tim's experiment

Modern football, at least the professional part featuring multi-national millionaire mercenaries, doesn’t seem to have much to do with the game which I played and liked as a boy. It doesn’t even seem to have much to do with the activity I watched somewhat later from the part of the Chelsea ground called the Shed. I don’t know why it was called the Shed because there was no shelter from the elements at all. Nor did you get a seat. Still, I have enough affection left for the activity to rejoice that Septic Blatter has finally agreed to step down from the peak of the pullulating pyramid of corruption over which he has presided for so many years. It seems that national police forces are very slow to take an interest in international sporting organisations. As a result those which manage to attract large sums of money slip into a corrupt lifestyle very easily, a problem which has also afflicted the Olympics over the years.

At a time when many people who had paid lip-service to the Blatter regime are now turning round and saying they knew FIFA was rotten all along, it is perhaps refreshing (if also a bit embarassing) to find that he still has a fan club in Hong Kong.

Enter Mr Timothy Fok Tsun-ting, who represents Hong Kong in FIFA elections — and much else — and happily voted for Mr Blatter days before Mr Blatter himself decided that perhaps that was a mistake. We all know Mr Fok — rich daddy, English public school, American university, President of Hong Kong Olympic Committee, member of sundry international sporting bodies, Member of the Legislative Council, on which he represents sports and (God help us) culture, and the CPPCC — hailed on several occasions as the laziest member of Legco but a formidable bringer in of the bacon as President of the Hong Kong Football Association, now basking in a shower of public money.

Mr Fok defended his vote for Blatter on the grounds that Mr B had done a great deal to give a “helping hand” to smaller federations in Africa and Asia. Let us resist the cynical thought that if you are buying votes the smaller federations are probably cheaper… It seems the HKFA had received from FIFA over the last five years no less than US$3,3 million. The Association spent US$1.3 million of this refurbishing its offices, which Mr Blatter ceremonially reopened last year.

There is an interesting mechanism at work here, which may indeed account for Mr Fok’s longevity in office, as well as Mr Blatter’s. Sporting bodies customarily have a rather curious financial structure, in which the grass roots are comparatively impoverished but there is an international circus which makes a great deal of money. This leads naturally to calls for a mechanism to distribute the largesse collected from the television coverage of the circus to the deserving poor on whom the whole enterprise depends. But somehow in sporting organisations this always seems to come down to one man which his hands on the money tap. He gets all the credit from those who receive it and becomes a sort of permanent unretirable Pope, at least until the FBI arrives. Mr Blatter, according to Mr Fok, was responsible for “the commercialisation of the sport”, which is now sitting on a pile of money as a result. This is nonsense. All sports which can be commercialised have been commercialised. Credit should go, I fear, to Rupert Murdoch.

Anyway the question which all this raises is this: given that football has this sugar daddy who is not available to other sports, shovelling millions of dollars in its direction, why is it also the beneficiary of a generous scheme intended to “put the sport back on its feet” at the expense of the Hong Kong taxpayer? The FA is not an impoverished organisation — the headquarters is in Ho Man Tin for goodness sake — and after years of squabbling the professional end of the game doesn’t look like a plausible choice for a deserving recipient. Other sports do not get Mr Blatter’s largesse or anything like it.

It is a recurring puzzle how our government makes decisions on these matters. Enter any district sports centre and you will see all the squash courts being used … for table tennis. Frantic efforts are made to breathe life into professional football while equally deserving activities are ignored or even hampered. Personally I think Hong Kong will never be a great footballing centre. There is a shortage of space, leading to a shortage of formal pitches and an even more severe shortage of flat patches of grass where kids can have informal games.  Another problem is the matter of size. One of the things which surprised me when I was a full-time football reporter was that nearly all professional footballers could look me in the eye. I am over six feet tall. People who were not built on that scale did not generally make it. Of course there are occasional exceptions. But still – there are plenty of sports in which height is no advantage, or may even be a handicap. As Hong Kong is generally a vertically challenged community it would be a good idea for us to make sensible choices. Better than leaving it up to Mr Fok, anyway.