His first manager, Matt (later Sir Matt) Busby, treated the young Best with benign neglect and occasional crisis interventions. There is still uncertainty as to whether he did issue the famous injunction that the young Irishman was not be coached, but apart from arranging for him to be looked after by a club landlady and encouraging him later to get a girlfriend who would be less trouble than the married woman he was dating, another intervention which backfired, Busby maintained a considerable distance from his young genius. The tightly organised youth system put in place by (Sir) Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford, and the cotton-wooling of Ryan Giggsin his youth was a direct reaction to the laissez-faire of the Best/Busby era.

Best’s genius caused frustrations in a team game. He wrought great anguish in Bobby Charlton and Denis Law, indeed the latter put his goalscoring decline down to the increasing prowess and selfishness of Best. Law would get into dangerous positions in the penalty box but George was off doing his own thing on the wing, which often ended in outrageous goals for the alchemist.

Hugh McIlvanney wrote:

With feet as sensitive as a pick-pocket’s hands, his control of the ball under the most violent pressure was hypnotic. The bewildering repertoire of fients and swerves, sudden stops and demoralising spurts, exploited a freakish elasticity of limb and torso, tremendous physical strength and resilience for so slight a figure and balance that would have made Isaac Newton decide he might as well have eaten the apple.

The Best quotations, by or about the player, have reached Shanklian proportions, ‘I spent a lot of my money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.’ Or Kevin Keegan being described as not fit to lace George Best’s drinks. It is asserted too that Manchester United had to modify their training routines to prevent Best monopolising the ball. When they introduced two touch routines he used the second one to knock the ball against an opponent’s shins, collected the rebound and was off again.

Jim Baxter of Glasgow Rangers and Scotland said, ‘He was the finest footballer I ever saw, and I include Pele …’ Best’s team-mate and England internationalist David Sadler reflected,

He was definitely the greatest player I’ve ever seen.  I’m talking from experience, on the basis of what I saw every day, in matches and in training, and I would say you could have put George in just about any position in our 1968 team and he would have been better than the person who was playing there.  Sounds stupid, doesn’t it, but at that time Tony Dunne was probably the best left-back in Europe, and George could have done the job better than him.  In Nobby Stiles’s position he would have been quite capable of getting the ball, because he was a tremendous tackler, and when he got it, he’d have used it better than Nobby.  He could head the ball better than me, and probably as well as Bill Foulkes, and he could do everything Bobby Charlton did and more.  People say Pele didn’t tackle because he didn’t have to.  George didn’t have to, but he did.  You couldn’t beat him on a football pitch There was nothing a player could do to defeat him, mentally you couldn’t kick him out of the game because he’d bounce straight back and tackle you twice as hard.

Michael Parkinson, comments in the Electronic Telegraph around 6 July 1998

That is as good a definition of genius as I have ever come across. In the overwrought, delirious atmosphere of modern football, where mediocrity is lauded and the commonplace celebrated, it is important we are reminded what great players look like so we might recognise them when they come along. We forget. After all, it’s been a long time since George Best.

The George Best record for Manchester United was extraordinary. The current United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson talking about one of his present-day stars, Ryan Giggs, said:

He’ll never be a Best. Nobody will. George was unique, the greatest talent our football ever produced, easily. Look at the scoring record – 137 goals in 361 League games and a total of 179 goals for United in 466 matches played. That’s phenomenal for a man who did not get the share of gift goals that come to specialist strikers. George nearly always had to beat men to score.

George Best’s life was touched by tragedy. His mother died an alcoholic, though her severe drinking began after that of her son, and might be related to his trajectory. The son’s alcoholism did not seem to be genetic.

Edited versions of this article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser, 28 November 2005, p. 35 and in Australian and British Soccer Weekly on Tuesday 29 November 2005 and on the Football Federation of Victoria website at <http://www.footballfedvic.com.au/> on 28 November 2005.

At the time it was whistling for a wind and a statistical generalisation based on a single example, now we have doubled the sample size, and the claim remains true.

No Australian football (soccer) team ever makes it easy for the fans.

On Wednesday night in Sydney the boys in green and gold flirted with defeat on several occasions as the Uruguayans created several openings in and around the Australian penalty area.

As long as inspirational midfielder and playmaker Alvaro Recoba was on the field Australia was always just a goal away from catastrophe as the chances of scoring three against a mean defence was very remote.

Yet Dutch master coach Guus Hiddink pulled another rabbit from his magician’s hat.

In Montevideo he started suprisingly with a very attacking formation, including three out-and-out strikers, Harry Kewell, Mark Viduka and the only A-League player, Melbourne Victory’s Archie Thompson.

