Thursday, June 17, 2004

Ways to Revolutionize the Thailand Football League

After our latest setback in International Football - where our national Thailand side was drubbed 4 - 1 by the visiting North Korea team - there has been lots of talk about how we can revolutionize how the direction of Thai Football should go.

After hearing alot of things, here are my observations and recommendations:

The observation why our state of Thai Football is down sums up to the following:

1) Lack of proper football league in Thailand (our best players usually play in Singapore/Vietnamese FC leagues)
2) Lack of Passion from our Fan (no association with support for our football leagues)
3) Lack of Direction from our Football Authority of Thailand(FAT)
4) Throwing money where it should go. e.g. Money as prize money for winning tournaments, but not investing on infrastructures
5) Lack of qualified coaches
6) Cronyism in selection of team members
7) More focus of fitness based training

My suggestions to fix the following are:

1) Set up proper leagues in Thailand. Right now we have 2 leagues - a provincial league that no one watches due to second/third tier players, and a main league which has teams that are sponsored by big corporations. The main problem is the lack of money in provincial leagues, and the lack of fan passion of teams in the main league. I don't associate myself to teams such as Thai Farmer Bank, Port Authority, BEC Tero, etc. but I associate myself to province. In this example, the FAT should seriously think about how to fix this main underlying problem. Combining the leagues, set up a draft, find sponsors, are just some of the part that should be done. To be exact, instead of doing a swansong with the PM in trying to procure Liverpool FC, the money would best be placed in placing the infrastructure of a strong league here.

2) Hire consultants from Vietnam (yes I'm not kidding) Football League to help figure how to set up our fledging Football League. As Vietnam are in the early stages of Football development, but have place good initial infrastructure on club level and competition in their country we can learn alot from them. Later we could step up with assistance from more successful football leagues later.

3) Change diehard habits - cronyism should be thrown out the window. Fitness should be placed on higher priority - weknow our national team cannot keep up with 90 minutes of football action.

4) Find more qualified personnel in coaching and other football related fields. I don't think we have good physio-therapist nor good nutrient advisor, and I highly suggest we need to start to instill some right habits to the team.

I hope someday soon I can see our Bangkok FC taking out those bastards from the Chiang Mai FC some day. p.s. the last statement was just a joke :P

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