Football: The Beautiful Game is a Terrible Shame.

By Wayne Goldsmith | In Football World Cup

Every four years, us non football (soccer) people get excited, enthusiastic and ecstatic about the FIFA Football World Cup.

We get caught up by the nationalism, the marketing hype and the promises of the ”beautiful game” and being witness to the world’s biggest sporting event.

And, every four years, we walk away scratching our heads thinking “why haven’t they fixed the same problems they had four years earlier? ”

Like so many others, I want to believe. I really do. This is after all, the “World’s Game”. I love sport. I love competition. I really want to be a Football fan.

But first and foremost I am high performance sports professional and if I apply the same standards to Football that I do to other sports – particularly other professional sports - Football fails.

So, let’s go ahead a few days from this post.

Several predictable comments will come in from Football tragics:

“You don’t understand the game”.

“You don’t understand the culture of Football“.

And the inevitable, “You are an idiot. Who cares about your opinion anyway”.

Thanks for the thoughts but save yourself the time and energy: I have heard them all before.

The fact remains that at a time when the world is watching, Football has got it wrong.

Players and teams who give their lives to compete at the FIFA World Cup deserve the best support, best technology, best officiating and best sports science available: the best players and the best coaches with the best high performance environment. Hard to argue with.

So why when a range of technologies can accurately, simply and consistently improve the game, why does FIFA persist with doing things the way they did when Pele was in nappies?

Let’s look at some of the Horrible Highlights of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa:

  • Goals that should have been goals but weren’t goals;
  • Goals that were goals but shouldn’t have been goals;
  • Players given a red card for not doing anything wrong;
  • Players not given a red card in spite of committing illegal acts on the pitch;
  • Players “diving” and “milking” penalties with such predigious acting talent they should hang up their boots and just accept the Academy Award for Best Actor next year.

Add in things like the allegations that the “freaky-football” was made available to a certain European team months before anyone else got their hands on it and the rumours about bribery and corruption in the host nation bid process for the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups and you are looking at a sporting organisation with no direction, no leadership and no hope of becoming all it could be.

And all this in the “beautiful game’s” showcase competition. (Makes you wonder what really happens in football around the globe in local and regional level games if this is what happens in the best football competition in the world). 

I want to be blown away by the FIFA Football World Cup.

I want to sit there with my mouth open thinking, “wow these guys are so professional, so innovative, so cutting edge in all aspects of high performance that the rest of the world will never catch up”.

I want to tell clients and colleagues in other sports that they should be flocking to the FIFA Football World Cup to watch football coaches, football sports scientists, football medical teams, football performance analysts and football teams in action to learn from the best of the best.

Instead we see a fantastic game ruined by conservative administrators, pedantic traditionalists and over zealous sports leaders who passionately believe in the most destructive seven words in high performance sport “that’s the way we do it here” . The only thing they ever want to see changed is their business class seats to first class for their families and 126 friends on their next junket to a would be World Cup host nation.

Don’t get me wrong – I want to believe. I want to become a Football Fanatic. I see the passion and enthusiasm of football fans on T.V. and I want to be part of it.

But I am also a high performance sports professional with 20 years experience working with the best of the best sports teams around the world: I know when something is not working and the FIFA Football World Cup just does not work. It is more of a terrible shame than the epitome of the beautiful game and, as always, the people who suffer the most are the players who just want a fair, consistent, honest, high quality high performance environment to play the game they love.

Expert commentators will explain this away with statements like “It’s just football” and “These things happen in football” - but why should it be?

Surely with the money and resources available, football can be - must be - the leader in all aspects of high performance sport: science, technology, coaching, officiating, sports medicine etc and be the benchmark of high performance sports environments in the world.

Football is the biggest sport in the world in terms of participants, television audiences and resourcing – why isn’t it also the undisputed leader in every aspect of high performance sport????

See you in 2014 – I will be saving this post so I can cut and paste it and use it again in four years as I suspect the same issues will be there next time the World meets on the football pitch.

Wayne Goldsmith

© 2010 – 2011, Wayne Goldsmith. All rights reserved.

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July 6, 2010

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