Sport | Football
Transformation of players 'will take time'
The first UFL kicked off with more questions than answers regarding all parties concerned in the game.
- By Yasir Abbasher, Senior Reporter
- Published: 23:52 September 20, 2008
- Yousuf Al Serkal who resigned from his post as UAE FA Chairman earlier this year, expects that the association will need between ten to fifteen years to bear fruit.
- Image Credit: Ahmed Ramzan/ Gulf News
Abu Dhabi: The first UAE Professional Football League (UFL) kicked off with more questions than answers regarding all parties concerned in the game whether they be players, coaches, referees, club officials, fans or even media personnel.
And the biggest question of all - how long will it take to harvest the fruits of professionalism, resulting in progress and improvement of the local game and national teams.
Gulf News took these questions and met with the architect of the UFL, Yousuf Al Serkal, Vice-President of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and former chairman of the UAE FA who decided that the 2008-09 season would be the kick off for a professional league in the country.
Al Serkal who resigned from his post as UAE FA Chairman earlier this year, expects that the practice will need between ten to fifteen years to bear fruit and that it will take this amount of time to transform players into true professionals.
Gulf News: What do you expect for the UFL bearing in mind it was you who personally decided that this season would be the kick-off for the professional competition?
Al Serkal: The early signs and hype are encouraging. We saw the real practise of a domestic transfer market for the first time in the history of the game in the UAE and all clubs have worked hard to strengthen their line-ups for the competition. But although these actions might be promising I don't expect many changes in the competition and I expect that the league will almost be similar to the competition of last season.
Why?
"We need between ten to fifteen years to have a true professional competition with true professional players, referees, officials and fans. The players, despite currently being paid professional players' salaries, are still living as amateurs. They have to totally change their lives, their old habits of what to eat, when to sleep, how and when to train and how to keep fit. It is not easy to change all that.
"To have professional maturity the players have to make big sacrifices and the clubs have to bring in professional officials and the fans have to be patient. You cannot change from an amateur to a professional in one or two seasons."
What about changing the clubs to become private companies?
"That will need even more time bearing in mind the special nature of our clubs not only in the UAE but in Arab countries as a whole because they have always been semi-governmental departments to serve society. The AFC does not put a condition that all clubs should be private companies because they know that clubs in most Asian countries need the support of the government and cannot become self-sufficient in less than 40 or 50 years.
"The AFC also knows that there will be not enough investors to buy these clubs' shares if they were put on the market and only rich supporters will buy some shares because of their loyalty and love for their clubs.
"But they are against the direct interference of governments in clubs' affairs especially in technical issues. The AFC, like Fifa, prefers that the boards of directors of the clubs be elected by he general assemblies of these clubs."
How can the national teams benefit by applying professionalism?
"They say that strong local competitions yield strong national teams. But to have strong local professional competition we will have to wait for some years for players to become true professionals as they now know that if they want to better their lives and their incomes they will have to show their best, showing their best will improve the game on a local level and them automatically the national teams will have better prepared players whether physically or tactically. But we should realise that we need to improve the local competitions and know that professional players all over the world play more than one game per week. We have to have more competitions and players should be keen to improve their standards to have higher offers and thus the game will improve and progress on both a club and national team level."
Anything more?
"I am optimistic. Taking the first step was a huge success and I am looking forward to seeing a real improvement in the future. Yes, there will be mistakes but we have to learn and benefit from these mistakes and this is how experience is made."
The early signs and hype are encouraging. We saw the real practise of a domestic transfer market for the first time in the history of the game in the UAE."
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