adminSharuko On Saturday
Just in the past three days, the Germans have opened my eyes to the frightening reality of how much our football remains trapped in a quagmire of darkness and poverty, engaged on an auto-piloted flight to nowhere and crying out for a dynamic leadership to help it take a giant leap of faith forward
Twenty years ago, an immortal German coach, Reinhard Fabisch, took us within 90 minutes of qualifying for a place at the 1994 World Cup finals in the United States.
The defending world champions then were the Germans after Franz Beckenbauer became only one of a few special men to win the World Cup both as a player and as a coach.
Today, 20 years after Fabisch dragged us as close to booking our ticket to a place at the World Cup finals as we have ever come, l find myself in his country, still working in the trenches of the game that brought us together all those years back.
In the past three days, since my arrival in Frankfurt on Wednesday morning, l have spent dozens of hours in boardrooms listening to the heavyweights of the German football leadership, including the chief executive of the highly-successful Deutsche FuBball Liga, Christian Seifert, travelling around this country and even watching a Bundesliga game last night.
There was an emotional attachment to the team that l watched last night, Augusburg, because it was in their same stadium, a few months ago, that Knowledge Musona played his final match in the Bundesliga before retracing his footsteps back to the comfort zone of Super Diski.
Today, l will watch my second Bundesliga game, at the 80 000-seater home of Borussia Dortmund, a team which has leapt from the verge of financial ruin just seven years ago to become one of the biggest forces in world football today.
In Germany, they say that until you have been to the Westfalenstadion, the home of Borussia Dortmund, where its iconic Yellow Wall, produced by thousands of the club’s fans on its south bank, is one of the imposing yet spectacular sights in world football today, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
German football is alive and well, its top-flight league is thriving and has never been this healthy, Bayern Munich are once again champions of Europe, the club’s star player, Frank Ribery, was voted the outstanding player on this continent last season and its national team is one of the favourites to win the World Cup in Brazil next year.
Of course, Fabisch is no longer here with us today, after losing his battle with cancer, and lies buried, somewhere in the soils of this vast Central European nation, but the legacy of the great work he did during his magical spell in Zimbabwe remains alive.
But while the Germans remain a very powerful global football force, just as was the case 20 years ago when Fabisch dragged us so close to a possible World Cup date with them we could even see the shores of the United States, our national game has stalled and taken some huge steps backwards.
Just in the past three days, the Germans have opened my eyes to the frightening reality of how much our football remains trapped in a quagmire of darkness and poverty, engaged on an auto piloted flight to nowhere, crying out for a dynamic leadership to help it take its giant leap of faith forward.
In just three days l have realised that we are fooling ourselves, in Mickey Mouse set-ups disguised as football entities, which have trapped us to the world of the Stone Age, while other countries in the game, whom we could have booked a possible World Cup date with 20 years ago, have relentlessly marched on into another different world.
In the past three days l have realised that we have drifted so far away from the real world where football is being played, and retreated into our fantasy or reality world where we somehow tell ourselves that all is well, when the painful truth is that our national game is being choked by a range of challenges we are simply staggering in the darkness.
On the drive from Frankfurt to Augusburg yesterday, l thought about Fabisch and wondered what would have been his impression of the state of our national game, in particular, and the Warriors in general, if he was alive today and we had met him for a chat on this tour of duty.
Suddenly, as my thoughts wandered everywhere and nowhere on that lengthy road trip, I thought I heard something that resembled the lyrics of a hit song by pastor Charles Charamba, whose words appeared to be directed at my troubled soul.
“Muchatiiko kana, Fabisch azokokubvunzai, vamwe vangu
Ko, makaitei, makaitei ko, nemutambo wedu zvamakasara panyika?
Vana Peter kudzidza zvakanyanya vakange vasina, kana mari chaiyo
Pakutanga muhomwe vaigara vasina, chavaingokupa
Ne Dream Team yangu waingova mufaro panyika.”
When you belong to a football constituency that doesn’t care for its future, with very little or no investment at all in its junior football structures, and you come to a country like this one which injected a cool 103 million euros, into the same structures, you begin to understand how far you are away from the real world.
When you come from a football family that is allergic to embracing change, to help it face the challenges better, preferring to do business as usual, when every pointer shows that the system is not working and, instead of progress there is decay, and you walk into the light provided by what is being done in the game here, you can really feel so awful you would probably be forgiven if it all makes you so sick you will vomit.
Yes, we don’t have the kind of money that the Germans have but our game was still a poor man’s constituency, 20 years ago, when Fabisch and his Dream Team came within just a win, in their final game, to take us to the World Cup finals in the United States.
But it’s when you take time to listen to the extra-ordinary stories of the men and women who have helped transform the Bundesliga into this massive global giant, the passion that drove them in their relentless drive to touch the heavens, that you get to understand that it’s not just big money that can make football take a giant leap forward.
It Wasn’t This Rosy In The Bundesliga
Only 13 years ago, the DFL, the company that has vastly transformed the face and financial health of the Bundesliga, was in its formative stages, German football was in a poor state and crying out for a helping hand from dynamic young leaders who could bring a breadth of fresh air and chart a new course.
Christian Seifert, the top man in the DFL today, was just 30 years old back then at the turn of the millennium but, five years later, when he was just 35, the Germans invested their confidence in him to turn things around and, eight years later, he is still in his same post as chief executive of the DFL and everyone is smiling.
On Thursday, Seifert addressed us for about an hour and, refreshingly, was honest enough to tell us that it was not all rosy in the beginning but said some tough decisions had to be made and innovative ways explored as they tried to shape their future.
The creation of the DFL, a company of professionals whose jobs are to find ways of making the Bundesliga and the Second Bundesliga into very profitable leagues with strong and competitive clubs that can take on the best in the world, was a masterstroke for German football.
