KARACHI CHRONICLE: Sports professionalism

19 Jul, 2014

The FIFA World Cup has ended in Brazil, with Germany emerging champions, Argentina second and Netherlands at third place. Experts and viewers are unanimous in believing there has never been such an excellent football World Cup in which every participating team showed the highest standard of professionalism. Whatever the results, and no matter if the teams you favoured won or lost (my choice: Camaroon, Uruguay, Brazil all went down), all across the world there was admiration and the young were motivated to take up the sport.
Today World Cup championships are held in almost all sports and there is, of course, the Olympics. Yet none of them commands universal viewership as the football world cup. Lyari, which is the motherbed of Pakistani football, bestowed its own name on the Brazilian team. They never called it Brazil, it was Lyari. The reason, they said, was that the Brazilians play like we do, with short passes, because they learn to play in narrow streets just as in Lyari. There were no curses or condemnation for Brazil when it lost in the semi-final and then in the third-place match. Lyariites adopted Germany afterward, not because they really love the team or find in it some quality with which they identify, but with their acumen for the game they were certain the cup would be won by the Germans, and Lyari badly wanted to back a winner.
There is no game except football which is Karachi's true sport even though the city has produced great cricketers, hockey players and even Jahangir Khan the Squash legend. Football is like blood in the veins, but because it is essentially a poor person's sport, it is neglected. Whatever is achieved, such as the bronze won in World Street Football, or an individual star Bruce Rodrigues, or the paltry club match etc are simply an expression of love of the game. There is little hope Pakistan will ever play in a world cup because of lack of professionalism.
It is professionalism which produces the standard of play which qualifies a country for the world cup football. Without financial investment, teams from Nigeria, Uruguay, Camaroon and Costa Rica could never have made it to the FIFA World Cup in Brazil. Pakistan is not poorer than these countries, surely.
The only team sport which is professional in Pakistan is cricket, and the quality of the game has improved tremendously. Unfortunately in Pakistan and India the game has also attracted shabby, dirty and disreputable elements who fix matches. Players have also been involved in such seedy activity. There is also too much politics with managerial and other posts jockeyed simply for the money.
International football too has had its dirt. For example, at the FIFA World Cup in Brazil an official was caught involved in black market of tickets. But Football players hardly have such a reputation. If they do it means an end to their career. The majority of players come from poor homes and to lose a career which makes millions is something only a fool will do. So they keep clean. One of the reasons why professional football has not been introduced in Pakistan is fear of the misuse it would encourage. But if there are ways and means of controlling it internationally, it can be done here too.
Sports in Pakistan is class conscious. Cricket is the game of Lords, though we do not have any lords. Hockey of the middle-class though half the chaps are uneducated and football the game of the poor. And since our attitude is to do nothing for the poor, we do nothing for football.
We export labour, we could export footballers to earn foreign exchange. The talent is there, especially but not only, in Lyari. Investment is needed to send them to professional schools, such as the Manchester United Summer School in UK. I guarantee the boys will be picked up by professional clubs once they are trained. Eventually, true professionalism will filter down to Pakistan as well when clubs contract players and clubs vie for the best players for a price.
Another thing we need is mass public involvement in Pakistani football. In Brazil not everyone got a ticket to see the match in the stadium, but did you see the thousands of people watching the match for free at the Copa Cabana Beach in Rio? Brazil was out of the run in the semi-final but it did not dampen the spirit of the public. There were still huge crowds inside the famouse Maracana stadium, on the Copa Cabana Beach, in the bars and hotels all over Brazil. Similar involvement existed in every nation which played in the FIFA World Cup. The fellow-feeling that grows from such public participation is of great social value to the game and to the country. We had some public spaces where a handful of people could watch the world cup on large screens put up by some lads or a club. Some of us watched it on television, but you had to be a die-hard fan of the game to do that since the matches were telecast late at night.

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