It is a reason not to be cheerful that work commitments have prevented any of our Trading Team from attending the African Cup Of Nations (ACON) in Ghana. The tournament offers proper football with minimal corruption as the personal prizes available to the players extend far beyond the tournament itself - the ACON is a passport to a potentially secure financial future if a player is picked up by any of the numerous European agents attending the event. As is always the case in economics, incentives control reality and very few of the players are willing to be bought off by the criminal underworld of the bookmaking fraternity. Hence, proper football...
The competition has been greeted by the usual moans, groans and, the unfortunately frequent, outright racism that is the standard template of the footballing first world when dealing with its poorer disenfranchised brethren. Premiership managers claim that their seasonal strategies are being disrupted by the ACON when such assertions are merely an indication of a complete lack of strategic thought in the initial instance. Its not as if the dates were secreted away by the Confederation of African Football (CAF). If a given Premiership manager wishes to purchase highly talented players on the cheap, often with associated abusive contracts, they can hardly cry "foul" when their transfer policy falls short. Such spurious arguments are resulting in attempts to have future tournaments put back until the summer months so that the first world European leagues are not affected by the loss of their prized assets. Indeed, some of the top African players in England have supported such a move as the feeling is that their careers are dependent on always kowtowing to the British pound and the Yanqui dollar. The CAF is considering bringing forward the next version of the ACON to the New Year which would work as far as the majority of the European leagues are concerned but not in the bookmaking-controlled territories of England and the Netherlands as the layers in these countries insist on domestic football continuing over the xmas/New Year break as there is much money to be made from the pockets of leisure punters in such windows. The pressure from England, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands towards the competition being held during the ludicrously hot summer months of the northern and central parts of the continent is clearly an exercise in putting the health and safety of players firmly in second place behind the needs and requirements of the clubs, the bookmakers and their shareholders. We should not be surprised - none of the named European nations have exactly covered themselves in glory historically via their imperial and commercial concerns on the dark (sic) continent.
Of course, the health and safety of the players is neither here nor there amongst the major issues impacting upon the global game. Where is the media coverage for the ex-players limping their way through the rest of their lives due to the cortisone injections that used to be a common feature of the game? Has anybody noticed any real response by the global and continental football authorities to the increasing numbers of high-profile deaths of players on the field of play in recent years due to heart failure. Phil O'Donnell is the fourth pro to die in the last six months following Sevilla's Antonio Puerta, Hapoel Be'er Sheva's Chaswe Nsofwa and Walsall's Anton Reid. At least the Spanish authorities gave some dignity to Puerta's death while the Scottish Premier League only reluctantly cancelled a portion of the adjacent league programme after O'Donnell's death - these people are not only biased and incompetent but insensitive too. According to FIFA, 93% of the deaths in sport are caused by sudden cardiac arrests. Adrenaline produced during exercise, often under the added influence of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs), is the prime cause. In one of its better moments, World Soccer magazine notes that, since 1991, the Italian authorities have run checks on all athletes with a resultant tenfold reduction in the incidence of death and at a cost of merely 28 Euros per athlete - beer money when there are betting markets reaching 1.33 billion Euros per match. FIFA's chief medical officer, Professor Jiri Dvorak, points out that "cardiac screening should be mandatory" as "there are one thousand cardiac deaths a year in sport".
Anyway, we digress. But, before forcing African players to play their continental competition under greater meteorological excesses, the Premier League and their member clubs should consider the health risks. Of course, they won't. We're dealing with a modern day slave trade here in African footballing talent and, so long as the Premier League and its members are covered by suitable insurance, any death will be seen as virtually irrelevant.
A final point on the coincidence of tournaments needs to be made here. The UEFA Euro and FIFA World Cup brands occur during the northern hemisphere summer months which clashes with numerous leagues around the world, from the extreme northern latitudes to the extreme southern, but there is never any issue raised regarding the impact of these mega-brands on the leagues affected. Inevitably, the leagues of Russia, Eire, Chile, Australia etc have minimal clout...
