Global Football

 The formation of the super league made me realise that the rise of the English Premier League is basically a disaster for Southeast Asian football. In 1992, the Malaysian Cup was by some distance the most popular football event in Singapore. Of course we were not having a great year. I recall that in 1990, we lost the Malaysia Cup to a Kedah side that had V Sundramoorthy playing for them. In 1991, Abbas Saad and Alastair Edwards left Singapore, and I think there was a hangover, and in 1992, Singapore and Selangor – of all teams – ended up getting relegated. That's the equivalent of Real Madrid and Barcelona getting relegated.

And everybody knows what happened next. Singapore finished top 2 in the second tier league, and we qualified for the Malaysia Cup and we got all the way to the final. That was the first of two great seasons. And the second season, we got all the way to the final again. I think we had to get past Selangor in the semi-final, and then we beat Pahang. And we also know now that the match was thrown, but really... no matter. IT was great to have that Malaysia Cup.

In a way, it was the perfect narrative. Football in the early 90s, which was my teenage years, was just perfect. Singapore reached the Malaysia Cup final, and lost, then got relegated, then promoted again, reached another cup final and lost again, and then finally won the double. It was a thrilling narrative, and probably explains why the Singapore Lions were so popular during those days.

There was also the story of the SEA games, where Singapore finally assembled a team that could have won the football tournament, except that Lim Tong Hai scored two own goals. Maybe they weren't completely his fault, but that's one thing he'll never live down. Perhaps we'd have gotten beaten by Thailand in the final, but at least we deserved a silver medal. Singapore has never been able to get this close to winning the tournament ever since.

Something else happened during those years. It was also the changing of the guard. Just as the twin disasters of Heysel and Hillsborough helped bring down the Liverpool empire of the 80s, Singapore had two twin blows. First was that Singapore got kicked out of the Malaysia Cup. I can't remember the exact justification for it, but I think the Malaysians were increasingly wary that Singapore was going to dominate the Malaysia Cup. (let's leave aside the inconvenient fact that if not for Singapore, there may never have been a Malaysia Cup). The second reason was the rise of Manchester United. In 1993, they had won their first league title in 26 years. I probably didn't live through the Great Liverpool Title Drought so I never understood what it was like, and I still think it's pretty funny that Liverpool can end their 30 year drought for the title in the middle of the pandemic, when they can't have their open top bus parade.

Anyway, the legend of Manchester United spread far and wide. Manchester United came back strongly at a very crucial time. The premier league was about to catch on, and Manchester United was perfectly poised to ride the wave.

The top 5 of the inaugural Premier League made for some strange reading. Man U was champions, which sounds pretty normal now, but it was not, it was their first league title in 26 years. Second was Aston Villa, having a pretty good season with Graham Taylor. Third was Norwich, who had their best season in recent memory. Fourth was the newly promoted Blackburn Rovers, managed by Kenny Dalglish. Fifth was Queens Park Fucking Rangers.

That was a pretty strange lineup. Perhaps this was partly attributable to the changes in the back pass rule, that affected the different clubs differently.  I'm mentioning that because back then it wasn't obvious that within a few years, English football would be dominated by a small cabal of clubs. The English Premier League was formed as a breakaway league, in a process that was strikingly similar to the European Super League. But they were canny enough to ensure that there was a minimal change in form.

Manchester United was the club that took this opportunity for world domination. At this point in time, the biggest and richest clubs were those in Serie A. For whatever reason, by the late 80s, Serie A was the greatest league in the world, either because of great teams like AC Milan, or great players like Maradona, or their ability to attract the best players all over the world. There were maybe 7 or 8 teams that were great. Other than the 2 Milan teams and Juventus, there was Parma, Sampdoria, Lazio, Roma and Fiorentina. But the rest of the world didn't speak Italian, and that hampered their ability to reach world domination.

