One of the best players of our generation and arguably the best player of all time, Lionel Messi, described how he managed to achieve his dream in a few simple words. He said “I always thought I wanted to play professionally, and I always knew that to do that I’d have to make a lot of sacrifices. I made sacrifices by leaving Argentina, leaving my family to start a new life. I changed my friends, my people. Everything. But everything I did, I did for football, to achieve my dream.”
In my humble opinion that one quote epitomize the real effort that needs to be made by anyone to be successful in one area; in this case the beautiful game, Football!
Those involved in the local football scene knows that I have a history in the local game. Having spent over 10 years in the committee of local club, 6 years of which were in the Premier Division, I grew to love the local game and also grew to understand how many things work here in Malta!
Lately we’ve all been impressed by Iceland’s success in their qualifying campaign to Euro 2014 in France, and right so because what they achieved is something straight out of a b-rated sports movie that we used to watch when we were kids. It’s good to keep in mind that Iceland is a country with a population of 330,000, which makes it even smaller than Malta.
I’ve did some research about what Iceland did over the years and this new found success didn’t happen overnight for them. Iceland has been working towards improving their overall footballing standard since the 2nd half of the 1990’s. What they first did was to ensure that each and every city had an artificial pitch that enabled them to play football even in their harsh winters. After that was achieved they started towards improving their coaching levels. After a few years Iceland became the country with the highest number of UEFA A Licensed coaches per capita, this enabled them to have a qualified coach at each and every club, no matter how large or small the club is.
Comparing that to Malta, I believe that we are very close to that level. Most clubs in Malta today have their own artificial training pitch and most clubs (if not all) have at the very least 1 UEFA A Licensed coach. So it begs the question, what are we doing wrongly here? Why are countries like Iceland improving immensely whilst our improvement has been very, very minimal? Here I’m going to offer two points which I strongly believe in. 2 points which might not be popular, however I truly believe that they are necessary for the local game to develop.
The first one is the number of clubs in Malta. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, however professional football is not a game for everyone. Thus in order for our country to improve we need to minimize the amount of clubs on this island thus making the fight for places even more stringent. How can it be that if you take a walk from Valletta to Sliema cross the seafront you would have passed from 7 localities that each have their own football club? (Valletta, Floriana, Pieta, Msida, Ta Xbiex, Gzira & Sliema) I believe that we should have regional football clubs in which a club will cover an area of 5 kilometres and each club will have 1 team participating in the top division and a few other teams participating in smaller divisions and different age groups. That means that the Maltese league system will have a maximum of 3 divisions, a reserves league, an Under 23 league and an Under 21 league. That way we’ll allow players to play against their own level and make them dream big towards playing for the senior team. The problem with this is that it will never happen. No club will ever entertain the idea to merge with a few other clubs thus this idea unfortunately will never materialize.
The other thing that we can do is something that has worked for Iceland. Iceland currently have over 100 players playing in Europe in many different levels. They also include players playing in England, Germany, France and Italy. Iceland has many players playing with Under 21 and Under 19 teams across Europe and this can only result in one thing. They have more players getting trained with better players thus they will definitely improve. However how can Malta do the same? I believe that this needs to come from the kids themselves, or even more so, from their parents.
We need to instil a sense of professionalism from our better local players and encourage them that from a young age they go and play abroad. The MFA needs to help these kids secure European clubs when they are still 14/15 years old. That way they will continue their studies abroad and also train with the very best coaches in the world. Unfortunately in Malta kids are too close to their parents and they don’t like to let them go, this will unfortunately result in kids feeling homesick and quickly return home.
In my years involved in football I’ve seen players that at a very tender age that were courted by Real Madrid, by Inter and by Milan; and all of a sudden I’ve seen them come back to Malta and grow up to be an ok player in the Maltese league. What went wrong there? For one reason or another they preferred to come back to Malta and because they lost their opportunity to play abroad at a very young age they never developed to their full potential.
My plea here is simple, let’s all push our best players to leave Malta at a very young age, let’s all help them secure contracts with European clubs and then let’s start reaping the benefits. This is a numbers game, the more we send the more options we have. If our players remain in Malta all their lives they will never reach their top potential. Together we can do it, however we need everyone that has football’s best interests at heart to do his part, be it the clubs, be it MFA, be it the parents and also the kids themselves.