Throughout all the pseudo-arguments of the north Europeans lurks the ever-present -ism that is racism. When asked about whether European attitudes look down on African players, Real Madrid's Mahamadou Diarra says: "Yes, that is something you can feel, its palpable... There is a lack of respect but I don't worry - I don't play so that people in Europe say nice things about African football". Which is a good job, really, because respect is the last thing on the minds of the racists. El Hadj Diouf is regarded as somebody who spits at opponents rather than somebody who provides an amazing amount of work together with donations for Senegalese people. "Mido is a paedo" was the hilarious chant of the Newcastle fans (aren't you glad that they've got Michael Owen instead?); when Mikel of Chelsea does a two-footed lunge, it is always worse than when Stevie Gerrard does the same; some, like Kanouté and Rigobert Song just give up on the English game altogether while among those who stay, many are not appreciated for their true talents - think the handling of Sissoko by Buffoon Benitez etc etc. And even when there is a grudging recognition that an African player might just have an iota of talent, this talent is always dressed up in such phrases as "All African players are strong and powerful" rather than appreciating the astonishing multi-talented nature of individuals like Adebayor, Drogba, Essien, Toure etc.
To accentuate this lack of respect further, many European clubs tap into the illegal world of the unofficial soccer academies that litter the cities of west Africa - there are said to be 500 of these alone in Accra, Ghana's capital. Indeed, several of the Africans street-selling trinkets in Kerkyra started their voyage of high risk in the hope of gaining a foot on the lower rungs of the European football ladder.
Which brings us back to World Soccer for, despite it being the best football magazine on the market, it too disses African football. One of their best writers is their African correspondent, Mark Gleeson, but in the last year coverage of football in Africa has been restricted to just one page per issue - bizarrely, exactly the same amount of space that is given to non-FIFA football. The editor, Gavin Hamilton, evidently feels that articles on the merits of the teams of Gibraltar or Gozo are equivalent in importance to a whole continent of diverse and exciting football in Africa. Racist or what? Additionally, the Talent Scout section rarely touches on African players with the focus being almost entirely on South America. For goodness sake, they even get the name of Africa's premier international competition incorrect throughout the current issue of the magazine. Incompetent and racist that would make them...
The only blot on the opening week of the ACON was the disclosure by Benin manager, Reinhard Fabisch, that he was approached by an individual fronting an Asian gambling syndicate from Singapore prior to the match against Mali. This crook was after an inside job and was quickly shown the door. World Soccer, in the current issue, also focuses on rigged games involving an assortment of players, referees, authorities and/or Asian bookmakers in Poland, Albania, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Kazakhstan. The media always accuses the same countries and it is always the Asian bookmakers who are allegedly behind the corruption. It might appear peculiarly contrarian that it is our belief, indeed our knowledge, that the vast majority of corruption is perpetrated by European bookmakers together with a selection of the equivalent players, referees and authorities of the footballing first world. Of course, there has never been one sentence relating to this massive corruption in the decade and a half that I have been reading World Soccer!
Fabisch made an interesting statement following the approach from "Singapore". He said that he assumed that African countries were being approached because the players (and their families) were economically poor and, consequently, they would be more willing to be bought off. Nonsense. Check out the incentives. It is always the rich that do corruption as a core competency. The poor might do it out of necessity -according to Cervantes, it is better to rob than to ask for charity - but the incentives are so skewed in favour of performing to the max that it is highly unlikely than Benin's players would take the short term buck only to have to return to an existence of desperate poverty thereafter. Indeed, in previous versions of the ACON, the British bookmakers were always reluctant to price up the matches simply because they were dealing with proper football and not the hybrid of soccer and greyhound racing that they tend to prefer.
Talent is and will be produced in order to be sold. Talent is a form of value. This talent resides within the individual, not the state. In the words of Jean-François Lyotard : "The harmony of the needs and hopes of individuals and groups and the functions guaranteed by the system is now only a secondary component of its functioning". Lyotard, again: "There are two basic representational models for society: either society forms a functional whole, or it is divided in two". Only the most myopic and biased capitalist could claim that the former exists in today's neo-con world. It is to the massive disadvantage of the vast majority of the population of Africa that this is the case.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
