Death of Local Football

It's always been a little disturbing to me. During the 1990s, the most popular sports team in Singapore by far was the Singapore Lions. Whoever was representing Singapore in the Malaysian League and the Malaysia Cup. That made sense to me. Our big homegrown hero was Fandi Ahmad. He came of age in the successful Malaysia Cup campaign of 1980, but he never played for Singapore for much of his career until he returned for the “Dream Team” in 1993, and he left before the double winning season of 1994, probably he wasn't going to get into the side with Fandi Ahmad, Abbas Saad and Michael Vana around. (Of course, we now know that Michael Vana wasn't going to make it through that season).

Football was invented by the British. I don't know when that happened, but around the time when it became a spectator sport the branding of the clubs were tied to the grounds where their stadiums were. Unlike American sports, which were called “franchises”, to underline their essentially commercial nature, the tradition in football was that you never moved the club to another town. (It was alright to tear down a stadium and rebuild it, but when a consortium bought Wimbledon FC and moved it to Milton Keynes, there was this big fan revolt, and they've never been the same ever since.)

So the first development was that you were able to sign foreigners. The second development was that you started to have a foreign fan base. The third development was foreign coaches and then foreign ownership.

In a way, the first breach, that you were able to sign foreigners, was difficult to block. Back in the day, England was one of the most advanced countries in the world, and they had a really good rail network. (Oh how times have changed). Anybody could move to anywhere else in the country and make it their home, so why not footballers? Players were free to move to whichever club their choose, as long as they were out of a contract. Even before the Bosman rule, they had some form of mobility.

In some ways, this was something that was to plague the football league. It had the effect of making the playing field less equal between the clubs. The elite clubs could always attract the best players and make themselves even more elite. Even then, those were the days before the rise of Liverpool as a dynasty, when one club dominated the landscape. A lot of clubs were champions in those days: Aston Villa, Blackburn, Sunderland, Everton, Sheffield Wednesday, even the ones we recognise these days, Arsenal, Man U and Liverpool.

The second breach was more interesting: something of a real breach. In the days before TV, you had to watch matches live, and there was no question that the arena was the stadium, which meant that the receipts from people buying tickets were the main source of revenue. Indeed, this was the case until fairly recently. One of the big reasons why Man U dominated English football in the 90s and the 00s was because they had one of the largest stadiums in England. They were blessed in that Old Trafford was on a piece of land that could be expanded into a large stadium, and that large stadium was able to generate a lot of matchday revenue.

It was only recently that revenue from broadcasting rights was going to overpower stadium receipts. But in the meantime, a few elite clubs will be able to command strong enough brand recognition to have worldwide fans. There will always be people who love clubs like Derby County based on a few league titles they won in the 70s, or Blackburn Rovers, Newcastle United or Leeds. But in the main it's usually the big six of England – the Manchester Clubs, Liverpool, Tottenham, Chelsea and Arsenal, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Juventus and maybe PSG. These clubs command the biggest fan bases at the moment because they have the biggest successes at the moment. And too bad for clubs like the Milan clubs, Ajax, Dortmund, Porto, St Etienne, because past glories aren't going to get you far.

25 years ago, at the dawn of Manchester United's period of dominance, I didn't like the way that people simply latched onto its success. And it coincided with the Singapore lions being asked to leave the Malaysia Cup. Suddenly, homegrown football didn't matter anymore. These twin developments were in hindsight probably crushing to the homegrown football scene, although it was not plain to see at that time. Singapore had always succeeded in everything they did, so you always thought that the S League were going to be successful. In a way, it was, and in other ways, not. I'd argue that it helped Singapore to win 4 regional championships in the Tiger / Suzuki cups. But they couldn't get the people to show up, they couldn't forge the same level of fandom that the Singapore team used to enjoy.

Yes, teams like Manchester United offered a superior product. The level of the football was simply better. But do you think it was right that as a result, local leagues around the world suffered? The mid 90s was a time when, internationally, the gap between the richest and the poorest clubs were narrowing. There were upstarts everywhere. Romania, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Colombia and Bulgaria has one or two good tournaments. Pele's prediction that an African team would win the World Cup by 2000 didn't seem totally ridiculous, because Nigeria and Cameroon were coming up with a lot of talented players. However they were eventually doomed by the lack of organisation.

