Tuesday, July 31, 2012
SLeague Obituary
Not much about Singapore recently. Mainly ‘cos it’s all been
said before ad nauseum. The League
Cup, which should be dropped, was expanded into a group stage so teams could
play each other more often.
Then came an announcement that the top half would play off
against each other as would the bottom half.
Are the people that run the game for real there? They love
their talk of hubs, key performance indicators and the like but they ain’t at
some business school theorizing to their hearts content. They are supposed to
be running football and they are making a right balls up of it.
Crowds are falling so what do they propose? The same teams
play each other more often! The same
teams that people have stopped going to see!
Is there no end to the lunacy? Yesterday the Singapore FA
held its AGM and in more bad news for the few people left that follow the
Singapore league the man in charge said he would not resign. Why not? After all
when Singapore failed to qualify for the last world cup he said the whole team
should be sacked for falling short of the required standard. What is good for
the goose is surely good for the gander?
Under this guy we have had a strategic plan, which really
looks like it is being made up as we go along, we have SLeague 2.0 and 3.0 yet
it’s all crap. Attendances continue to plummet and nothing seems to be done
about it apart from business school speak.
The league is probably still the most exciting in the
region, witness Young Lions recent come from behind win over the once mighty
SAFFC, but the punters aren’t buying. So what makes them think more of the same
will work?
The SLeague is dying and it’s dying because the top gave up
the ghost long ago.
Singapore is a hard market to sell in despite what some
western expert claimed recently. People there will happily fork out $100 on a
replica shirt from Liverpool yet baulk at paying a fiver to see a team that
plays across the road.
How can you fight a prejudice that says everything European
is fantastic, everything local is shit?
Singaporeans will wave the flag for
Singapore; the crowds in the Malaysia Super League for the daftly named
LionsXII prove that. And when the national team have a home game, and they
stand a chance of winning, the fans turn out in force.
There is a Singaporean identity. One that moans about the
MRT, is scared shitless of crossing the Causeway, loves to follow English
football and takes great pride in the national airline. But there seems to be
no affinity for where they live. Singapore, yes. But Tampines? Gombak? For many
people their local team is Liverpool or Chelsea.
It’s a difficult mindset to challenge.
It doesn’t help when the local league is padded out with
filler clubs. SAFFC are military, Home are coppers and Young Lions are, in
theory, the future national team. Add the foreign teams of Harimau Muda
(Malaysia), Albirex Niigata (Japan) and DPMM (Brunei) and you can understand a
certain reluctance. It doesn’t feel like a local league. It feels like someone
has upset a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle and no one can find the picture.
Everyone conspires against the SLeague. Local papers will
reprint agency stories that appeared in the English media about Andy Carroll or
David Beckham 24 hours earlier rather than get off their arses and cover the
local stuff in any depth.
It’s difficult to see what kind of future the SLeague has
against this backdrop. If such an exciting league does not pull the fans then
perhaps it is time to put the league out of its misery? Again we come back to
the people at the top who are getting well paid for their part time sinecures
yet achieving very little.
Waffling on about putting more effort into the strategic
plan is just waffle. The plan when it came out was pure waffle; high on buzz
words, low on detail. The President at the AGM says that because they are not
reaching the desired goals does not mean they are failing! What planet has been
on recently? Don’t the KPIs he loves to waffle on about apply to him?
When the man charged with taking the game forward says that
not reaching targets is not a problem then perhaps it is best we just knock it
all on the head.
At the same AGM someone got up and gave an impassioned plea
for the game’s survival. The response of the President? It’s an old song, we’ve
been hearing it 10 years. Of course you have been hearing it 10 years, Mr
President, nothing has changed, the same problems remain and have not been
addressed beyond a babble of MBA speak that gets us nowhere.
I would like to be wrong. I really would. I would love to be
able to tell people that all they have to do to get to an SLeague game is get
off at the nearest MRT and follow the crowds. Or pick up a weekly paper devoted
to football on the island. Or go down a sports retailer and see Tampines Rovers
or Gombak United souvenirs on sale. But none of that is likely to happen any
time soon.
There is plenty of passion for the game. You just have to
look at the links on the left had side of this blog to see people taking the
time to write about the game they love; it would seem at times they devote more
time than those who are supposed to administer the game.
But passion is not enough. There needs to be know-how and
money and deep reserves of both. At the moment we have neither. Stick a few
fruit machines in the club house and that seems to be the limit of some club
owners.
There is talk of a fund that will kick off with 900,000 GBP.
That is the level the administrators are operating at. With investors from
Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand looking at buying clubs in Europe, Singapore,
by far the richest country in the region, wonders what to do with a sum of
money that Carlos Tevez earns in a month. Small country, small scale, small
minds.
Anybody wanting to do anything with the game would soon come
up against a system that distrusts any kind of entertainment that attracts
large crowds. Institutional apathy deadens the most enthusiastic; with
Manchester City, Arsenal, Valencia and Chelsea floating through the region in
the last 12 months none have bothered with Singapore.
With the largest stadium
holding about 7,000 spectators even the Teletubbies would be forced to give
Lion City a miss. The replacement for the National Stadium is still at least
two years away and no one thought to have a stadium in reserve while the new
one was being built.
Can the SLeague continue given the seemingly insurmountable
problems it faces, both cultural and institutional? It’s difficult to see how
unless a total change in mindset is affected. It would be nice to see that
happen. It would be nice to see Aleksander Duric get the credit he deserves;
Noh Alam Shah be recognized as a Wayne Rooney type character receiving the same
sympathy the real one gets from local wannabe Mancs; that promising players
like Hariss Harun and Shafiq Ghani are given the opportunity to show their
skills without worrying about National Service.
Singapore football is worth saving. Is anybody up to the
task?
# posted by Me @ 6:03 PM 