Now he began more cautiously with a midfield strengthened by the inclusion of Tim Cahill and Marco Bresciano, both of whom went into the two-leg tie with one caution to their name.

Had either been booked in the Centenario they could have played no part in the critical second leg.

Australia stuttered in the opening fifteen minutes as if the weight of history were too much, and big defender Tony Popovic got himself a yellow card after 28 minutes for holding off his opponent with a flying elbow.

Then came Hiddink’s master stroke.

Realising that Australia had an extra defensive player, he removed Popovic and replaced him with the talismanic Kewell.

Kewell immediately unhinged Uruguay by scampering down the left, wriggling past a couple of defenders and seemed to be lining up for a shot which he shanked only for the ball to squeeze into the path of Bresciano, and the Parma opportunist blasted it through the upraised arms of keeper Carini.

There was bedlam in Sydney, and around Australia, as Australia at last had a level playing field and the tie was locked at one-all on aggregate.

Kewell was to make several other critical contributions, none more so than when wing-back Scott Chipperfield got himself stranded upfield and Kewell sprinted back to prevent a Uruguayan cross into the box where there were unmarked players.

Despite a lack of match fitness, Kewell was continually influential as his team went after a second and decisive goal.

Late in the game Hiddink replaced Brett Emerton with Geelong’s Josip Skoko, who had time to set up Viduka with one chance and fire a long shot narrowly wide of the post, before the referee blew for the end of extra-time and we had the penalty shoot-out.

Keeper Mark Schwarzer, as he had done previously against Canada in a similar situation, pulled off two brilliant saves and John Aloisi matched Jimmy MacKay in 1974 with the goal which takes Australia to the World Cup.

What does this mean for football in Australia?

Apart from the $8 million to be shared between the players and the Football Federation of Australia, there is the chance for a new generation of heroes to take part on the world stage next June.

Guaranteed media exposure and the rise in the profile of the game down under, at home and abroad, are certain.

But the World Cup qualification is underpinned by more significant changes which have taken place in the game recently.

Soccer is already the most popular participatory code of football among the young, boys and girls, and they now have something extra to aim for.

The domestic A-League has already drawn crowds above the expectations of the new regime at the Football Federation of Australia under Frank Lowy and John O’Neill, and the standard is higher than that of the old National Soccer League.

Above all, there is pleasant atmosphere in which to watch games and the young are responding magnificently.

Entry to the Asian Confederation of FIFA means no more sudden-death qualification against a South American country, but a broad competition for one of at least four places at future World Cups.

The national team and club sides will participate in lucrative and highly popular competitions which will reinforce the country’s growing economic, political and social involvement in Asia.

Sponsors like Qantas, Hyundai and Samsung are already on board and will, possibly for the first time, have a chance to act as a bridge to the greater integration of Australia into the geographic region of which it is increasingly a part.

So though the game in Sydney was wonderful, it is only a part of the march of the world game in Australia.

Edited versions of this article appeared on the Football Federation of Victoria website at <http://www.footballfedvic.com.au/> on 18 November 2005 and in the Geelong Advertiser, Saturday 19 November 2005, pp. 100-01.

The recent performances of the Under-17 Joeys and Under-20 Young Socceroos in World Cup tournaments seem to give cause for concern as does the absence of superstars like Harry Kewell and Mark Viduka among the current crop of graduates from these squads. While Frank Lowy castigates Foster for being ill-informed his reply is very short on specifics of what the Football Federation of Australia is doing to address some of the issues identified. At grass roots level coaches and interested parties are concerned that Australia is losing its way in youth development for a variety of reasons not touched upon in the public debate so far.

But before we start turfing baby and bathwater down the sink, or returning to a supposed golden age in the past, lets look more closely at what has happened in the last decade. First, and probably most important, is that countries overseas have begun to take youth development seriously and the international spread of coaching skills, assisted by FIFA and its Confederations, has raised the standard of the teams taking part in all youth tournaments. Secondly, many countries have examined the Australian youth development system, and taken the appropriate bits from it to graft on to their own programs, so that we now find ourselves up against the people we have helped teach. A similar thing has happened with the Australian cricket team and its academy system. The bar has been raised and we need to innovate or go backwards.

On the question of the domestic coaches appointed, how are they to gain the experience sought by Scheinflug if they are not appointed while their playing knowledge of the world game is current and when they have shown that they can manage domestic competitions, as Farina did with the Brisbane Strikers and Postecoglou with South Melbourne, both NSL champions? As to the Institute programs, Ron Smith has wide experience in Asia, where Australia’s future lies while his successor Steve O’Connor is a highly experienced Australian player and coach. He is not an English clone. At state level there is wide variety of experience, not all of it English by any means.

