SPORTS: Football Speaks Italian, English or Spanish

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 30 2002 (IPS) - The 2002 World Cup is evidence of the increasing flight of talented footballers to Europe, which is “home” to 70 percent of the players who will participate in the championship that kicks off Friday in South Korea and Japan.

Latin American experts compare the exodus of the region’s best players to the “brain drain” their countries suffer as their best- educated citizens head to the United States and Europe.

The flow of football stars, however, is mostly channelled towards Britain, Italy and Spain.

The Latin American Academy of Sciences estimates that 1.1 million scientists from the region have emigrated to the United States and Europe in the last 40 years, a phenomenon that has accelerated in the last two decades.

But the rising emigration of footballers does not just affect Latin America and the rest of the developing world, but also countries of the industrialised North.

Indeed, 18 of the 23 players on France’s national team, the current world champion, normally play for clubs abroad, but will play under their native French flag during the World Cup. On the Denmark team, meanwhile, 21 belong to foreign football clubs.

The biggest magnet is Europe, the “regular season” home to 70 percent of the 736 footballers who will participate in the championship organised by FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) in South Korea and Japan.

The tournament’s regulations allow a maximum 23 players for each of the 32 countries that have qualified for the finals. National team members must be citizens or naturalised citizens of the respective country and must not have competed as a member of any other national team.

The number of footballers competing in this year’s World Cup who play for clubs outside their countries of origin during regular season play has risen in comparison to the portion in previous World Cups.

In this year’s championship, 48 percent normally play for clubs outside their countries of origin. This is five percent more than the 1998 World Cup in France, and 18 percent more than the 1994 tournament, played in the United States.

The concentration of non-citizen footballers is particularly evident when considering the five top leagues in Europe. Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain together hold the contracts of the 350 best players in the world, that is, 47.5 percent of those who were chosen to play for their countries of origin in the 2002 World Cup.

The situation is most pronounced in the cases of Cameroon and Ireland. All 23 of their national team members are under regular season contracts to foreign teams. Senegal is close behind in this tally, with 22, followed by Argentina and Denmark, with 21 each.

However, even the European football super-powers lose their best-qualified “foot-force” abroad, on par with those they receive.

France, which attracts star players from all over the world, has exported 18 of the 23 playing on this year’s national team, including super-idol Zinedine Zidane, who last year transferred to Spain’s Real Madrid club for more than 60 million dollars.

In this sport, “the importers win, not the exporters,” because the latter give up the quality players that would allow them to develop their market of football fans and the spectacle of sport, according to Isabela Nunes Pereira, economist and author of a study on football management for the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Football moves some 250 billion dollars worldwide each year. But Brazil sees just one percent of that figure, much less than its share, considering the country’s size and the fact that it is the only country that has participated in every World Cup and is four-time champion, Pereira told IPS.

This is related to the fact that Brazil has been “the world’s leading exporter of players since the 1950s,” she added.

In the past two years approximately 1,500 professional footballers have left the country, according to the records of the Brazilian Football Confederation.

In addition are the illegal, under-the-table transfers of players, as is the case of many adolescents who football scouts believed have the talent for a brilliant future career. This phenomenon affects “even 12-year-old boys,” Pereira pointed out.

The smaller football clubs in Brazil have turned into talent- hunting centres for European teams, which may pay generously for this “service”.

The focus on training athletes for European-style soccer – where force prevails over dexterity – conspires against fomenting the Brazilian and Latin American style of the game, say experts.

A similar dynamic can be found in Africa, a region that is beginning to carve out its niche in the world of football. Specialists point out that African football will not be able to develop its own style if the best players are hired away by European clubs.

Pereira said that the export of players, what she refers to as the sale of national heritage as a source of revenue, is a disastrous trade-off and further weakens local teams, especially if the phenomenon evolves from a temporary alternative to an ongoing solution to the local football industry’s financial woes.

In proportion to the national population, it is possible that other countries export more players than Brazil does.

One example is Argentina, which is among the favourites to win this year’s Cup. The Argentine team is almost entirely foreign, with 21 of the 23 players returning home from abroad to play under their flag of origin.

The economic crisis afflicting Argentina is likely to intensify the exodus of football talent.

But the economy is not the only factor, as emigration of footballers afflicts wealthy countries like the Netherlands and the Nordic nations.

It apparently takes strong football markets – like Britain, Italy and Spain – or a weak football tradition – as is the case of China, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Saudi Arabia – to escape this trend.

A model of sports economy development is Britain, which was able to recover from an unprecedented football crisis in the 1980s that was marked by empty stadiums, fights among fans, and highly indebted and poorly managed clubs, said Pereira.

The British league pulled itself out of the crisis and is now one of the strongest in the world in economic terms, proof of what proper management in sports can achieve, she added.

The dominance of the European teams, shielded by their economic power and their already-developed markets, has created an imbalance that is seemingly impossible to correct.

Where else in the world could clubs afford to pay tens of millions of dollars to attract the best players, like France’s Zidane, Britain’s David Beckham, Argentina’s Gabriel Batistuta or Uruguay’s Alvaro Recoba?