Even on a club level, there were the occasional left field teams. Arsenal football club. Newcastle, Middlesborough and Blackburn's prominence in the 90s should be seen as some kind of a last gasp of the formerly great industrial north. They were bankrolled by local tycoons who wanted to be seen as giving something back to the community. There were teams that either went deep into the Champions league or won it outright, like Leeds, Valencia, Porto, Monaco, Dynamo Kiev, Borussia Dortmund. There were unexpected winners of leagues like Deportivo La Coruna, Kaiserslautern, Wolfsburg, Bremen, Stuttgart, Valencia, Boavista.

Elsewhere, the African leagues in Cameroon and Nigeria could have risen to prominence as they were the ones who provided their national teams with the sterling talents that so captivated the world in 1990 and 1994. But what happened instead was that west Africa turned into a feeding ground for the leagues of Europe, the French leagues especially. And up till the turn of the millennium, you could still see the Argentine and Brazillian leagues as great clubs in their own right – the Cruzeiros, the Palmeiras, the Santos, the Boca Juniors and the River Plates. But nowadays nobody talks about them anymore.

One big reason for this is how the market became distorted. Big money has always distorted the football markets, Alfredo DiStefano used to play for a Colombian club called Millionairos, and Franco was putting his weight behind Real Madrid, the Romanian communist government always put their weight behind Steaua Bucharest and Dynamo Bucharest, and Silvio Berlusconi was the godfather of AC Milan. But when Roman Abramovich bankrolled Chelsea, he took things to another level entirely.

Following the five year ban from European football after 1985 as a result of the Heysel stadium disaster, it took 10 years for an English team to win a champion's league, and even then it felt a little flukey. But as a result of the English Premier League, it was eventually realised that it was a product that could be marketed to the world. English Premier League was not destined to have the greatest clubs, because probably no clubs were bigger than Barcelona and Real Madrid. But they were destined to have the greatest league in the world, after Serie A's dominance in the 80s and the 90s. They could market themselves to the English speaking world. It used to be the case that French clubs could reach out to Francophone Africa better, but Arsene Wenger changed all that by imbuing that club with a French flavour. Blackburn's prominence did not last very long, but they showed that big money could turn a minor club into an exciting challenger to the great Man U side of 1994. Newcastle's prominence did not last very long, but they were briefly the most exciting team in the league, and Liverpool played the part of the fine and dandy team who played attractive looking football but lacking enough steel to win and restore themselves back to the top of the pile.

Whatever it is, the Premier League managed to fashion itself into a fine product that could be marketed to the rest of the world. The Manchester United – Arsenal rivalry managed to pit against each other two sides which played attractive football. Chelsea, and then Arsenal were the first few teams which hired foreign coaches, and brought in skilled foreigners who brought in the exotic element and an air of continental flair.

At the beginning of the premiership, football was the domain of the great northern teams which dominated in the past: Sheffield Wednesday, Blackburn, Aston Villa, Newcastle, Leeds, Sunderland, Derby County, Coventry. It was played in the English style, full of long balls and hard running and tackling. By the end of the decade, the face of football were the London teams who offered a cosmopolitan environment for glamour names like Gianfranco Zola, Ruud Gullit, Dennis Bergkamp and Vialli. Arsene Wenger's Arsenal managed to mount a strong challenge for the title, buoyed by flair players bought from big clubs at relatively inexpensive prices because they were misfits. The managers, owing to their cosmopolitan backgrounds, and differing temperaments, ended up being as much part of the draw as the teams themselves. Alex Ferguson the grumpy curmudgeon versus the suave and worldly but nerdy Arsene Wenger, versus the naive but passionate Kevin Keegan. There were stories of the smaller provincial clubs who punched above their weights for a while, like Leicester (this was during the Martin O'Neill era, long before 2016), and then fell back to earth with a thud when they got relegated and went into administration. But even the finances of the clubs became part of the news cycle. Transfer news was part of the news cycle.

The long and the short of it was that the rise of the premiership was an utter disaster for many other leagues worldwide. I don't know how Singapore managed to win a few more championships during the first decade of the century, but I can only imagine that maybe the economic depression that swept through the region in the aftermath of the financial crisis left Singapore relatively unscathed.