The appointment of Ernie Merrick as coach of the Melbourne Victory is now beginning to be recognised for the inspired choice it was. Merrick is the highest credentialled coach in Australia and he and his back-up team have put together what is generally regarded as the best blend of young talent, backed by experience in the new A-League. His assistant is a young Australian Aaron Healey whose own career at the top level was truncated by injury, but who has imbibed his sports science and acceptance of modern technology from Merrick. The future of Australian football lies with the players like Adrian Leijer, Kristian Sarkies, Michael Ferrante, Vince Lia, Simon Storey and others who are gaining their stripes against the Dwight Yorkes and Brian Deanes of the A-League. Driving them on are players and winners of the calibre of Geoffrey Claeys and Kevin Muscat, whose experience and on-field teaching have proved invaluable.

Having said this there are problems with the current system of talent identification with perhaps too much emphasis on age and physicality rather than skill and talent. The relative age effect which biases selection in favour of players born just after a cut-off date for age-governed tournaments has been shown to be still operative in Australia (and not only in Australia, however). Youngsters drawn from regional areas have greater difficulty in getting into representative teams than their metropolitan counterparts. The tyranny of distance still operates, despite many efforts to overcome it.

So while it is good headline-making stuff to call for a revolution or a return to the golden age, lets hope Frank Lowy and his team keep their nerve and assist the current system to evolve, taking account of new developments around the globe, innovating sensibly and on the basis of tested, scientific methods, and above all drawing on the good qualities which we have in the sport here. Having said that, nothing in this piece is intended to deny Craig Foster and Les Schienflug’s absolute right to criticise what is happening, but the debate needs to be raised a notch and specifics have to replace windy rhetoric.

This article appeared on the Football Federation of Victoria website http://www.footballfedvic.com.au and in Australian and British Soccer Weekly on 4 October 2005, p. 7. © SESA

For the last two decades the clubs have marked time and managed to survive. In a way that is impressive in itself, since several other teams have disappeared since the war while others are the product of amalgamations and take-overs. This is true of both Corio and Geelong for example. Corio was successively British, German and Italian before the Hungarians from Northern Suburbs took over, while Geelong was British, Italian and Anglo-Irish prior to the Macedonians of East Geelong arriving.

Only one Geelong team, North Geelong, has reached the Victorian Premier League, which it did in 1992, winning the Premiership under coach Branko Culina in its first season in the top division. Since then North has slipped back to Division Two of the State League until this year, when it will return to Division One. Bell Park which challenged North for local bragging rights is now in Division Three of the Provisional League while Corio will play in Division Three of the State League and Geelong Rangers has just been promoted to Division Three where it will join Geelong which was relegated last year. (All subject to changes if there are amalgamations or clubs drop out of leagues).

None of these clubs can survive on their membership fees and gate money. Attendances are often below 100 apart from the Geelong Advertiser Cup pre-season tournament which gets numbers up into the low hundreds. Clubs attract small amounts of local sponsorship and advertising, sell alcohol in their club bars and run interminable fund raisers which often cost almost as much as they bring in. Players in FFV competitions below the level of Division One of the State League are required to be amateurs, which means they can legally get a small payment towards expenses, though some receive brown envelopes in addition from a variety of sources.

North Geelong’s success last season was critically dependent on the attraction of an excellent coach, Robbie Krajacic, a top player with Bulleen, and the return of key members of the 1992 Premiership team and other players who had played in the National Soccer League for the Melbourne Knights or Sydney United, the Cervinski brothers, Mijo Trupkovic and Grgo Saric. This was an expensive process and it will become more so if North seeks to return to the Premier League in future.

So the clubs have a past, but have they a future? The following are some of the arguments as to why they do not.

1 Demographic changes, the end of European migration, means no replenishment of traditional support.

2 The integration of generations of migrants into Australia so that they do not need their soccer clubs as a bridge into the host society.

3 Geographical dispersion. The potential fans of these northern suburbs clubs now live in Lara or Torquay rather than Bell Park and Corio.

4 The example of Melbourne Victory. Showed you can attract fans to a genuinely non-ethnically identified and but locally focussed club.

5 None of the clubs have adequate resources or organisation to appeal to significant sponsors and can offer sponsors very little by way of brand promotion.

6 The existence of the present clubs probably prevents the emergence of a genuine wide-appeal Geelong club, so not only are the clubs condemning themselves to a permanent struggle for survival, they are holding back the development of the game in Geelong at a time when it should be capitalising on the success of the Socceroos in World Cup qualification.

