SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Lionel Messi is probably the top sportsman in the world right now. Unless you ask fans in Argentina where the soccer star was born and grew up in a town called Rosario, roughly 180 miles north-west of Buenos Aires.
After helping his club, Spain's FC Barcelona, win most of the top awards in 2009, Messi was named World Player of the Year by FIFA, soccer's governing body.
He received the 2009 Ballon D'Or, given to Europe's top player, based on the votes of journalists around the world. Messi won this honor by the widest margin since it was first awarded in 1956. He even won the Latino Athlete of the Year 2009.
But when it came time for Argentina to pick its top athlete, the soccer-mad country chose tennis player Juan Martin del Potro, a relative unknown on the world sports stage until his U.S. Open win last year.
Messi has been criticized in the Argentine press for not playing as well for the national team as he does for Barcelona. Argentina has been one of the strongest soccer countries in the world, along with Brazil, Italy and Germany. But the Albicelestes, as they're known, almost failed to qualify for this year's World Cup in South Africa. Read MarketWatch's World Cup blog.
"Nothing new: Messi has once again disappointed in the Albiceleste shirt," Argentine daily newspaper La Nacion declared after a lackluster performance in a World Cup qualifying match against Peru in October.
Messi moved to Spain to train with Barcelona in his early teens and some critics have questioned his commitment to Argentina's national team -- stirring strong emotion in the superstar.
"I get angry when they say I have no feeling for the Albicelestes," Messi said in a December interview with Spain's leading newspaper El Pais. "Nothing upsets me more than to say that I am not Argentine. Who knows of my feelings?"
The controversy puts the diminutive 22 year-old Argentine at the center of one of the biggest battles in soccer -- between the richest clubs who pay the superstars, and international organizations such as FIFA which run international tournaments including the World Cup.
On the surface, it's about who gets access to top players, like Messi, and who pays when they get injured. Dig a little deeper and it's about power and money.
"There's always been tension between playing for your club and your country," said Ian Blackshaw, an international sports law expert at the TMC Asser International Sports Law Centre in The Hague. "This tension will always exist because football is a matter of power politics and it's all fueled by money. It's not only the world's favorite sport but the most lucrative."
This tension is rising as national teams prepare for the 2010 World Cup starting in June, while club teams in Europe battle for supremacy in seasons that typically end in the spring. Add in the Africa Cup of Nations, which has been running for most of January, and the competition for talent is intense.
$2.7 billion
There's a lot of money at stake. The last World Cup in Germany drew a cumulative television audience of over 26 billion -- almost six times the number of people who watched the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Advertisers will pay a lot to reach such a large audience. FIFA got roughly $2.7 billion for the television broadcast rights to this year's World Cup.
Part of the draw is to see superstars like Messi, Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo and Brazilian Kaka pitted against each other in an electric atmosphere fueled by national pride.
FIFA, as the organizer, gets that money. Clubs like Barcelona, Manchester United and Real Madrid, which pay tens of millions of euros employing superstars, see little of the cash directly.
"International tournaments now generate very significant sums of money and historically the clubs have not benefited from this. So clubs feel aggrieved that they're providing free labour for others to make money," said Richard Parrish, professor of sports law at Edge Hill University in the U.K. "My employer doesn't allow a competitor to make free use of my labor and neither, I suspect, does yours."
Pride
So why do top players take part in the World Cup?
One reason is that FIFA regulations mandate involvement in top international tournaments, said Michael Gerlinger, director of legal affairs at Bayern Munich, Germany's largest soccer club. Some international matches don't come with an obligation to release top players and clubs regularly refuse to take part in those, he noted.
There's also the pull of pride in playing for your country. If players perform well in top international tournaments their value increases, which can trickle down to the clubs that employ them.
"If players become more valuable that trickles down to the clubs," Blackshaw noted.
No comments:
Post a Comment