The Malay Mail (8th Nov, 2013)
THE
2013 football season ended last Sunday with the Malaysia Cup final, but
already Malaysian footballers are up to all sorts of antics for the
next season. Now, their ridiculous behaviour is expected to become full
blown and probably bring shame to the Malaysian League, as it does each
year.
One would think that since football in the country
turned semi-pro in 1989 and fully professional in 1994, everything that
is wrong with the game would be corrected. But no, we are still looking
at ways to fine-tune the league. In fact, in 2015, the league is to be
privatised and supposedly take the game to the next level.
When the league is put under the microscope, there
are still many areas that need to be improved, or to be blunt, altered.
Aspects like security, fan control, ticket sales, banned items in the
stadiums, poor ground conditions, substandard refereeing and, above all,
the management of teams in a professional manner.
However, over the next two months, all eyes will be
on the movement of coaches and players for the new season. As I said
earlier, this has already started. And from the news that has surfaced
so far, football is getting a bad name.
Apparently, coaches and players have started
negotiating with potential employers for the new season. There is
nothing wrong with that, but some of them have already signed letters of
intent and collected advance or signing-on fees. Well and good, but
when these coaches and players use this as a bargaining chip with other
teams and turn their backs on the teams they picked first, then they
don’t know what “professionalism” means, or they just don’t care.
These coaches and players had the decency to return
the money when they went back on their word to avoid any controversies.
Those would-be employers let them go scot free, in good spirit, but it
does not augur well for the game.
Coaches and players should be made to realise that
they cannot take teams for a ride. They must be punished. Yes, they want
the highest wages but there are procedures to follow.
They should behave like professionals if they want to be treated as such.
We
hope we don’t see more of these cases in the coming weeks as coaches
and players look for new teams. As the majority of coaches have found
their teams for the new season, the players’ movement is going to be the
focal point.
Several of them will move with the coaches as a
package deal while others will move in a ‘player’s package’, where a few
players get together and demand that they be signed on as a ‘pack’.
Then there are players trying to get letters of intent from
teams and then negotiate with others with the letters in the hope of
getting higher wages. Some will sign with one team and then go to
another that offers better wages.
There are bound to be cases of players who have ‘double signed’, which would see the teams fighting over them.
All
this is unhealthy for Malaysian football. Here we are trying to raise
our standard to be on par with the leagues in South Korea and Japan,
both of which started later than Malaysia’s.
The only way to eradicate these amateur ills of the game is to punish those who breach the rules of the game.
Make them sit out the season if that is the only way to educate them and make the league a truly professional entity.
The affected teams must take a stance and the FA of Malaysia must punish the guilty without any compromise.
There
is no room for compassion if the game is to be cleaned up once and for
all. Otherwise, Malaysian football will turn into a circus!
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