(This piece was broadcast on Geelong’s community radio station 94.7 The Pulse on the Soccer Show with Tonci Prusac on Saturday, 3 December 2005 at 1-2 pm. It also appeared in the Geelong Advertiser on Wedneesday, 7 December 2005, p. 53.)

Victory welcomed back skipper Kevin Muscat and Socceroo Archie Thompson, though Thompson started on the bench after his Australian duties and the celebrations which followed. Central defender Geoffrey Claeys was out with a groin problem allowing youngster Daniel Piorkowski to continue to partner Geelong’s teenager Adrian Leijer in central defence. Ricky Diaco had his first A-League start alongside Daniel Allsopp in attack and Andy Vlahos dropped to the bench. The Mariners were missing two of their stars, former Melbourne Knight Tom Pondeljak and Andre Gumprecht.

In 9 minutes keeper Eugene Galekovic threw the ball to Muscat who found Richard Kitsbichler clear on the right. The Austrian winger’s low cross was thrashed over the bar by Allsopp with the goal gaping.
Two minutes later Vince Lia created another opening for Allsopp but this time he put the free header wide. Allsopp has only scored one goal this season and while his work rate cannot be faulted, his confidence in shooting positions has deserted him.

For the Mariners, Damien Brown’s quick free kick released Dean Heffernan whose driven cross was carried over the line by keeper Galekovic. The errors continued when Galekovic handled outside the penalty area and Vince Lia got himself booked for kicking the ball away in 37 minutes. From the free kick Brown struck a swinging ball into the area and former Morwell Falcon John Hutchinson got a slight touch to deflect it past Galekovic for the Mariners’ opening goal.

Victory had not scored in six hours of play when the half-time whistle blew and the patient crowd were shouting for Archie Thompson to make an appearance. But the first Victory substitution was Vlahos for defensive midfielder Steve Pantelidis at half-time. Rain began to fall heavily making the pitch slippery as the Victory chased the game in the second half. Not till 63 minutes had passed did coach Ernie Merrick swap Thompson for Diaco. Thompson was soon in the action with a pass just ahead of Vlahos.

In 74 minutes Brown split the Victory defence with a pass to Dean Heffernan who quietened the home crowd with a simple second goal for the Mariners. Victory looked bereft of ideas in the last fifteen minutes and the Mariners played out time with little difficulty.

One strange statistic in the new A-League is that there have been 24 away wins and only 15 home wins, a reversal of the normal pattern in most leagues around the world.

(Alan Clark supplied the last point. An edited version of this article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser on Saturday 19 November 2005, p. 98.)

Many people still believe that the game was influenced by Gaelic football, an impression that is sometimes reinforced by the hybrid game played between teams of Australian and Irish footballers in recent years. But the Gaelic game was not codified or some would say reinvented until the 1880s and there is no contemporary evidence that Victorians borrowed from the Irish in any significant way in the 1850s when our version of football started.

Others, including the Australian Football League, have tried to emphasise links with Aboriginal games played in the western district of Victoria especially one called marngrook. The link in the latter case is often said to be Tom Wills, who grew up near Ararat and probably played with the local Aboriginal children in his youth. He later coached and played for the Aboriginal cricket team before they went on their celebrated tour of England in 1868, though Wills did not accompany them. Wills also wrote a letter to Bell’s Life in Victoria in 1858 suggesting the setting up of a football club and drafting a code of rules. This is often seen as a key step in the evolution of the game.

Martin Flanagan, author, journalist, novelist and now playwright, has turned his imaginative book The Call into a theatrical experience currently running at the Malthouse in Melbourne. In it Flanagan has restated his credo that Tom Wills was the bridge between Aboriginal culture and the creation of ‘a game of our own’, the dominant football code in this part of the world. Flanagan’s work delivers the message to readers and audiences who may or may not know anything about the history of the game in its formative years, so a generation may grow up accepting this vision as historically and psychologically accurate. And of course it is politically correct in the early twenty-first century, putting Aborigines back in the picture from which they have been excluded for generations. The Australian Football League reinforced similar ideas when it supported the erection of a monument to Wills at Moyston in western Victoria. The pleasure which leading Aboriginal players like Michael Long have taken in the notion that their ancestors were there at the origins of the game they have graced with such skill is not to be discounted, nor is the possibility that the rational methods of the academic historian may not be the only appropriate ones for the investigation of cultural practices and the transmission of ideas between social groups.

So it is probably, as my wife would say, curmudgeonly to suggest that Flanagan’s novel and play are myth-making not history. Some words about having a game of our own were put into Tom Wills’ mouth by H C A Harrison in his memoirs published in 1923 but Wills’ original letter has no such content. Indeed, Wills suggested that if football did not appeal a rifle club or even an athletics meeting would be reasonable substitutes.

