Olympics & soccer

Published : Aug 16, 2008 00:00 IST

For all the prominence and drama of athletics, it is soccer which makes the most money of any Olympic event. This was seldom more strongly shown than at the Los Angeles Olympics.

Looking ahead to the Olympic Games in London in 2012, Colin Moynihan, ex-minister of sport under a conservative government (I described him then as “small but imperfectly informed”) and Seb Coe, once a great runner but no great politician, have sounded an alarm. They are appalled by the refusal of the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish associations to release their players for a Great Britain team, to compete in the next Olympic tournament.

The three recalcitrant associations all fear that by colluding with an all British team, they would be playing into the hands of those countries, especially the South Americans, who for years have been insisting that Britain should have no more than one entrant in any major competition. i.e. the World Cup and the European Championship. You can see their point; up to a point. The four so-called home countries may exist as separate entities in football terms, but politically, they come under the realm of Great Britain. As against that, the four British countries would argue that, historically, they existed as separate entities many years before the European and South American national teams were even thought of.

Two points need to be made. First, that if Britain does enter a so-called United Kingdom team, made up wholly of English players, there is an old and double precedent for it. Both in 1908, when the tournament was played at the White City in West London — alas, now long since built over — and 1912 in the Stockholm Games, the victorious United Kingdom sides consisted wholly of English players. All genuine amateurs, playing for first division teams. Such as the distinguished attacker Vivian Woodward, a star with two London clubs in the shape of Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea. Outside-left in the 1912 winners was Ivan Sharpe of Derby County, who would, on retiring, become one of the most far seeing and progressive football journalists England has seen.

The truth of the matter, however, is that the Olympic Games need soccer far more than soccer needs the Olympics. For all the prominence and drama of athletics, it is soccer which makes the most money of any Olympic event. This was seldom more strongly shown than at the Los Angeles Olympics. At a time when professional soccer in America was deeply in the doldrums, the crowds at the Olympic football tournament were huge. Yet the signs are that, by 2012, it could be dead in the water.

Almost simultaneously with the outcry by Coe (who has done nothing since, bizarrely, appointed head of FIFA’s supposed ethics committee; surely a contradiction in terms) and by Moynihan, major European clubs had risen in rebellion. First it was Barcelona, insistent that, against his wishes, they would not release the dazzling 20-year-old winger Lionel Messi to play in China for Argentina. Next it was the turn of leading German clubs, notably Werder Bremen and Bayern Munich to rebel. Even to the extent of confiscating the passports of Serbian players who had been chosen by their country. Karl Heinz Rummenigge once a star forward for Bayern and West Germany, now a leading administrator, insisted, against the angry rebukes of the FIFA President Sepp Blatter, that there was nothing in the international rules to compel clubs to release their men for the Olympic tournament. Indeed, these clubs, when ordered by Blatter to fall into line, took their case to the high court of sporting jurisdiction. Blatter declared that clubs could withhold from what was an under-23 tournament, in which, anomalously, three overage players could be included by each team, only such veterans. All players of 23 and under had to be released. Subsequently, the court has ruled against FIFA.

All seemed to indicate that the writing was on the wall for the Olympic soccer tournament. One which, with all its anomalies, its thinly disguised professionalism in the days before the category of amateurism was abolished, had provided its pleasures. You could put this down to money again, in the last analysis. So top heavy and bloated has major soccer become that there simply isn’t room for such a tournament any more. It is looking, especially to the leading clubs, like more and more of a luxury. The European Champions Cup itself, the Blue Riband of the European game, now, Heaven help us, begins in its preliminary stages as absurdly early as late July. Just around the time when Olympic teams demand some of the best young players.

Not every major club has been as intransigent as Bayern and Barcelona. Liverpool, however reluctantly, have released their key midfield enforcer, Javier Mascherano, their Dutch winger Babel and their Brazilian midfielder, Lucas. And must now, given the attitude of Barcelona and company, be regretting their generosity. The point is, however, that, win or lose, the defiant clubs have shown that things cannot go on as they are.

Historically, it wasn’t long before the soccer tournament became a parody of amateurism. The British played by the rules. The Spaniards and Italians, when the Olympics resumed after the Great War in the 1920s, certainly didn’t. And the glorious Uruguayan team which won the title in Paris and Amsterdam in 1924 and 1928 was very much the same team which, in Montevideo, won the first World Cup in 1930. FIFA having realised that, with the Olympic competition a parody of amateurism, it was time for a full scale world tournament to be launched.

In ensuing years, we saw a superb Hungarian team emerge from its isolation behind the Iron Curtain to win the 1952 Olympic crown; thrashing England 6-3 at Wembley the following year. Puskas, Kocsis, Hidegkuti; some amateurs! But in the communist bloc all was hypocrisy, professionalism was deplored and prohibited. Players nominally served in the Army instead, though they were seldom seen on parade. Now and again there could be such happy surprises as India’s in 1956, in Melbourne. But for many years, hypocrisy ruled.

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