Rift Between FIFA, Clubs To Dictate Soccer’s Future

Soccer’s past is easily summed up: From a variety of primitive kicking games, it developed slowly into the world’s most popular sport. Soccer’s present is a bit more complicated, for from that base of worldwide popularity, there has grown a multi-billion dollar global business. And with wealth and power have come enormous problems — problems that forewarn of a troubled future.The makings of a huge split in the sport have been apparent for decades. They have been repeatedly papered over. But they regularly recur, slightly stronger and rather more intractable with each re-appearance.The threatened split, of course, is about money and authority. Soccer’s ancient (and increasingly antiquated) power structure has always insisted that the people who run the sport, be it at the local or the international levels, be amateurs and volunteers. In other words, people who can be assumed — if not guaranteed — to put the interests of the sport above considerations of financial profit. Hence, a complicated network of 208 national federations, all of which are members of FIFA, the international body headquartered in Switzerland that controls the game worldwide. But that control is constantly under challenge by commercial interests — particularly by the rich clubs and by television. If that sounds pretty straightforward, it is anything but, because soccer has added an extra layer of complication.In effect, it requires its best players to play for two teams — for their clubs, and for their national teams. That arrangement goes back over a century, and it has worked nicely for most of that time. But it is not working smoothly now. The clubs are increasingly restless with what they see as an unfair arrangement. After all, the clubs pay all the players’ regular expenses — wages, insurance, etc. — yet are expected to release those players whenever the national team requires them. The national team demands have become more frequent as the number of international games has increased.Although the national teams are run by the various national federations, the clubs tend to direct their anger toward FIFA, which lays down the regulations — including the one that requires clubs to release players for official FIFA tournaments. The big tournament, of course, is the World Cup — not only the one-month tournament itself, which is held every four years, but all the qualifying games leading up to it. There were 845 of these games leading up to last year’s tournament in Germany and qualifying games for the 2010 tournament in South Africa have already started in Asia and South America.FIFA has considerable power: It can suspend from activity any club or national association that contravenes its regulations. But that power is looking increasingly shaky. The clubs have already made it clear that they want some sort of compensation for their players — particularly those who might get injured while playing for their national teams. A lawsuit on this matter, pitting a Belgian club, Charleroi, against FIFA is currently underway in the European Court of Justice.But the overall issue awaits a resolution: the tug-of-war between the clubs and FIFA for the players’ services. FIFA, a nonprofit body that makes millions from the World Cup ($66 million from last year’s tournament in Germany) has, in recent years, added two more major tournaments to its list: the FIFA Club World Cup (held every year) and the FIFA Confederations Cup (held every two years).The physical demands on the players have become an issue. While the clubs accuse FIFA of increasing the workload, they themselves have added to the players’ burden by making them play in off-season tours of Asia and of America.The feeling is that players, particularly the game’s top stars, are being required to play too many games. But no one has yet defined what constitutes “too many” games. There are possibly more stress-related injuries than there used to be, but conclusive statistics are lacking.It is this battle for the players’ services that could cause soccer’s current structure to fall apart. It is certainly true that a player’s nationality no longer carries the emotional weight that it once did. Over the past decade, national teams have increasingly included players whose connections with the countries involved have been distant (a grandmother, possibly), or players who have been recently naturalized.At the club level, European Union regulations make it impossible for clubs to restrict the signing of players from other E.U. countries. This is another source of dispute between the clubs and FIFA. FIFA is pleading with the E.U. to allow soccer clubs to impose a quota on foreign signings, but the richer clubs prefer an open market.The clubs have probably got it right here. There is little evidence that using foreign players turns fans off. England’s Arsenal, which regularly fields a team without a single English player on it, leads the English Premier League and plays every home game in a packed stadium.If nationality, and consequently the concept of national teams, are losing their meaning and their appeal, then the future of the World Cup, the greatest of sports’ international festivals, is in danger.A replacement is already lurking, and has been vaguely discussed for years: an international league for clubs. Initially, it would be limited to Europe, home of all of the world’s richest clubs. It possibly would never need to play its games anywhere else because it could recruit its worldwide audience through pay-per-view television.One of the earliest proponents of such a league was the former Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who is the owner and president of AC Milan. For Berlusconi, a TV mogul, the electronic audience was the key to everything, and he foresaw the day when fans would be admitted free to stadiums merely to create the required atmosphere for exciting telecasts. For the clubs, the big attraction of such a league would be that they would run it themselves, backed by television money, and free of FIFA’s vexatious diktats.The World Cup would become a mere memory, and FIFA would wither away along with it. Unthinkable? Maybe — but not quite so unthinkable as it was 10 years ago.pgardner@nysun.com

Rift Between FIFA, Clubs To Dictate Soccer’s Future

Rift Between FIFA, Clubs To Dictate Soccer’s Future

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