In the mid-nineteenth century the game which was emerging took a decade or two to become clearly distinguished from the other forms practised in the colonies. Flanagan himself makes use of an article from the Argus in 1860. The nub of that article was that Wills was not using the round ball, which was the preferred kind for the game being played at the time. Games were played on rectangular pitches, round balls were used, rules were debated and styles varied for many years before the game settled down into anything we would recognise as close to the code we play today.

Historians including Bill Mandle, Geoffrey Blainey, Rob Hess, Robin Grow and Bernard Whimpress have demolished the anachronistic attempts to give the game Irish or Aboriginal antecedents. The celebrated marngrook references come from later publications like James Dawson’s Australian Aborigines: The Language and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1981 edition, originally published 1881, p. 85. High marking was not a feature of early Australian Rules so the suggestion this was derived from the Aboriginal game is also very dubious.

Familiarity with the mores of Melbourne bourgeoisie in the mid-nineteenth century would destroy any notion that they would reach out to an Aboriginal activity for a game to teach their sons, Tom Wills or no Tom Wills. Their focus, perhaps regrettably, was the United Kingdom, though the game they helped evolve eventually set up a unique pattern among Australian sports in that it was one which was not played in that country. As I have argued in my article ‘The last night of Poms: Australia as a post-colonial society’ in John Bale and Mike Cronin (eds), Sport and Postcolonialism, Berg, Oxford, 2003, the only characteristic Victorian football shared with the later Gaelic game was that it was not played elsewhere. Cricket became the national game in Australia, precisely because it could be played against the English as part of the great imperial project. Aussie Rules could not, and hence its legacy, like its origins, is very curious, with only the invented hybrid game against the Irish to give it a modern international dimension.

(An edited version of this article appleared in the Geelong Advertiser, 6 November 2004, p. 37.)

His experiences led me to remember our early days in Victoria, a decade or so later in the 1970s. We did not have serious language problems. Though a thick Scottish accent could be a bit of a barrier, we could usually communicate more easily than those without English. Also I came to a job in a university and universities have many similarities around the world.

After a week in a motel in Belmont, during which we got the children into primary school, bought our first Australian car, a station wagon, found a house we liked and could afford and bought it (or put in an offer which was accepted for settlement in three months) we looked around for temporary accommodation. A colleague at university said that another lecturer in who lived on a farm out west of Geelong had a cottage to let. We agreed to spend the next few weeks there till our cream brick veneer was available.

It was a strange time. Our new friend’s heart was in the right place. He was kindly but otherworldly in the extreme. The house had no heating apart from an open fire and a chimney which was blocked by thousands of flies. There was no fridge in the place, but he said, ‘Come up to the farm, I’ve got three in the shed’, and so he had, removing the sheep dip from one and saying we could have it. He came down with some curtains for the windows though we were 100 metres off the main road, but we were still struggling with a stove to cook on and blankets which were full of holes and maggots. Behind the house was this great brown mound which I initially thought was Mount Moriac, but was just the heap of bottles left by the previous tenant, an alcoholic butcher.

One day my wife came home to find the owner had planted geraniums in the garden, but there were Murray Grey cattle on the verandah and she could not get into the house. He wanted me to help him castrate sheep on my first day in the cottage, but I had my fill of farming in Scotland and declined. He had a tractor which he had to park on the top of the hill because it would not start. But it had no brakes, so that was a dangerous thing to do.

At university one day I met him in the corridor. He told me, ‘I have just shot a black snake under your house, but I fear I have shot the wrong end.’ I had this vision of a very angry snake looking for its tail. ‘Don’t tell my wife,’ I pleaded. But he walked around the corner and promptly did so. So I had a wife and two children who were constipated for a month because they would not go near the outside dunny. Eventually we persuaded the people from whom we were buying the house on the Olympic estate in Highton to let us rent the property ahead of settlement date, as they had moved to their new abode down the coast. We bought some camping gear and foam rubber bed-settees and camped at the house until the ship finally came in with our belongings from Scotland.

In those first few weeks we began to put together a couple of photo albums for the folks overseas. We took pictures of all the things which appeared strange to our eyes, knowing that after a month or two we would not register them as different any more. So storm drains, letterboxes at the kerbside, overhead power and phone lines, bullbars on trucks, flags and bunting fluttering at car saleyards, geraniums growing up power poles on nature strips, the beaches along the Bass Strait, road signs with kangaroos and koalas, or instructing us to turn left at any time with care (later the title of a book of poetry by our next door neighbour, Graeme Kinross Smith) and many other mundane parts of the Australian suburban and rural environment were captured in photographs. And we recorded an audio-cassette to accompany the albums and fired them off to Scotland as our Christmas contribution.

