BEHIND SPORTS COVERAGE: Money will not bring soccer success to VPL clubs

Registration and transfer of new players has literally occupied Vodacom Premier League clubs since the end of the league over three months ago.

And despite the Tanzania Football Federation’s decision to extend, twice, the deadline for the exercise mid last week, VPL clubs do not seem to be satisfied with the signatures they already have.

Every year, before the start of the new season, VPL clubs have been extremely busy hunting for players’ signatures from local and foreign players with the aim of improving the performance of their clubs in the league.

But every year, performance of VPL clubs has been dipping instead of improving.

And nothing has helped us in measuring our country’s soccer performance than the performance of the first two top clubs in the VPL in the Africa club champions and the Confederation Cup tournaments.

 For instance, the last time a Tanzanian soccer club reached the highest level in Africa club championship was 40 years ago in 1974 when Simba Sports Club was eliminated in the semifinal by Egypt’s Mehalla el Kubra.

And the last time a Tanzanian soccer club reached the highest level of Africa’s Confederation Cup was 21 years ago by the same club, Simba, when it was eliminated in the final by Cote d’Ivoire’s Stella Abidjan.

Since then, the first two clubs in the VPL have not gone beyond the preliminaries of the two continental tournaments, the expenditure of millions of shillings in the registration of local and foreign players notwithstanding.

One of the main reasons behind VPL clubs’ failure to do well in continental clubs tournaments has been lack of high quality players, a problem that cannot be solved through collection of local and foreign players.

Unfortunately, leaders of most VPL clubs continue to believe, almost religiously, that they can build their clubs through the registration exercise afforded to them at the end of the league by collecting what they consider in their eyes to be the best players from home and outside the country.

For tested, existing records show that what most VPL leaders believe in is actually the best way of how not to win any soccer tournament under the sun.

In fact, one does not need to possess a degree in football coaching to know that the best way to soccer success lies in development of soccer from grass-root level.

What Tanzania soccer clubs’ leaders need to know is that countries like Germany, Brazil, Spain, France, Italy or Argentina would not have won the Fifa World Cup if they had not developed their local football base.

In fact, there is no match that proved the importance of development of a local soccer base in terms of nurturing soccer talents than the semifinal match between Brazil and Germany during the 2014 Fifa World Cup when the former went down 1-7.

Brazil lost heavily against the eventual Fifa World Cup winners simply because the pedigree of their players could not, in anyway, match or surpass that of Germany from the goalkeeper to the man warming the reserve bench.

While Brazil heavily depended on one player (Neymar), who would miss the ultimate match, their counterparts depended on more than the eleven players they had on the field.

That explains why whenever the Germany national team failed to score, any reserve player brought onto the field always scored.

And in that way, the Germany team did not only forge ahead, but went on to win the prestigious tournament.

Therefore one of the most important lessons provided by the Germany team is that you cannot win a major  soccer tournament of the World Cup’s magnitude until and unless the pedigree of players of the entire team is second to none in the world.

Many Tanzanian soccer fans are not only mad in love of the English Premier League, they also like the English national soccer team and have always hoped that it would win the Fifa World Cup.

Unfortunately, since 1966 when they last won the tournament, they will never win it, not because they don’t have good soccer academies and coaches, but because the pedigree of their players is not good enough.

In order to develop further the pedigree of British players, more English players need to leave the country not when they are about to retire, but in their soccer playing prime.

The problem that British players presently face had befallen German players after winning the 1974 Fifa World Cup in Munich, Germany.

After failing to do well in the 1988 European national soccer tournament held in their own backyard, a number of young German players that included, among others, Juergen Klinsmann and skipper Lothar Mattheus, left their country for Italy and other European countries.

It was thus not surprising that when it came to the Fifa World Cup held in Italy in 1990, Germany won the tournament as her players had come of age. Germany papers would later quote their players as saying: “The Italian league made us strong.”

This is what leaders of VPL clubs need to learn. That’s, no matter how much money they spend in their registration exercise, their teams will not do well if they don’t do something about their local base.

Attilio Tagalile is a journalist/author and can be reached at [email protected] 0754279655