In contrast, Man U went from strength to strength. The team that defended their title in 1994 was even stronger than in 1993. They lost the title in 1995 to Blackburn, who were bankrolled by a local steel magnate. It was a thrilling title race. In 1995/6, Man U's title was won on the back of Eric Cantona's thrilling return, and their come from behind victory: Newcastle looked like they were going to win the title after being 12 points ahead at Christmas, but they lost steam towards the end. I can't imagine what the premiership would have been like if Newcastle had won that title, but I suspect they would have faded away like Blackburn. The 1996 team also saw the emergence of Man U's youth prospects, and several of them went on to become legends.

In 1997/8, Arsenal had a new manager who brought with him new fangled management approaches: better nutrition, better fitness, better flair, and better scouting. Instead of Man U going on to dominate the EPL for years, as they are well placed to do, a challenger would come on the scene to make the EPL a duopoly all the way until 2004.

You could say that the first 12 years of the EPL were great years. There were all sorts of narratives in the EPL that made things interesting. The hard men. The teams which didn't know how to defend. The flair players. The grafters. The super talented but lazy players. There was Wimbledon the crazy gang. There were the teams which survived relegation against the odds: the Bradfords, the Leicesters and the Ipswiches.

And then, in 2003, something changed. Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea football club. Blackburn and Newcastle had been bankrolled by wealthy owners for a season or two, but there wasn't any effort to buy an empire, at least not yet. Up till this point, a lot of developments had been positive, but this was the first attempt to buy the title.

At this point in time, Arsene Wenger was at the peak of his career. He had assembled a team which won the title in 2002 and 2004, and in the latter campaign, they won it without losing a match. His team had been assembled relatively cheaply, and played their football with flair and spontaenity.

Now, however, Chelsea brought in a whole new team of expensive players. They did well in their first year, but didn't win the league title, and they only got as far as the semi-finals of the champion's league, losing to the unfancied Monaco. Curiously enough, though, two of the players who would form the spine of that great team were Lampard and Terry and they were already in the club before Abramovich bought it. Quite a few of the signings did not make it: Veron, Mutu, Crespo had varying degrees of quality but they failed to settle in Chelsea and were shipped out. Ranieri was a good manager, but he was fired after the end of the first season, to be replaced by Mourinho.

Mourinho would succeed in building an empire. During his first season, the spine of the side that would challenge for many major honours was built. Duff, Robben, Carvalho, Makalele, Terry, Lampard, Drogba, Cech, Ballack. It was a good team, and they were tough and bloody minded, but they didn't play the most attractive football.

The first decade of the 21^st century was a time when the EPL started to lose its innocence. It started being about who could get the most transfers. Sam Allardyce probably would go down in history as one of the great managers, but his impact on the game would be hard to watch: the management would be about data analytics and good positioning. The game stopped being spontaneous. His Bolton sides had fine players with good skill, like Jay Jay Okocha, El Hadji Diouf and Youri Djorkaeff. But they played football that was a little too defensive and hard to watch. You couldn't really argue with the results, because he made Bolton a tough side to beat and finished in the top half of the table for a few seasons in a row.

Another issue was the players. Back then, this was before the age of social media, and in the 90s, lad culture ruled. For a few players, life was one big party, and quite possibly, Balotelli was the last of the party animal players, although one could argue that his big weakness was not playfulness, but rather a lack of tactical awareness. Gradually, players stopped being playful and started to sound like robots, repeating the same soundbites over and over again. It was great for the professionalism, but it was a lot less fun. It seemed like the 90s were some kind of adolescence, while the 21^st century was some more sober kind of adulthood.

Gradually, the changes that made the premier league so fascinating to watch over the years already took place: foreigners coming in to make the game more interesting, higher playing standards, more commercialisation.

When the champion's league was rigged so that the English sides would get 4 places every year, the same 4 clubs (Man U, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal) would hog those places. It used to be that lesser clubs had their stars. Coventry had players like Gary McAllister, Moustafa Hadji and Craig Bellamy. West Ham once had a lineup that included Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand, Trevor Sinclair, Paolo Di Canio, Neil Ruddock, Shaka Hislop and Eyal Berkovic. The problem was that a few of those teams ended up in dire financial straits. Leeds tried to “live the dream” and then failed. Aston Villa tried to make the leap into being a team which played regularly in Europe, but when they failed to bridge that gap, Randy Lerner lost interest.

