Reflections on the football year

(Published in the Slovak daily Sport)

Yesterday’s Europa League match in Naples was the final competitive game of the football year. So what were the past twelve months like?

National team – fantastic. One simple sentence says it all. Youth national teams? Fairly decent. Domestic league and clubs? While the prevailing tendency is to point out the negatives, there were also positives.

Slovan Bratislava’s advancement to the Europa League group stage by beating Tiraspol, a club with a significantly higher budget, was an unquestionable success and worth highlighting once more. However, their performance in the group stage and subsequently in the domestic league drove away disgruntled fans, some of whom, after hosting friends from Sparta Prague, likely won’t return for years. The number of spectators, especially in the final autumn matches (just over 600 including season ticket holders), in proportion to Slovan’s player salaries, is not just a global, but a galactic anomaly. It’s as if only 4,000 people showed up to watch a Premier League champion’s home match. Absurd? Unfortunately, yes.

There were bright spots in Žilina and Trenčín, particularly due to their youthful squads. Others only showed occasional flashes of promise.

People are looking for football experiences, and Slovaks are not finding them in our domestic league. It’s pointless to keep repeating the same reasons: poor infrastructure, lack of role models, violence, competition from dozens of top-tier league broadcasts every weekend. In Slovakia, TV rights and ticket sales will not become significant sources of income for a long time. Clubs will have to rely on attracting commercial revenue from sponsors and selling players. Although there have been few major transfers from Slovakia in recent years, patient work may eventually bear fruit.

From the perspective of the football association’s work, transparency deserves praise once again, such as live broadcasts of conferences and press events. In other sports associations, this is still not standard practice. Although some solutions have been hesitant (such as the U21 coaching staff scandal), there is at least an effort to address issues rather than sweep them under the rug—and that’s a good thing.

Still missing are  new Slovak transfers regulations. Professional players whose contracts expire will not be able to move freely even in the winter of 2015. The minimum standards for player contracts, agreed upon in spring 2012 by European stakeholders (UEFA, players, clubs, leagues, and supported by the European Commission), still haven’t been implemented in Slovakia. The delay is hard to justify, these standards must be adopted immediately!

Unfortunately, football as a product has once again failed to focus on youth this year. The €45 million for regional stadiums has long since been secured. In the coming year, the priority should be to return football, and sports in general, to schools in the afternoon, and to concentrate on cooperation between football clubs, schools, and local governments. That is the right path forward; today, nobody is going to gather talents from neighborhood courtyards anymore. If good ideas exist within the football association or clubs, they need to come out of the drawers and into the hands of politicians and the media.

When, if not in a pre-election period? And why not, when MP Zmajkovičová’s candy ban in school snack bars managed to occupy all major media outlets for weeks on end? Children’s health is also connected to sport!