In the 90s, it seemed as though Brazil would dominate football indefinitely. They had a team which was by some distance the best of the last 4 of 1994, although Italy would be a tough nut to crack. They had star players like Romario, Bebeto, and young Ronaldo would come through. It was a golden generation which had Roberto Carlos, Cafu, Dunga in 1998. If Ronaldo had been fit in the final of 1998, who knows what would have happened? In 2002, nobody was terribly surprised when Brazil won, even if it was a little suspicious how France, Argentina, Italy, Spain and Portugal exited the tournament early.

But the stars of South America were mainly plying their trade in the European clubs, who paid the best salaries. The Brazilian, Argentinian and maybe even Colombian system had raised a great generation of players and the main beneficiaries were the European clubs. I don't really know what happened to that pipeline. It was really difficult for the players to balance their careers in Europe – which were mentally and physically demanding enough – with the additional requirement of having to fly all the way to the four corners of the globe for matches. The Brazillian talent pool dried up. Ronaldinho had no more than a few years at the peak of his career. Robinho did not live up to his promise. Possibly neither will Neymar.

It's hard to find superstars these days who aren't products of football academies. Messi is hardly an Argentinian, having grown up in Barcelona. Because the South Americans have to give priority to their clubs, it has deprecated the importance of the international game. But it has hit the South Americans especially hard, since they've had to balance their international duties with club careers in Europe. International football suffers from the fact that the team that's put together hardly plays week in week out.

However, there have been some teams that have. Some of the best international teams have been made out of sides that were dominated by a great club side. 1970's Brazil trained together for a year. 1974's Holland consisted of many members of the Ajax team. 1974's West Germany also consisted of many members of Bayern Munich. 2010's Spain was split down the middle between Real Madrid and Barcelona. 2014's Germany was mostly Bayern Munich. So the club system benefitted the Europeans because it was more likely for them to come up with a squad that had more unity, who had many combinations of players who knew each other and could replicate that chemistry on the international arena.

The inequality that took place at the club scene was partly fuelled by foreign money going into the clubs, great aristocratic consortiums that bankroll PSG, Man City and Chelsea. Clubs that are already rich receive a highly disproportionate amount of profit from worldwide audiences, and indirectly starve out the other local leagues around the world. Up until the formation of the Champion's league, the European cup was a knockout system, and it was entirely possible for a relatively minor side to win the big prize. That was when it was possible for sides like Feyenoord, Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa, Porto, Steau Bucharest and Red Star Belgrade to win the prize. However with the champion's league, they made it tougher for the smaller sides to prosper by having a group stage at the beginning that would more efficiently wipe out weaker but luckier sides. In the next 25 years, the only truly left field sides who have won the champion's league would be Borussia Dortmund, Porto and Liverpool. And Liverpool weren't really that weak. And moreover, Dortmund's coach and Porto's coach would go to a bigger side and win another champion's league with that team.

And another thing about football, it's a sport where there is a great amount of variation in the ability of the players. A skillful player is just that much better than somebody who isn't. A stronger and faster player is just that much better than somebody who isn't. A team who has midfielders of great vision are just so much better than midfields who can hardly see in front of him. A player who has “lost a yard of pace” is that much weaker as a result. If you have a team with the best players, and the best tactics and the best intelligence will be almost impossible to beat. They can literally pass circles around you. The best teams not only have the best players, but they have armies of scientists who analyse the game to death and just know how best to game the opponent.

All these factors contribute to how unequal the game has become.

How is the Women's World Cup great?

I'm actually not the best person to be writing this, because this is the tail end of my days as a football fan. But there are some things that have forced me to talk about how and why the World Cup is great.

Why the men's World Cup is great.
1. Tradition. When the first World Cup came around, my youngest grandparent (and the one I was the most attached to) wasn't even alive. IT was a bygone era when Argentina and Uruguay ruled the world.

