teams playing in front of increasingly empty stadia in a league that is increasingly ignored outside Scotland. And the "Lions of Lisbon" will become an increasingly distant memory, incongruous with the harsh realities of the present. * The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
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