Bending it like Beckham, off the field

Suddenly, everyone, from the street urchins to the elite, has taken to football. Elite clubs arranged parties to coincide with the opening of the cup in Munich; teams have been put together and are playing matches under floodlights; flags of favourite contesting teams, mainly Brazil and Argentina, have emerged on rooftops and tied to wing mirrors of cars; brands like Levi’s have come up with World Cup-theme denims and t-shirts; money is being wagered on which team will win and debates rage in school and college cafeterias, restaurants, coffee houses and the drawing rooms of elite and middle-class families. Even dealers in electronics items report a significant rise in the sales of television sets.

But the joke is that while we can make some of the best footballs in the world (60 per cent of the world’s footballs are made in Sialkot), we cannot produce people who can actually play them. Why is Pakistan suddenly bending it like Beckham, on and off the field?

There was hardly any excitement at the last World Cup, except among football fans whose numbers are miniscule. Football has never really figured in Pakistan’s sports history. Most good players came from East Pakistan, but that was before 1971. Since then, football had stayed on the periphery of sports. The majority of the players now belong to Balochistan or down south to the slums of Karachi.

Unlike India, where football, albeit not that big, is still taken much more seriously, Pakistan has not created any clubs or infrastructure to promote the game. In fact, cricket has even shadowed the national sport, field hockey, and become the de facto national sport. There is money in cricket—big money—and other sports have languished on the sidelines, football faring the worst.

But within a year, something interesting has happened.

Last year, Pakistan was 177 in FIFA rankings; it has now climbed 24 places to reach 153. This leaves aside Pakistan’s chance win, and the only one, against India in the final of the 9th SAF games in 2004.

While one could perhaps explain away elite parties as part of a global fad during the World Cup season—the world is flat after all, as Friedman says—and an excuse to throw GTs with bootlegged booze, there may be something more substantial at work in the street.

In the last year or so, the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF), in collaboration with the Asian Football Confederation and FIFA, has been making efforts to put the sport on the radar screen.

AFC has given a $2 million grant and FIFA has promised another $400,000 for the promotion of football in Pakistan. The money is not big, at least at this stage, but it has kept PFF afloat. The Federation has put together teams and made them play. Camps have been arranged for training and, for once, one can discern a process.

PFF is currently holding a national football training camp in Lahore’s Railways Stadium to select the team for the 14th Asian Cup Qualifiers and 10th South Asian Games. Even more importantly, FIFA President Joseph Sepp Blatter has promised to visit Pakistan after November 2006 to inaugurate Lahore’s FIFA Football House. FIFA has also promised to extend financial support to PFF for building another goal project. Moreover, FIFA is particularly interested in women’s football in Pakistan and a FIFA team was recently here to make a documentary on women’s football (a National Women’s Football Championship comprising eight women teams from across Pakistan, was played last year for the first time) to confirm that PFF is spending part of its $1 million annual grant to promote the sport among women. While the coveted 2002 World Cup trophy travelled to neighbouring Bangladesh and India on its promotional tour of the region, fans in Pakistan had missed out.

According to a PFF official, the cup did not come to Pakistan because “the amount needed to insure the cup was huge and we could not afford it”. Which brings us back to the elite’s enthusiasm with the game: this excitement cannot remain confined to their drawing rooms and 62-inch television screens but must translate into financial support for the game. The PFF has awakened to its responsibility. Now the government needs to step in and set up a marketing department to invite and encourage private capital for the promotion of the sport. Football, if it has to take off, must build its infrastructure from the grassroots and then rise. The process we now see at work could become the basis for just this.

We were once a credible footballing nation that kicked its way into Asia’s top 10 with players in demand from league clubs in India. In this World Cup, Pakistan’s contribution is sadly limited to just sending some hundred “made-in-Sialkot” footballs for practice sessions and a few Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) officials to attend the opening ceremony. PFF, which was founded in 1948 and became a member of FIFA the same year, has since been slumbering.

Let’s see if the coming years can change this state of affairs.

The writer is Assistant News Editor, The Friday Times, based in Lahore.