Football in the former Eastern Bloc

I have returned from a trip to Eastern Europe, one of the former enclaves of the USSR (remember them?). I went to Poland and saw a bit of Slovakia as well.

It was, I must say, quite a revelation in many ways, including from a football perspective.

As expected, the passion for club football over there is very much locally entrenched — that is, within and between cities.

This is very much unlike our environment where one finds more Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates fans in Cape Town than supporters of Ajax Cape Town and Santos (not forgetting 2008 Vodacom Challenge contenders Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool).

My hosts in Lodz — some of whom I spoke with in our own version of Fanagalo, in this case a mixture of English, German and body language — were fanatical about two teams in this former Soviet clothing-industry town. Some are staunch Widzew Lodz fans, while others are LKS supporters.

I don’t know what we could have passed the time with if it was not for conversations about the “beautiful game”. I also can’t recall how many times I confirmed that I will host them when they come over to our shores in 2010 for the Fifa World Cup.

The passion for the game was one thing, but the other was the fact that some of their stadiums are clearly not up to scratch.

I bet you 50 Polish zloty: even the Rand Stadium before refurbishment would have fared better. One Premiership team have now been forced to play 60km away from their traditional home because their stadium has not seen any upgrade since it was built.

Some of my colleagues travelled to Scandinavia around the same time and they say our league is commercially much larger than some of those they saw there.

So why are our players leaving in droves to play in these leagues, you may ask?

Well, the answers lie in the salaries they get, the professionalism with which technical team operations are maintained, the exposure they get (possible Uefa club competitions spot) and benefiting from playing with players from all over the world — some of whom have lots of experience at World Cup level.

The gap is gradually declining, though, as the likes of Mamelodi Sundowns recruit top players such as Sibusiso Zuma from Germany’s Bundesliga 1.

I have just read that the Polish have announced that they will be ready to step in with a contingency plan if Euro 2012 co-hosts Ukraine do not play ball in terms of meeting deadlines on the building of stadiums. That was an encouraging move, I thought.

This shows that they are serious about alleviating the current situation, just like they have done with the economy since the days of the Solidarity movement.

I guess the similarity here is that we will be hosting the World Cup 15 years after we introduced democracy.

Let’s hope that both South Africa and Poland/Ukraine will prove the naysayers wrong and finish all their stadium construction in time for the World Cup and the Euros, respectively.