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Indian football has
suffered because it couldn't make the transformation to a free-market
regime, a change required
to go from being good at the local level to great at the global
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The
British took football to other parts of the world. The first football
club in Argentina-one of the favourites to win the ongoing World
Cup-was the Buenos Aires Football Club, an offshoot of the local
cricket team. And the first Italian football club was the Genoa
Football and Cricket Club, founded by some expat Brits. So, how
come India, ruled by the British for 190 years, has a middling cricket
team and no football team at all? We have one on paper and it does
play some tournaments but that's like equating a performance of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat in Chennai-I saw one,
many years ago and it wasn't bad; actually, compared to Indian football
team's showing, it was world class-with the real (West End) thing.
There's one more curious fact about football in India: how come
the only two states to boast football clubs of some stature are
West Bengal and Kerala? It can't be the fish, for the state that
consumes the maximum per capita, Tamil Nadu, is a minnow in the
football domain.
This essay won't attempt to answer the first
question; that's best left to historians. As for the second, West
Bengal and Kerala's prowess in football may have something to do
with their long history of Communism.
The only evidence I can offer towards this
is empirical. Consider the erstwhile USSR's dominance in the Olympics;
China's performance at the games; and tot up all the medals won
by each of the constituents of the erstwhile USSR since the demise
of the communist regime. Not convinced? Ever wonder why the resurgence
in English football-the country is my personal favourite to win
this World Cup-has paralleled the revival of the Labour Party? The
last may be nothing more than a coincidence; still, it's an intriguing
one.
Management guru Peter Drucker once described
an organisation as something that allows ordinary people do extraordinary
things. Maybe the Communist obsession with rule-based-engines helped.
If it did, it must have been in the initial stages. For eventually,
the same free-market principles that apply to business hold true
for sport. Look at Europe's best football clubs: talent migrates
to the highest bidder; yet, each club needs to make economic, not
just football, sense. The minute player salaries-these constitute
the bulk of a club's expenses-exceed revenues (this is happening
to several clubs in Italy), the clubs will go under. Their best
players will defect and their performance will suffer.
That isn't very different from what happens
in business: a company marshals its resources to create products
or services that it can sell for profit. If the quality of the football,
sorry, products and services is bad, it will find few takers. And
if it spends more on its resources than it can recoup from its sales,
it will make losses. Neither is a sustainable proposition.
Indian football (or football in Kerala and
West Bengal, to be exact) has suffered because despite benefiting
from the advantages of organisation in the early years, it couldn't
make the transformation to a free-market regime, a change required
to go from being good at the local level to great at the global
one. Maybe Communism was to blame: Kerala and West Bengal have a
poor track record in business. As for Indian cricket, the British
created the skeleton of an administrative structure and Free India
built on it. Only today, the organisation could-to use the lingo
of consultants-do with some re-engineering. Just like the Indian
cricket team could do with a pay-for-performance compensation strategy.
Or wouldn't that be cricket?
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