In May this year Pope John Paul II who is now 79, and was a goalkeeper according to all written reports on his career spoke out on Football as the he knows it. The Pope no longer plays football - the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak - but is said to be an enthusiastic follower of the Vatican City football league, which must be the smallest national league in the world.
John Paul 11 preach a sermon on the evils of football to the top men in Uefa (European Football Association), a lesser version of the really corrupt giants known as FIFA. On the surface most of what he desires is great and honest and therefore has no chance of materializing in this age of money laundering, bribes and betting scandals, but here perhaps the Pope is hoping that is his perceive naïve will allow some readdress by conscious minded Catholics- or does he seriously expect professional footballers to turn overnight into a set of Holy Joes (Not Public though)? He expressed sentiments to which Uefa and worse yet the dogmatic FIFA will pay pious lip service, before carrying on exactly as before.
While a lot of people outside of the paying coffers of Football will know that the Pope is right. Those in power even regionally such as CONCACAF and various Caribbean Football Associations should take heed before it is too late. Oh, most in control of football vast riches may say most of it is predictable and forgettable: bad behaviour, flashy cars, and nightclubs. And, naturally, the role-model heresy. Being a role model in Sport is, of course, about being commercially exploitable, not about setting a genuine example as in other spheres of Life. But the Pope at least is making an effort to be heard which is much more than can be said of any other World figure.
Parents, not sportsmen, are role models. "It's not my job to bring up your kids," the basketball player, Charles Barkley, said. Camus, the existentialist goalkeeper, said: "After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences, what I most surely know in the long run about morality and the obligations of men, I owe to football."
The Pope believes football is "an important vehicle for values such as sacrifice, constant endeavour, respect for others, loyalty and solidarity". Though piously expressed, this is true of every team sport that was ever played. Team sports are not possible without such things. Fair enough, but it is not exactly the stuff to liquefy the blood of St Januarius.
And the Pope also said that it would be a good thing "if promoters, managers and communicators of the football world ensure that football does not lose its essential characteristic as a sporting activity and is not submerged by other interests - above all, economic ones".
Again, this sounds like nothing we have heard before and has to be commended. It is a pontiff on automatic pilot telling the Football rulers that when your time comes, one will judge you greater on your dastardly deeds on earth.
But think about it. Football is in a process of transition. It is a fantastic game and these days there are fantastic amounts of money in it.
Not so very long ago, financial involvement in football was largely a self-aggrandizing semi-philanthropy. Local man makes good and buys into local football club. The administrators were men of vocation: looking after the game - it was not then called a product - they loved. In general, television was thought to be a bad thing, leading to financial ruin.
There is more football to enjoy, and everyone in the game is infinitely richer. Football is now the concern of the corporate. It has been dumbed down in the process: penalty shoot-outs being the most obvious example.
Change, once started, cannot be stopped halfway. There are warning signs that the Pope is right, that the game is losing what it is that makes it a game.
And there was poor Ronaldo, apparently forced by commercial concerns to play in the World Cup final, even though the pressures of the occasion caused him to have a fit on the same day. And he played dreadfully: it was awful to see a real switch-off.
Talk about self-defeating. It was the one incident that shows the ultimately contradictory demands of financial and sporting institutions. Or to put it more papally, the essential characteristics of sport were submerged by other interests. Since that time Ronaldo's career has nose-dived, proving that God does not like ugly in any form, football practitioners (managers, coaches, Presidents of Associations, Vice Presidents, Secretaries and players) should heed all of this.
And one of the fundamentals is the belief that the match, the team, the result really matters: and that there is no higher consideration than this. This is not a moral stance, but it is the matter on which the playability and the watchability of football depend. Is it too much to ask that even sponsors would prefer Football to be on higher planes? In Trinidad and Tobago, we continue to sell football, as simply a quick fix of money for many and get richer joy for a select few who own clubs and gain the benefits of sponsorships and transfers.
Football if we are not careful will lose its power to inspire the world's imagination - and if it loses that, it would lose its earning power. Football is in the position of a bird with a STONE attached to its foot by an unusually long piece of elastic.
Football is the bird, its commercial backers the brick. There are two possibilities: one, that the elastic breaks and the bird goes flying off into the wide blue yonder. The second is that the stone comes flying through the air and whacks the bird in, if I might use some non-papal language, the bum. Football's audience can only pray that it is the former.
In Trinidad and Tobago, we are heading the very same way, and it is a pity that none of the religious leaders in this land of multi religious groups can find the temperament and dare I say it -THE BRAVERY- to stand tall and tell our Association, our Football Leaders, Jack Warner, Oliver Camps, Harold Taylor and Richard Groden, just - WHAT IS NEEDED TO PUT CORRECT IN FOOTBALL-. Maybe, then and only then, we may qualify for the 2002 World Cup Finals.
Thank God for His holiness, Pope John Paul 11, Long may be Live!!!!!!
