Money or no money, football will survive

In my home town Nainital, there was a club called Mosquitoes. It had a football team and sometimes even managed to put together a cricket XI. I wasn’t particularly fond of the club. Just that I couldn’t ever forget the name. Mosquitoes! The story goes that it would employ local pahari youth who were small-built, but when on the field, pesky and persistent like mosquitoes. The club has been around for over half a century, and enjoys huge local support. It still functions, without any sponsor. The team members pool in money, locals donate and the club’s history grows.

I thought about the Mosquitoes after Honda announced the plan to disband their Formula One team.

Recession has come to sport. I have been told by various market research agencies that football, the world sport, is likely to suffer the most losses.

The big football leagues in the world are going to be badly affected. Already, the dwindling advertisement and sponsorship money has taken its toll in the Spanish League, which is running massive debts. On match days stadiums are running empty.
Most clubs have had to reduce the cost of the tickets.

“Attendance at the stadium is down compared with last year due to the global financial crisis,” Barcelona President Joan Laporta had said last week.

In England, the situation could get even worse. Today there are nine premier league clubs with foreign owners (Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Aston Villa, Fulham, Portsmouth, West Ham and Derby County).

In 2003, there was just one, Fulham, whose owner had lived in the UK for 30 years. Egyptian-born businessman Mohamed Al Fayed, owner of top London department store Harrods, invested 30 million pounds in Fulham in 1997.

Chelsea’s Russian owner Roman Abramovich has spent more than 300 million pounds on the club since he bought it for 60 million pounds in 2003.

Since then, Premiership has been pumped up by American, Russian, Icelandic, and Gulf money. Money that’s reducing, money that could be pulled out.

I hope we don’t come to a stage where a football team has to be disbanded. Analysts say that big clubs in English, Spanish and Italian leagues, with television and sponsorship deals worth millions of pounds, are largely insulated from the financial crisis. But it’s the smaller fish that will have no food to survive on.

“I don’t see the big clubs being affected so much as there are always important companies that want to use them to drive their advertising campaigns,” Javier Tebas, vice-president of the Spanish football league had said recently.

Ironical, isn’t it, that a sport meant for the masses, played by the masses for recreational, community building purposes, is facing the problems of the rich.

I doubt the Mosquitoes of my hometown are losing sleep over the economic slowdown. They’ll survive, for they loved the game and didn’t ever play it for any other reason. Just as football was always meant to be played.