It's very easy to say that relegation keeps the game honest, that it makes things interesting, and enables social mobility amongst clubs. But does it really? Relegation has become such a dire financial threat that teams are afraid to overreach, lest they end up like many other clubs which have gone into financial administration. Sunderland, Wimbledon, Porstmouth, Bolton and Blackburn are just a few of the clubs which have gotten themselves into trouble. The ones that survive are the ones who always play it safe, walk that fine line between not being too ambitious, but also not allowing results to slip.

Looking back at the EPL table 10 years ago, there were teams that might at that time have seemed like great models of governance. Wigan Athletic looked like a great overachiever who had stayed in the EPL for a few years and even managed to reach 2 FA cup finals and win 1. Stoke seemed to have established itself as a mid table side. Swansea appeared to be a miracle worker. Today, all of these clubs have been relegated.

I guess I talked about a lot of issues, but the one I really wanted to talk about is, “is it possible for all clubs to be great, and for all leagues to be great”? Is it possible for all clubs to have great fan bases, and be self sustaining? Should you even have a league that's divided between the haves and the have nots?

During the first 50 years of the English league, the league titles got spread around quite a lot. English football never got into a situation that was similar to many other countries, where there was a small cabal of clubs at the top, a small ogilopoly, and all the other clubs were just handmaids. There is a staggering list of former football champions: Nottingham Forest, Derby, both Sheffield clubs, Leeds, Blackburn, Newcastle, Aston Villa, Sunderland, WBA, Everton, Wolves, Preston, Burnley. And let's not forget Leicester.

How do we get a situation where the winner is unpredictable? It is very hard to achieve that with a round robin system. As they say, the league table doesn't lie. It's hard to get lucky and win the league. Leicester were lucky in 2016. For their performance, they would probably have finished in the top 4 in many other seasons. But it just so happened that many of the other contenders were having lousy seasons (Man City, Man U, Liverpool, Chelsea) and Arsenal were on the way down.

Usually, success on the field is a combination of two factors: there are great players, and there is great management. And behind both of them is great financing. Success tends to be self-reinforcing, and that's why the big clubs tend to stay that way. However, the EPL is competitive enough that there are many times when a team will just click and last for 2-3 years and then fade away.

What's changed in recent times is that big teams can cement their status at the top for a much longer time than that and have generational renewal.

It's hard to say whether there's been an increase in mobility or not. While it's been true that for a while, it seemed that there was a state of flux, before Man City cemented its dominance on the league. This is the 10^th anniversary of Man City winning their FA Cup, their first success of the Abu Dhabi era, which they would build upon to win titles in 2012, 2014, 2018, 2019 and they'll win again in 2021. At first, the list of champions read: Man City, Man U, Man City, Chelsea, Leicester, and it seemed that the title was being shared around. But on looking back, it seems that Chelsea and Man City, the two clubs funded by billionaires, have dominated the decade. The other champions are Leicester, a dark horse, and Liverpool, a traditional power that had the benefit of a great stadium and a great manager.

It seemed to be true that Man U's dominance of the game had ended in the post-SAF era, but they seem to be headed in the right direction, because they'll always have the ability to attract great players. And meanwhile, everybody's frantically spending their money so that they can close their gap with Man City, a team that not only has great funding, but a genius manager operating at the peak of his powers.

In Europe, if you want to look at the Champion's league, here's a nice statistic: in the last 10 years, Real Madrid has reached the UCL finals 8 times, Bayern 7 times and Barcelona 4 times. There is a real small cabal of "super elite" clubs.

In hindsight, the era from 2002 to 2010 was the era of peak Mourinho, where a team could park the bus and play out of their skin and achieve success almost reliably. Those were Mourinho's tenures with Porto, Chelsea and Inter Milan. Then in 2008, Barcelona hired Guardiola, and he introduced the world to tiki taka football. I don't know if there are any definitive versions of the Guardiola mentality. The early versions of his philosophy at Barcelona was that they were going to pass the opponent to death. Then another version involved a lot of pressing.