For our own first Christmas in Australia I had learned that tradition required a barbecue, so there I was under the golf umbrella barbecuing in the rain in the backyard to the incredulity of our neighbours. It was a good baptism into Australian life, and gives us laughs nowadays, and some of it at least was funny at the time.

An edited version of this article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser on Saturday, 15 October 2005, p. 37.

Milanovic has applied economic analysis to confirm what has been known to most people connected with the sport that recent developments, particularly following the Bosman judgment, have resulted in a concentration of talent in rich clubs in a few countries in Europe. Jean-Marc Bosman, a Belgian player, took his case to the European Court in 1995, arguing that his club FC Liege had no right to a transfer fee after his contract expired. The court found in his favour and also declared that limiting the number of ‘foreign’ players from other European Union countries was contrary to European law. Freedom of labour movement in football followed and talented players now gravitated towards the leading clubs in Italy, Spain, Germany and England.

The consequence, according to Milanovic, is that the chances of a club outside this elite reaching the final stages of the major European competition, the Champions League, or winning the league title in one of these countries has been sharply reduced in the last decade or so. In the European Cup, now renamed and reorganised as the European Champions League, from the 1950s to the late 1980s around 28 to 30 teams reached the quarter-final stages out of a possible 40 in any five-year period. In 1998–2002 that number dropped to 22. Milanovic is aware of the change in the structure of the competition which originally included one club per country to one in which the leading countries have up to four places in the competition, while the minnows have to compete in pre-qualifying matches for a very limited number of places in the qualifying rounds.

In Italy the gap between rich and poor has widened. For example, from the 1950s until 2000 there were on average three or four teams from the southern parts of the country, traditionally the poorest part, in the top division, Serie A. Teams like Napoli and Cagliari won the Scudetto, the Italian championship. Now, he argues, there is only one or none at all. While that may have been true at the time he completed his research, it is no longer so, with Palermo and Messina from Sicily, Reggina from Calabria and Cagliari representing the south in 2005–06. Representation from the region is set to increase even further next year with Catania  from Sicily on top of the Serie B. It is true that none is in the running for the Scudetto, and the poorer clubs have just challenged the leading group for a fairer distribution of the income from television, currently biased heavily in favour of the Turin and Milan clubs. Had Milanovic looked at other countries such as Scotland, Portugal, Uruguay and Holland he would have observed that concentration of talent in two or three top clubs and the marginalisation of provincial teams was of long standing and had little to do with globalisation.

On the other hand, when it comes to the World Cup, players may not change their allegiance (with very limited exceptions) and have to represent the country of their birth or parentage. Good players from poor countries who are attracted to the top European leagues improve their performance and hence have the ability to carry that back into the World Cup qualification for their countries. So there is greater evenness of competition in World Cup qualification and in the final tournament. In the four latest World Cups there have been at least two ‘newcomers’among the top eight finalists. For example when the cup was played in Korea/Japan in 2002, South Korea, Senegal, Turkey and the USA reached the quarter-finals (last eight).

In addition, the goal difference between teams competing in World Cup finals is decreasing, suggesting to Milanovic more even competition. Since the number of goals per game has been decreasing as well, it is perhaps less surprising that differentials have narrowed and, as Milanovic appreciates, the number of countries taking part in World Cup finals has increased from16 in 1978 to 32 since 1998, thus giving greater chances for lesser countries to take part in the final competition.

Milanovic concludes that the free circulation of labour has led to an increase in the quality of the top-level football competitions but a greater inequality between teams. For the fans improved communication means that they can watch top-level competition around the world, though their local team has little chance of winning anything or even playing in the premier league. However, when it comes to national competitions the poorer countries have a chance to do better. They can draw on a cadre of players who have experience of playing in the top leagues once every four years for the World Cup and sometimes more often for regional competitions. So in Australia we have Mark Viduka and Harry Kewell, for example, and now Archie Thompson of Melbourne Victory on his way to PSV Eindhoven, the club of Australian national coach Guus Hiddink.

Milanovic warns that the rich clubs chafe even under the mild redistribution of resources implied in the selection of their players for their country of birth in the World Cup and fears that the powerful clubs may gang up on FIFA in the form of a breakaway by the G14, a self-selected group of rich European clubs. Similar breakaways have occurred in the past; some successful, others not so. Milanovic suggests that the football model illustrates some of the benefits and many of the hazards implicit in globalisation and the fragility of rules and institutions designed to curb unfettered competition in the market. While some of its economic analysis may be a little daunting, this is the type of article anyone interested in the future of the game ought to read. It is published in the Review of International Political Economy.