Suddenly, you had a team of professionals with targets, who worked around the clock and combined their different skills, all in an effort to find the best possible ways that the two top tier leagues in Germany would earn more money and turn their members, in this case the clubs, into stable and profitable entities. The Germans didn’t say that they were doing well, given they had just reached the World Cup final in 2002, because the remarkable performance of their national team in Japan and Korea masked the grim reality that their game was on its knees, its structures were in a shambles and there was need for radical changes.
Today, everyone is enjoying the fruits of that landmark decision to stop behaving as if it as business as usual and there is so much money in the game now, thanks to the DFL, the company can afford to give the German Football Federation 20 million euros a year in support.
They have a sustainable system, which safeguards their clubs, and wealthy foreigners can’t just walk in with their money and buy German clubs because there is a rule that the majority stake should be owned by 50 plus one percent of the local members who own these clubs.
If a wealthy foreigner wants to take over the club, he has to invest in the team for, a least, 20 years, as a minority shareholder before he can be considered to have the majority shareholding but such is the strong sense of pride, in the ownership of their teams, the Germans are unlikely to ever open their doors for such partnerships.
To them the Bundesliga is special, and that is why its title cannot be sold to a title sponsor, like the Barclays Premiership in England, but who cares about a title sponsor when business is thriving and they have the highest average attendance figures in world football at their stadiums and the cheapest tickets for their fans in Europe.
As Seifert addressed us on Thursday, talking about the DFL and all that it has done in the past 13 years, my thoughts raced to our domestic Premiership and I wondered why our game was also not embracing such changes and just going on, business as usual, when in the 20 years of its existence, there has been very little to celebrate in terms of commercial success stories for either the league or their clubs.
Twine Phiri, the PSL president, and his chief executive, Kenny Ndebele, know about the DFL because they were here before us, on the same programme sponsored by SuperSport, and were told everything about how these German guys turned their top-flight league around.
Why is the cheapest ticket in our Premiership still being pegged at US$3 when it has been proved that most of the fans who back this game cannot afford to foot such costs if our football leaders came here and were told that keeping tickets very cheap helped the Bundesliga revive its romance with the fans and, as the stadiums burst with life every weekend, the sponsors followed?
Why is our PSL still locked in the mode that the board of governors, who have their own challenges just to try and run their clubs, are the best people who should be unlocking the league’s true commercial value when this system hasn’t worked at all in the past 20 years and, as they were taught by the Germans, it’s best done when you leave it in the hands of the professionals?
The Germans, from what I have seen in the past three days, present the best model for our domestic Premiership to move out of its state of perpetual poverty and take the first steps, after 20 years of existence, towards financial security and writing commercial success stories for their clubs.
There is nothing wrong in copying something that works and Zifa have to pick some big lessons too because why should a rich nation like Germany have only 36 professional clubs, 18 in the Bundesliga and 18 in the second Bundesliga, who share a huge cake, while as poor as we are, we have more than 80 clubs in the top two tiers of our football that has no cake whatsoever to share?
Why do we need all the four Division One Leagues, all fighting for just four places in the Premiership, when more than half the 16 teams in the top-flight league are battling just to keep themselves afloat and to do basic things like paying their players?
Why do we believe it’s not important to invest in our youth development structures when here a club will not be licenced to play professional football if it doesn’t have functional academies?
We need a complete overhaul of our football structures and if we can’t learn from a league that produced the two teams that played in the Champions League final his year, then who can provide a better blueprint to help us turn around the corner?
Yes, money is important but it’s ideas that come first and the funding will follow, if what is being done is attractive, and we cannot continue to say the sponsors are not coming on board, the government is not helping us, when we are not doing anything to help our game.
We have to adapt and survive or continue with business as usual and die a painful and slow death.
Why Fabisch Would Be Mad With Us
Some time tomorrow evening, I will wave goodbye to Germany and jump onto the plane for the long overnight flight back home and, being part of the fans whose world was rocked by the Dream Team, especially in that landmark year 20 years ago, there will be a feeling that I am cutting the emotional attachment with Fabisch that l have felt all week since arriving here.
There is no doubt in my mind that, given our lack of real progress in the last 20 years, despite the strong foundations that he built, Fabisch would have been mad with us, if he had a chance to say something from beyond his grave, about what we have done to his game and his beautiful Dream Team.
I think he would be right to protest because if we were good enough to get so close to the World Cup, just one win away, in 1993, why have we become so bad that we couldn’t even win just one singe game of the six matches that we played in our qualifiers for the World Cup 20 years down the line?
We will probably tell him that we tried another German coach, Klaus Dieter something, I’ve forgotten the last name, for our World Cup campaign, and he will certainly ask why we gambled with a man who didn’t have a record, someone who was coming from a primary school set-up when he was coming from a successful stint with a then powerful Kenya team?
We will tell him that Egypt were too strong for us, beating us both home and away in these qualifiers, and he will probably say but how have we become so weak as to be bullied by the same Pharaohs that he beat in Harare and held on neutral soil in France?
He will probably ask – did you also play Guinea, this time around, as I did with the Dream Team back then, and we will say yes we played the West Africans but, this time around, they overpowered us both home and away. He will probably ask – is the next World Cup going to be held across the Atlantic, as was the case in 1994, and we will say yes, it’s on that side of the Atlantic but the difference now is that where you took us to first place in our group 20 years ago, we finished last this time around.
But it’s not all doom and gloom Reinhard and where Germany gave us a good coach 20 years ago, who helped change the face of our Warriors, your fatherland is now giving us the administrative blueprint to turn the whole game around.
Whether we can embrace the changes or not is what will define our future.
Thank you Germany.
To God Be The Glory
Come on United!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chicharitooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
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