Over the next decade, there would be various coaches who had a lot of new ideas – coaches like Ralf Rangnick, Brendan Rodgers, Thomas Tuchel, Hansi Flick, Julian Nagelsman. Football is increasingly a game where players are drilled on very detailed plans, and success as come as a result as much of the talents of the players as the quality of those plans. The question is: are good coaches more rare or good players more rare? Are there good coaches out there who can take average players and turn them into gems, and why are they so rare that there is an entrenched power elite in the big leagues of Europe?

On the player side, one reason why the US major sports has so much equality is that player recruitment works differently. Teams which finish behind actually get a little bit more money and try to make up the difference. This is in contrast to how football clubs which are smaller find it more difficult to attract big name players.

Of late, especially when it comes to the star players, it has become much cheaper to have a youth team and hot house a lot of young players and hopefully a few of them will grow up to be great football players. One famous example is Lionel Messi, a one club player (so far) and we don't know what his transfer fee would have been, because he's never switched clubs.

The problem with the youth system is this: young players will typically only want to join youth systems of a few select clubs, because he's betting his future on being associated with a big team, with a lot of expertise. He might have a range of options if he fails. He might begin with Chelsea youth and fail downwards to maybe Fulham, and maybe if he doesn't make it at Fulham, he knows that he must have options in lower leagues elsewhere in England or other countries. So maybe only big clubs have youth systems. And yet there are players who start off by playing football in the lower leagues, and progress up the system when they become good enough. Examples of this include Ian Wright and Jamie Vardy.

Now I've explored why the English system is so unequal, and sometimes it's deliberate, because a lot of things depend on the interplay between lesser and greater clubs. There are many times when a big club will buy a youthful prospect, and then loan him out to the smaller clubs in order for the player to gain experience, and they'll take him back if he's good enough. Every now and then, a smaller club will unearth a gem, and they'll sell that guy away to raise funds. People think that it's a given that a player will want to move on to a “bigger” club. But take a club like West Ham in 1999: they had a lot of good players. Why did they accept that they had to sell those players? They had players like Frederic Kanoute, Jermaine Defoe, Joe Cole and Michael Carrick, on top of the other great teammates from the 1999 team. That team would have qualified for Europe every year, but instead they got relegated.

Then consider a team like Leeds who flew too near the sun. They missed qualifications for the champions league, and then “fake it till you make it” fell apart, the team got into big financial trouble, and they fell hard, got relegated and only made it back to the premier league more than 10 years later, and seem to be destined for mid table mediocrity.

Is this a good system? Can you compare it to a system like major sports in America, where every sports franchise has the ability to win, and there's no “class system”? Most teams in the NFL are former superbowl winners.

These days, there's even more at stake to be one of the “big clubs”, because being near the top of the league gives you name recognition amongst global fans, who only recognise the top few sides. There's a reason why it was the “big six” in English football: these are the clubs who attract the biggest TV audiences. I don't know how many fans Leicester has because of their championship system. In contrast, the audiences in big American sports are mostly the Americans, and every club has a big fan base, except that maybe there are a few teams with big names which stand out, like Boston Celtics, LA Lakers or Golden State Warriors for basketball. But in the case of the Warriors or the Bulls, these are teams which have earned the right by making it to the very top and become unbeatable for a few years.

With football, it's become possible for a wealthy person to buy a club that would normally be a mid table side, and put in enough funds to grow that side into a big name. Which is what happened to Manchester City, or Paris Saint Germain and what the Saudis were considering doing to Newcastle United not too long ago.

In football, the downside of mobility is instability. It's hard for a club to be in and out of the champions league every year. The finances will be shaky. It's hard for a club who gets into the champion's league every year to not win it ever. That's what happened to Arsenal, and now their hold on their status as a top club is quite shaky. The problem with this sink or swim system is that it forces everybody to take this competition extremely seriously, and it actually amounts to a winner takes all system.

