Sport | Football
Club versus country row threatens Olympic football
Are we witnessing the end of Olympic football after more than a century? What we have lately seen is a bitter stand-off between certain leading European clubs, certain national associations and the ruling body Fifa.
- By Brian Glanville, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 23:25 August 4, 2008
Are we witnessing the end of Olympic football after more than a century? What we have lately seen is a bitter stand-off between certain leading European clubs, certain national associations and the ruling body Fifa.
This resulted in an appeal by Barcelona, Werder Bremen and Bayern Munich to the Court of Arbitration for Sports against Fifa's insistence that all players of 23 years and under should play.
At the root of all this of course is money. Football in the Olympics makes more of it than even that drug-ridden monstrosity that is athletics.
Even in the Los Angeles games, when soccer in the US was a mere sideshow, crowds at football games were immense.
The trouble is that there is simply far too much competitive soccer now being played; clubs are already involved in Champions League preliminary games, even before the Olympics begin and they need their players.
It's a long time of course since Olympic soccer was amateur.
Appalling statistics
The marvellous Uruguay team which won the 1924 and 1928 Olympic tournaments went straight on to win the first World Cup in 1930.
But the amateur age is now dead and major clubs call the tune at the expense of the Olympics.
Meanwhile, Gary Mabbutt, once an accomplished central defender for Spurs and England, has been doing his best to defend the choice of South Africa for the 2010 World Cup, despite the appalling statistics of rape, robbery and murder.
Thirty thousand policemen, he tells us, are being specially trained for the event. Tourism is growing abundantly, though he does admit that going into the so-called townships, where they've lately been murdering and burning immigrants, would be unwise. Meanwhile we know that Brazil have been contacted as possible hosts. Mabbutt's faith in Fifa may be misplaced.
And what of Andriy Shevchenko. A £30 million misfit at Chelsea, plainly brought to please the billionaire owner Roman Abramovich, the once formidable Ukraine striker somewhat surprisingly played for The Blues in Moscow last Friday against Lokomotiv Moscow.
He duly missed a penalty; yet Carlo Ancelotti, manager of AC Milan, eulogised about him. Milan, however, refused to buy him back this summer.
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