2. Each of the World Cups had a great story. The first World Cup in Uruguay that the English and many of the Europeans refused to participate in. Then the second and third World Cups which were won by Italy, partly because Italy were such a great side, and partly because everybody was worried that Mussolini would have the guys executed for not winning the World Cup. The fourth and first post-war World Cup had the legend of the Maracanaço.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguay_v_Brazil_(1950_FIFA_World_Cup) There was the 1954 Miracle of Berne, in which West Germany unexpectedly triumphed over the hot favourites Hungary to win the tournament. The 1958 final where one of the greatest Sweden sides lost to a Brazil side that featured a teenage Pele. (Also the first and only time a non-European side won a World Cup in Europe). The 1962 World Cup which was controversial because Chile was recovering from an earthquake. The 1966 World Cup which was notable for England actually having a great side and winning, the North Koreans shocking the Italians, and the Italians getting pelted with rotten fruit.

The 1970 Mexico World Cup, which was supposed to be one of the greatest yet, with that magical Brazil team, and England players being accused of theft. The 1974 World Cup which introduced the world to total football. The 1978 World Cup, notable at the time for pandering to corrupt dictatorships (something that by the way is true of 2018 and 2022, while 2010 and 2014 were held in corrupt countries). The 1982 football which had a great Brazilian team, but in what was supposed to be a rematch with the Italians after the 1970 final, they got dumped out by Paolo Rossi. That was the time when the debate was basically settled as to which was more important: the system or the individual. The 1986 championships, which featured some fine teams – Brazil, France, Denmark, but the one team, or rather one player who conquered all was Maradona.

The 1990 championships, a competition so infamously boring and based on defensive football that they changed the back pass rule so as to make football great again. But also notable for Camaroon bearing the flag for African football and getting knocked out a little unfairly against England in the quarter finals. 1994 with the romance of left field sides like Sweden, Bulgaria and Romania going deep into the tournament. 1998 with the fenomeno screwing up at the last hurdle, Zidane scoring with his head, and France getting their long belated first win of the tournament. Owen and Bergkamp with wonder goals, and Beckham getting sent off in a crucial match. 2002 with an unprecedented number of favourites falling by the wayside in early stages, paving the way for the dark horses South Korea, Turkey and Senegal to advance far into the tournament. And establishing a precedent for the defending champions to flop at the first hurdle. (But the final is still contested by favourites Brazil and Germany). 2006, with Zidane overcoming a Brazil team featuring Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Kaka and Adriano, only to lose his rag in the final and get sent off after headbutting Materazzi. 2010 with the vuvuzelas and jabulani ball and one of the greatest Spain teams with their tika taka. 2014 with the unforgettable 7-1 match. And 2018 with England and Croatia going deep into the tournament. And the USA not qualifying.

3. The quality of the football is just better. This is a big plus, because one of the things that sticks out about the women's world cup is the dreadful level of defending, although you could say that defending in the men's world cup wasn't really great until the 1990s. You have the world's greatest thinkers of football playing tactical chess with each other. You don't see the women's world cup being talked about like that. Marta and Lieke Martens would have been elite players if they were guys, but any talk about them being Ronaldinho or Messi or either of the Ronaldos or Rivaldo or Luis Suarez is just off the mark. This is significant, because the level of ability even amongst the elite players is very great. Football is a sport where the very best players are much better than the merely very good ones, and until truly great players emerge from the women's game, it's a little hard to take them seriously.

4. It has a great following, that's for sure. There's been some snide remarks about all the empty seats at the women's World Cup in France. 5. Smaller teams have excelled at the World Cup. Imagine Uruguay or even Argentina winning the world championship at anything other than football. And the great sides which didn't manage to win – the Netherlands and Hungary. Belgium surely had enough talent in their side to go all the way.

Ways in which the men's world cup is falling short.
1. The women are just better looking.

2. There was the issue of “playacting”. That's controversial. First, there are many football fans who argue that playacting was something that's great about men's football, that it's the controversies that add to the drama. About whether England's third goal against Germany in the 1966 final counted (yes) or whether Maradona used his hand to cheat against England (also yes). But if there's too much playacting, then I don't think there's a question that's a bad thing. Second, the way that the Victorian English conceived the game – and they were the ones who made the rules of the game – was that fair play was extremely important. But when football spread to other countries, many of whom have surpassed England in terms of standards, winning became more important, and some level of gamesmanship was assumed to be normal and moreover contributed to the level of entertainment. Thirdly, it was noted that the women engaged less in playacting. But there was also a lot less rough play. The ladies weren't even interested in tackling.