To me, one of the biggest downsides to the inequality of the English game is the rise of global clubs. And this takes me back to the local scene. Some of us who were old enough will still remember the magic of the Malaysia Cup days. There was a time when the first team of Singapore FA were household names. There was a time when Singapore actually had football stars, and it wasn't just Fandi Ahmad. There was a time when Fandi was just a small kid, and there were other heroes like Quah Kim Song and Samad Allapitchay and Dollah Kassim.

Granted, Singapore was a place where thugs were frowned upon, and even our hard men like Borhan Abu Samah had to be friendly people. We weren't going to have a Vinnie Jones or a Graeme Souness. Maybe the closest we had to having a bad boy was Noor Alam Shah.

There seemed to be a system, and people would live and die for the game. They would graduate to the Singapore team, and balance their part time jobs and their games, and play to a roaring crowd of 50000 every home game.

That system basically got destroyed after the 1994 double, and we haven't been able to find anything like it. The S League never got off the ground, because Singapore is not like London, who can find space for 10 football teams who can fill up stadiums of 50000. And because the system could not get off the ground, we couldn't pay the footballers to play for Singapore. It always seemed to be a league perpetually on the brink of financial trouble. And yet it still produced the core of the national side which won 4 AFF championships.

Personally I knew why you could go to Kallang stadium and cheer for a team that played football that was inferior to the English Premier League. That made sense to me. You cheered for a team that your parents cheered for, that people around you knew. Nazri Nasir and Lim Tong Hai were guys that you might bump into at a crowded kopitiam.

Singapore has a big Red Devils' supporters' fan club. It's nice to see a whole variety of people play for Man U. Handsome guys like David Beckham. Plain looking guys like Paul Scholes. Wolves in sheep clothing like Ryan Giggs. Black guys like Yorke and Cole. Thugs like Roy Keane. Asian grafters like Park Ji Sung. But I don't understand how you could look at them and use the word, “we”. Unless you grew up in the northwest of England, I didn't see how you could do it.

Further more, you could say that the rise of more systems oriented and tactics oriented coaches like Guardiola has been a boon for football. It has been a boon for attacking football, and the number of goals scored has gone up. It used to be that attacking too much was suicidal, and today it's more commonly accepted that the best form of defence is attack, that if you tried to do what Mourinho did 10 years ago, which was to park the bus, the attacker would get through anyway.

The downside of this is that maybe you had sides who didn't really have stars in their team. Man City was full of attacking midfielders I couldn't tell apart from each other. The first big Man City side had big personalities, even though they were relatively uncontroversial. Balotelli was controversial and he was moved on quickly. But it had stars like Aguero, Silva, Kompany, Hart, Tevez. The later Guardiola sides had players who just jigsaw pieces. You had Gundogan, Gabriel Jesus, Leroy Sane, Raheem Sterling, Phil Foden, who all had bland personalities and seemed to be indistinguishable from each other, like great cogs in a great machine. Perhaps the only guy who stood out was Kevin De Bruyne.

The other thing is that the football pages now look like data science presentations. People talk about heat maps, statistics like attempted passes, the shape of areas covered, and a lot of dry stuff. There was a time when I might have been more excited about that, but football has become more geeky and less about fire and instinct. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but I think it's just losing qualities that it used to have.

It was easier to like Liverpool, because at least you saw how Firmano, Mane and Salah were different, and yet combined well with each other.

Perhaps it was the uncompromising pursuit of perfection and the ruthlessness of the environment that they work under that makes it hard for people to express themselves as individuals. Or maybe things has become such that everybody was a squad player.

So you had this weird paradox where all the teams were very well known all around the world, and yet the people who made them up are relatively anonymous. There'll always be the flashy players like Paul Pogba. And Man U might have a Romelu Lukaku but he'll only be there for 2 seasons.