Branko Milanovic, ‘Globalisation and goals: Does soccer show the way?’ Review of International Political Economy, volume 12, number 5, December 2005, pp. 829–850.

This article appeared on the Football Federation of Victoria website on 16 January 2006 at http://www.footballfedvic.com.au/ An edited version appeared in the Geelong Advertiser on Thursday 2 February 2006, p. 40 under the headline ‘Soccer shows the way to the world’.

Among the leagues the English Premier League continued to claim the most attention, though the standard of football may not have been higher than that in Italy, Spain or Argentina. However, the resources which poured into the English game in past years showed signs of drying up despite Roman Abramovich’s continued underwriting of large losses by Chelsea and the take-over of Manchester United by the American Malcolm Glazer. This latter move was highly leveraged and United is now saddled with debts which may well be unserviceable in future, particularly if they do not perform well in European competition.

Australia’s move from the Oceania to the Asian Confederation of FIFA, which will take place on 1 January 2006 may well turn out to be the most significant international football event affecting this country. Even more than the stunning World Cup qualification secured in a gut-wrenching penalty shoot-out victory over Uruguay at the Telstra Stadium in Sydney in November. For the future Australia will play in national and club competitions at a high standard which attract huge fan support both at the grounds and on television which will have important implications for the finance of the game in this country. The successful start of the domestic A-League, which has attracted above expected attendances and some significant sponsorship, is another good sign for the game.

Australia’s reputation was somewhat tarnished by Multiplex’s problems with new Wembley Stadium which it is building. This will end up costing local investors, and may not be ready in time for 2006 FA Cup Final. The Football Association have booked the Millennium Stadium at Cardiff as a back-up.

The Brazilian superstar Ronaldinho has come of age this year winning both World and European player of the year awards by a huge margin from some excellent players like Frank Lampard, Steve Gerrard and Thierry Henry. Even the Real Madrid crowd gave him a standing ovation when he destroyed Real with its Galacticos including David Beckham and Zinedine Zidane at the Bernabeu in November. Barcelona also have one to watch for the future in Lionel Messi, star of the World Youth Cup who is already cutting it in the Primera Liga. The young Argentine is so good he is not being described as the next Maradona but the first Lionel Messi. In England Wayne Rooney has had a mercurial year with some stunning performances for club and country, but he could not help Manchester United qualify for the knock-out stages of the Champions League.

By late November the 32 places in the World Cup draw had been settled. The surprise packets this year included Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, led by the ever smiling Dwight Yorke, who has had an excellent season with Sydney FC in the new Australian A-League, and three of the African qualifiers, Togo, Angola and the Ivory Coast. Ghana was more expected, but the absence of Nigeria, Cameroon and South Africa was not. Australia is drawn in Group F along with defending champion Brazil, Asian champion Japan and Croatia. Qualification owes a great deal to Dutch coach Guus Hiddink and a fair slice of luck this time, making up for some raw deals in the past. Can Australia qualify from this group? It will need something special against three more fancied teams, but it is possible given a good start against Japan. Expect to see changes in the Australian line-up by June as Hiddink will pick players he thinks can do a job for him, not reputations. It is hard to go past Brazil, Argentina, Germany and Italy as winner, but if you want a dark horse then perhaps Ukraine led by Andriy Shevchenko might be worth a bet. England fancies its chances but will do well to get to the semi-finals.

The Champions League has now settled down as what is almost a European league with the G14 clubs dominating. The G14 is a self-selected group of top clubs from the major European Leagues who have set themselves up as a pressure group to try to obtain a larger share of the revenue accruing to the world game. Another of their recent initiatives is an attempt to force national associations to compensate them for injuries incurred by their players when representing their country. In this season’s Champions League, Juventus, Bayern Munich, Arsenal, Ajaxm Barcelona, Werder Bremen, Villareal, Benfica, Chelsea, Liverpool, AC Milan, Hiddink’s PSV, Lyon, Real Madrid, Inter Milan and Rangers got through the qualifying rounds, with only the last of these being unexpected. Lyon has an excellent side and is predicted to do well, while Chelsea and Barcelona have been drawn to meet in a replay of last year’s epic clash.  The UEFA Cup looks like it is going the way of the Cup-Winners Cup as a consolation prize for the also rans. It may well be that a two-tier format of a European league will be formalised in the next few years to head off a breakaway by the leading clubs.

