Faith in our league, faith in football

[David Votoupal]

The Club World Cup this year delivered historic results. For the first time since its inception, a finalist came from outside Europe and South America. Congolese club TP Mazembe, African Champions' League winners for the second year running, stunned Pachuca and Internacional to reach the final. They may have been well beaten by Internazionale in the final.

Admittedly, the nature of such achievements is spurious at best. But there is something to be learned of this for our A-League. Firstly, that we must believe in our league and what it can produce and secondly, just as important, that the football powers that be must do as much as possible to maintain and improve our league's standards.

African club football has a long and storied tradition. Many older fans will talk with reverence about great club sides like Guinea's Hafia, who won the Champions' Cup on three occasions in the 1970s. In more recent times, the Arabic-speaking north of the continent (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Sudan) have been the stronger, due to greater financial resources and player retention. It was only in the 1980s that South American and African players gravitated en masse to the ranks of European football, although Africans have been present in Europe and especially France for many years before. Inevitably this depleted the ranks of domestic football, but domestic football has continued to be a conveyor belt of talent and continues to produce excellent football, players and teams. Similarly, the migration of players from South America to Europe has not stopped those leagues from continuing to deliver.

Arguably, this parallels with developments in Australia, where the NSL suffered from a player drain but continued to produced excellent players. And the ramifications of the NSL's dying years have had to be dealt with in the formative first five years of the A-League. And in its sixth season, we can say the A-League has come of age with a quality of football far better than anything that has come before. But how does our league stack up, you might ask, or how will it stack up internationally?

Once upon a time, most top-class football talent and in any case most of a country's best footballers had been content to play their careers in the confines of their domestic league. Once upon a time, clubs from Scotland, Netherlands and Portugal could play truly world-class football, to say nothing of Eastern Europe. In more recent times we saw the heroics of Scandinavian club sides, like IFK Gothenberg, Brondby and Rosenborg. Likewise, Welsh clubs in the English Second and Third Divisions were competitive in Europe.

The part-time clubs of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland once could hold their own in Europe. Even clubs from Finland and Albania chalked up remarkable results.

All this changed as the balance of power tilted increasingly towards the "big" leagues. The fall of the Berlin Wall allowed players from the old Eastern Bloc to move West, but those leagues have managed to recover and are now a magnet for players from all over the place. The Dutch and Portuguese leagues continue to serve as "development" leagues, producing top-class talent. But then there have been the "problem child" cases of European football- Belgium, Poland, Hungary and, increasingly, Scotland.

After years of decline, Belgium has seen an overhaul of its youth system, and now boast an excellent crop of young players delivering at a decent level. Hungary, once a jewel in the football crown, hit rock-bottom (you know the story because I've told it before) but have been trying to climb their way back. Poland, likewise, is not a lost cause. Scotland are potentially in bigger trouble than any of those, owing to a continuous decline in playing standards both of the national team and the domestic league. Is the SPL, for instance, any better than the A-League now?

Even the ranks of domestic football Finland and Iceland have produced some excellent young talent lately- check out Riku Riski and Matthias Vilhjalmsson for starters.

I think the point of this all is that in the current football climate, the A-League is in a healthy position but it is up to everyone- the administration, clubs and fans- to ensure it becomes a thriving competition with an acceptable standard. And in doing so, we may hope that one day our clubs will be able to emulate the feats of the likes of TP Mazembe.

A key in the growth and development of Asian and African football is the willingness to learn and put things into practice, and we will need to do more of that on our own shores.

[Stuckey]

I guess the key is a country has to be willing to accept change. We need to realise that just because we went through a revolution of sorts doesn't mean we can now sit back and expect results. We need to keep moving.

I think the talk at the moment of removing the state federations could help towards this. Having everyone on the same wavelength will help move change through.

[David Votoupal]

I guess the key is a country has to be willing to accept change. We need to realise that just because we went through a revolution of sorts doesn't mean we can now sit back and expect results. We need to keep moving.

I think the talk at the moment of removing the state federations could help towards this. Having everyone on the same wavelength will help move change through.

I agree the state federations need reforming, because the game (especially here in NSW) is still largely unreformed beneath the A-League. The Ku-ring-gai district association wanted to split from FNSW because of the lack of transparency with players' fees.

But that's not really the point of my article, which was more to demonstrate that faith in our league is just as important as maintaining standards and integrity.