Thing is, football is supposed to build a sense of community, and in order to have that sense of community, you need to have some sense of identity that defines you, and some sense that you and not the rest of the world are part of some tribe. It's very hard to get that when you're supporting a global club. You don't get to feel like you're in some kind of a tribe simply because you and some other African 10 time zones away happen to be watching the same Hollywood movie, so why should it be the case for a global club?

And maybe, that's why I never truly committed myself to be part of some global club. I'm not going to get the same feeling that I got, watching Arsenal or Chelsea or whatever, compared to watching Singapore vs Pahang or Singapore vs Penang. And yet I know that when you watch the top sides, the quality of the football is so much better. Watching the EPL sides for me is kinda boring, a bit like watching the World Cup, knowing the spectacle that is about to unfold, but also knowing that the final will be between two sides you may not necessarily care about. I mean, who would I choose, between France and Croatia? I could see a dude from the mainland wearing the colours of Real Madrid and I think to myself, “why are you wearing the colours of the evil imperialist west?”

So the big controversy about the European Super League is that English fans thought that it was going to destroy the English Premier League. Cry me a river! The EPL has been destroying leagues all over the world for decades before this, and they're only complaining now because they're on the receiving end. It's also funny how the Spanish and Italian fans were not complaining much over this. Maybe there isn't much support for clubs outside of the big 3, or maybe because they already accept that clubs are there to be manipulated by some kind of plutocracy.

But this threat of a football system either being wiped out or changed forever has to trigger some discussion about the state of football in the wider world outside of Europe's big leagues. It's clearly a suboptimal situation that, increasingly, Europe has come to rule the world of football. It was an outcome that Pele did not predict, when he thought that one day an African side would win the World Cup. Of course, he's of African descent and he has high hopes for the motherland. But what happened instead is that the African diaspora had a lot of success. France won the World Cup twice, and each time, they had players of African descent playing prominent roles. It's the colonialisation story all over again, that it's the marginalised subjects who are striving for the empire's glory.

As for football in southeast Asia, it's all been a bit of a disgrace. In 1992, before football went global, southeast Asia was one of the few places outside Latin America and Europe with any interest in football. It was still nascent in many parts of Africa and the Middle East, and it practically didn't exist in Australia, Japan and the USA. Then what happened next is that those 3 countries have qualified for the World Cup multiple times, and not once has a southeast Asian country followed suit. Vietnam and the Philippines have made progress. China has pumped a great amount of money into trying to build a good football scene.

This is not a good development for football. We thought football was going to be globalised, but instead only the viewership has been globalised, but not the development of the sport. In the 2018 World Cup, the USA didn't qualify. Japan was the only Asian country who advanced to the second round, and Brazil and Uruguay were the only countries to advance to the quarter finals. Football has become more and more lopsided towards Europe on the field.

Singapore and Malaysia could be like Austria and Hungary – talk about football will inevitably be consigned to some glorious past that not longer exists. Who even remembers that Uruguay used to be the greatest football power in the world? And who knows when Brazil and Argentina are going to produce their next great football team?

So if football exists in Singapore, then it probably has to be part of a greater system. I never understood why Singapore and Malaysia never wanted to merge their football system, but I suppose it's true that this is the one thing where we need them more than they need us. I know that a great football system will require a lot of people to be sacrificing their lives for some dream that may not come to pass, and that is something that's increasingly incompatible with our high standards of living and our inability to run a football league on our own. Some of the teams are basically feeder clubs for teams in other leagues, and that's as good an admission as anything else that the Singapore league is a second tier league. Sometimes I wonder if Singapore can leverage on its superiority in machine learning and data science to produce a great football team. One can only hope.

And yet I yearn for the days when people still remembered the kampong spirit, even as they moved out of their kampongs in droves. People might not have enough of an attachment to the part of Singapore they stay in, but they do have an attachment to any football team with Singapore colours.

So this whole episode about the European Super League does make me question a few things – why is local football no longer a thing? What is the nature of football fandom now? Is it about people in stadiums, or is it about people watching people in stadiums on TV? Will we have to make do with Singapore crashing out of the first round every 2 years in the AFF championship?