3. Perhaps one downside of the World Cup in the era of Messi and Ronaldo is that neither of them have demonstrated their best for this tournament, as opposed to Maradona, Pele or even more recently, Zidane, Xavi and Iniesta. Whereas the women's world cup is far and away the most important tournament of the game.

4. The high stakes of the game. When the USA womens' team beat Thailand by 13 goals to nil, some people were outraged, and one of the reasons, in hindsight is that it would never have happened in the men's game. Everybody knows, the way the men's game is now, it is an unfortunate fact that playing for your country – in the men's game at least – is inextricably linked to defending your national honor. Because the men's game at the international level has become one where the result has mattered as much as how it was achieved, you've had a lot of gamesmanship. Extra time has always been controversial, because it's resulted in both teams defending so tightly because nobody wants to concede goals, and would rather prefer the lottery of the penalty shootout to losing in extra time. Many times you'd get matches which are played ultra-defensively. The World Cup finals of 2010 and 2014 were pretty dreadful, especially the former, since Holland basically set out to kick the crap out of the Spaniards. Fortunately in both occasions the better team won. Perhaps the relatively open game in 2018 was a result of Croatia reaching the finals, and knowing that they had already exceeded expectations, and they hoped to play an open game. Another way of saying all this is that the women's world cup is still in a period of relative innocence, where all the gamesmanship and dirty play hadn't crept into the game.

5. Megan Rapinoe in a way is a symbol of diversity. She was an openly gay player who had won the world cup. LGBT is one of the last taboos of the men's game. No male footballer playing in a major league has come out. Yet I'm in some strange way not that moved by her anti-Trump stance. Perhaps because attacking Trump is just way too easy. (I'll never defend him, obviously). It's more in line with what people are doing in the NBA, the NFL, so it's an American thing, not a football thing. This is not Maradona's payback for the Falklands War, which with both the hand of god and the goal of the century, actually amounts to the more compelling story. So in a way the women's game is more diverse than the men's game. In another way, the women's game is actually more racist, and this is because the men's game has spent a longer time battling racism. The USA women's team suffers from the same problem as the men's team. They aren't getting enough latinos. Everybody has to come through a system that costs money for the players, so there's a whole swarth of underclass people who might have been part of a great feeder system - much like the ones who produced 3 out of the four semi-finallists in England, Belgium and France. The ghetto to elite footballer pipeline doesn't exist in football teams of both sexes in the US, and that is holding back the development of the game.

What I have to understand is that if and when soccer catches fire in the US, there's no reason that it should, but if it does, then things will be done their way. They might have their own terminology. Major League Soccer is played using rules that are different from the European leagues. And it might be a place where the women's game - at least on an international level has equal standing with men.

It's funny that of all the women's games, football is the one that's caught on in a large way, considering that it's a gladiatorial sport. Perhaps this has to do with how football is the most popular game in the world. It's a whole new arena, considering that the other gladiatorial games - cricket, basketball, rugby - don't have the women's version having such a high profile. It's funny that the places where the women are succeeding are the ones where women have a tradition of playing sports. China has reached the final, while it's men's team struggles to even qualify for the tournament. Japan has won the world cup, while in the men's game the furthest a man's side has reached is semi-finals (and something stank about the way they did that, even though it was by all accounts a pretty good team). Unlike the men's game where Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina account for almost half of the world cups won, I don't think South American teams are going to take the women's world cup by storm. The women's game is going to develop in its own way, if it moves even more forward.

I am happy that the women's world cup has raised its profile in America. It has given the Americans a reason to care about football, and for a while disregard the tragic state of their men's game. It has given football fans around the world a reason to care about the women's game. But the standards fall so far below those of the men's game that it makes me wonder - cos I'm not a tennis fan - how badly Serena Williams will get thrashed if she were to square up to say Federer.

Weeds

If I had to choose a birth flower or whatever I'd choose the humble weed. I feel like I have some form of hardiness. As for having an aim in life and getting myself together to achieve something real, that's another matter entirely.