Football and the Olympics

So, Jacques Rogge, the head of the International Olympic Committee has warned that if FIFA changes the eligibility rules for the Olympic Football tournament, the IOC might cut the size of the tournament (i.e. reduce the number of teams) or drop the tournament altogether because "the value of the event" (in Rogge's words) would be diminished.

The Olympics is too large and too expensive for most countries to host. Even those countries that can afford it are essentially wasting money; according to everything I have read over the years, the United States is the only country that makes a profit when it hosts the Olympics. Every other host loses money, though the IOC makes money. Frankly it is a bloated event, that should be hosted across an entire country (maybe more than one) rather than force single cities to build more (white elephant) sporting facilities than they could ever find use for in the decades after the Olympics have moved on.

You can probably guess that I am only interested in a small fraction of the sports at the Olympics. The rest of the events, the majority of the events, do not interest me at all. And I am not alone.

There are two kinds of sports.

The first group, the majority, are sports that use the brand of the Olympics to generate interest in what is essentially their most important global championship. During the Olympics, the "world" pays attention to their sport; after the Olympics, the world loses interest.

The second group are sports that are so popular they do not need the Olympic brand to validate their world championships or world champions. The three biggest sports have self-standing world championships, the FIFA World Cup, the Rugby World Cup and the Cricket World Cup. Association Football is the world's most popular sport, and I suspect most fans would give up any number of Olympic medals in any number of sports if meant their football team would win the World Cup.

In tennis, it is more important to win the Davis Cup, Fed Cup or one of the tennis majors (US Open, Aussie Open, Roland Garros and Wimbledon); the Olympic gold medal in tennis is nowhere near the top of the agenda. I don't know much about golf, but I have never heard of a golf Olympic champion, nor have I noticed any golf fans excited about such a person if he or she exists.

Basketball is different. It is a popular sport worldwide, but the Olympics might just edge the Basketball equivalent of a World Cup in significance. This is probably due to the United States, the home of basketball. Americans love the Olympics; for the average American, "world champion" at something and "Olympic champion" of the same thing are synonymous. But then the broader American public have traditionally had little interest in Football, Rugby and Cricket, the sports that prove that a single-event World Championship can be more prestigious than an Olympic medal -- and this is also the country that describes its national champions as world champions.

For those of us who follow the major world sports, the Olympics congests the calendar while providing little in the way of an explanation for the congestion.

No really, what does the Olympic medal decide in football?

We have a world champion, decided at the World Cup. We have a junior champion, decided at the World Youth Cup. And we have a school-boy or cadet world champion, decided at the Under-17 World Championships. Each of these world championships has an equivalent continental championship that decides the continental champions at each level.

So what does the Olympics decide? The Under-23 champion? Of what use is that?

I am a citizen of a country (Nigeria) that has won the Olympic gold in football (in 1996), and if given the choice, I would trade it in for an extra Nations Cup title or a World Cup title. I don't know what the Olympic gold signifies. We were not the African champion, and we were not the World Champion. It was just another age-restricted trophy.

We endanger the health of football players, and the commercial viability of football (scarcity is value) by forcing our star players to play far too many matches every year, without rest. They don't rest. In the off-season, they are playing friendlies, qualifiers, continental championships and the World Cup.

There is fault on the club end too. The biggest example of unnecessary fixture congestion is the UEFA Champions League. It is bloated, featuring way too many unnecessary (boring) matches in the earlier phases. What used to be rare and fantastic encounters between European giants are now routine, mundane repeats of encounters we have seen several times before (particularly this year when there were nearly four English teams in the semi-finals).

In Africa, the uneccesary Championship of African Nations (CHAN) has been created. We already have the wonderful African Nations Cup, which not only crowns the undisputed champion of Africa, but also is (in my opinion anyway, as an African fan) the second-most important football tournament behind the World Cup. What is the CHAN for? We should not dilute the Nations Cup's value by crowning some sort of co-champion at the CHAN, nor do we need a new tournament restricted to players based in African domestic leagues; we already have the sub-continental championships (the CECAFA Cup, the COSAFA Cup, the Amilcar Cabral Cup, the CEMAC Cup and the Arab Nations Cup) that are contested exclusively by players based in African domestic leagues.

There is a similar story to tell elsewhere. Brazil for one could do with a simpler system of domestic football championships. All in all, football needs to be streamlined so we get quality over quantity, and to give our players time to rest between seasons.

As it stands today, FIFA does not even include the Olympics on its unified calendar, so clubs are not required to release their players for it (something Rogge complained about in the article).

If football was dropped from the Olympics, who would notice? Who would miss it?

There are too many international agencies that continue to operate in the 21st Century in ways that were outdated even in the 20th, and the administrative organs of world sport are no different. The IOC and FIFA could both do with some reform, but in a practical sense the Olympics should be downsized, made less expensive and more focussed by restricting it to those sports that need the Olympic brand. Everything else should have stand-alone World Championships, that are small enough for most countries to dream of hosting.