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.