National competitions remain interesting with the emphasis shifting towards European qualification, especially if the top spot is predetermined by the end of the calendar year as is the case in several countries. Chelsea, Barcelona, Lyon, Juventus and Celtic can probably put their feet up domestically and still win their respective leagues, though Osasuna have made a bold challenge in Spain. In England, Tottenham Hotspur under Martin Jol look threatening to Manchester United, Liverpool and a fading Arsenal for the European places, while Hearts challenge in Scotland has stalled since Valery Romanov replaced the excellent George Burley with Graham Rix, who is still under a cloud for earlier sexual misdemeanours. Burley has just been appointed head coach at Southampton in the English Championship where he will work with Sir Clive Woodward as Director of Football. Woodward was better known for coaching the English rugby union team to the last World Rugby Cup.

FIFA’s egregious president Sepp Blatter continues to produce contradictory plans for the world game. His World Club championship adds fixtures to an already congested calendar and yet produces a final in which the leading European team will play the South American champion with the rest making up the numbers (except that Manchester United let everyone down last time). Sao Paolo got an early breakaway goal against Liverpool and held on to win as Liverpool had three goals chalked off and missed a barrow-load of chances. While the Australian press thought that Sydney FC did well to finish in 5th place, the overseas writers were highly condemnatory of the standard of the also-rans in the ersatz tournament, which is not really going to develop the game in any meaningful way.

So what will be my memories of the world game in 2005? The brilliance of Ronaldinho, and the precocious talent of young Messi and the game of two halves which was last season’s Champions League final, when Liverpool recovered from a mauling by AC Milan to gain a draw and then held on by the skin of its teeth for penalties which it won. Then there was Australia’s similar exercise against Uruguay and the irony that Mark Schwarzer should have been watching Zeljko Kalac in goal for the ultimate shoot-out instead of saving the penalties that allowed John Aloisi to fulfil his and all our dreams with the final kick. The downside was the capitulation of Celtic to a young Australian called Scott McDonald, who scored not once but twice for Motherwell in the last few minutes of the final match of the season in Scotland to deny the Hoops a league championship it had dominated. Oh, and my home town club Ayr United going through another season without anything to show for it. A bit like Geelong in the footy. The year 2005 was not a great year, but a good one. Let’s hope 2006 is even better.

(This was broadcast on FM94.7 The Pulse at 1.30 pm on Saturday, 24 December 2005 on the Soccer Show with Tonci Prusac, Liam Tench and James Muir. An edited version appeared in the Geelong Advertiser on Friday 30 December 2005, p. 39.)

Melbourne Victory overcame Adelaide United by two-goals to one in a thrilling major semi-final of the A-League at Telstra Dome in front of another record-breaking crowd of 47,413 last night.

Both teams were at full strength and the tone was set as Geelong’s Adrian Leijer was engaged on a body on body clash with Adelaide veteran Carl Veart straight from the kick-off.

Victory’s Adrian Caceres and Archie Thompson broke through in the second minute but Thompson’s final touch took the ball just wide.

Then came the sucker punch as Adelaide went up the other end and Diego’s cross from the left let Travis Dodd sneak in for a header at the back post for a crucial away goal in 4 minutes.

This meant that the Victory had to score twice to gain the result on the night.

Caceres was causing problems with a series of runs down the left but when he cut inside the shots and crosses failed to trouble Daniel Beltrame in the Adelaide goal.

Two or three offside decisions also halted promising Victory moves, while Adelaide relied on a counterpunching approach.

Fernando had a blast from distance but hit it straight at Michael Theoklitos.

On the half-hour, Simon Storey, Kevin Muscat and Grant Brebner combined to set up Daniel Allsopp on the edge of the goal area but his shot was blocked by keeper Beltrame’s feet.

Matthew Kemp of Adelaide and skipper Muscat were booked for holding and a rash challenge respectively.

On the stroke of half time the Victory had a good spell of pressure with Simon Storey testing the keeper with one effort, and Brazilian Fred got himself booked for diving after squeezing his way past three defenders.

So the half ended with Adelaide still a goal to the good.

Two minutes into the second half the stadium erupted when Daniel Allsopp picked up a loose ball about 30 metres out.

He charged to the edge of the penalty area where he unleashed a fearsome left foot drive which screamed into the top left hand corner for the equaliser.

Adelaide replaced Fernando by youngster Bruce Djite, while Victory brought on Kristian Sarkies for Caceres and the Olyroo playmaker immediately drove a free kick to the keeper as the Victory went seeking a second goal.

By the end of 90 minutes that had not happened but then deep into injury time the Victory won a free kick out on the left.

Sarkies swung it into the danger area and when a defensive header came out to Victory substitute James Robinson he lifted a header over everyone into the top corner for the decisive strike.

There was just time for Aelaide to mount one last attack saved by the feet of keeper Theoklitos before the home team could start the celebrations in earnest.

Victory is into the grand final while Adelaide has a chance to reach that when it meets Newcastle Jets next week.