By: Ko Po Hui
Special to Soccer City FC
Flipping through the back pages of any dailies around the world (except North America perhaps?), tendency is that you'll swayed with headlines of whosoever going to where soever, the so-called star player pushing his employing club to the corner for his atrocious wage demands and lastly, how about selling clubs to the highest bidder as if in a cattle market?
Just how has the game been evolved for the past decade or so?
Money seems to be the catalyst for any form of combustion in the beautiful game these days.
It's not hard to see how the wages of these footballers sky-rocketing over the years and clubs are more than willing (or unwilling) to give in to their demand.
Failure of doing so could have resulted in a much financial damages in terms of revenues such as: gate takings, marketing, merchandising, broadcasting etc.
But at the end of the day, the ultimate paymaster to these ridiculous demands are people like us – THE FANS!
Sad isn't it? Gone were the days when players played the game for their passion for football while seeing monies as an form of incentives (wasn't it that case? Please feel free to raise your hand if you object to that presumption.), which is now having the biggest say in the game today OR simply put it as “NO MONEY, NO TALK”.
So much so as in order to fund those expensive wages and costs that incurred, it's inevitable that tops clubs would have to hike up a lot of charges like the match tickets, merchandise to a level that fans might find it too expensive to afford.
Just take a look at football fans like us in Asia. It's seem like we are the ones being held to ransom at every start of the European seasons as we are deadly for sure that the local cable operators will jack up the subscription fees to whet our appetite to see likes of Ronaldos, Rooneys, Torres etc. in action, with the common reason being the operators are “paying more to secure the broadcasting rights to the matches”.
However, it's pretty normal to see these fans willing to pay for it simply because without this weekend staple of their football viewing, life would be a such a misery for them, thus in the end, it's the local game that is bound to suffer as these fans rather have their bums stick to their couch rather than heading down to the stadium in their neighbourhood to cheer their local team on.
Nonetheless, given current global fuel hike that caused every necessity to getting more and more costly, it would not be a surprise football fans might want to think twice before heading down to the ground to cheer their favourite players on, who sadly seem to see themselves detached from the very person who are indirectly paying their salaries.
So in the end, who will suffer and have the final laugh? Nobody it seems will be the winner or loser as it's the game that will suffer eventually.
(P.S: the contributor had scrapped off his sport cable channel subscription long ago as he's not willing to pay for the wages of those “stars” he considered “spoilt-brats”)
Ko Po Hui operates BoLASEPaKO - devoted to the beautiful game in Singapore.
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