Thursday, February 5, 2009

World Cup 2006 Blog

World Cup 2006 Blog

Link to World Cup Soccer - South Africa 2010

Is Olympic Football About to Die?

Posted: 05 Feb 2009 06:40 AM PST

I think the answer might be yes. Partly because no one ever writes a blog post with a question in the title unless the answer might be yes, but mostly because both FIFA and UEFA are making plans to kill it off. Slowly but surely.

The current Olympic rule - players must be Under 23, but with three over-age exceptions - caused absolute mayhem last August, with players like Rafinha and Leo Messi getting into long long arguments with their clubs about whether they should be allowed to go and play or not. It wasn’t pretty.

And now FIFA (an organization that clearly has no love for Olympic football) has proposed (and UEFA has approved) two more nails in the Olympic football coffin:

1. No more overage players (that would have meant no Ronaldinho at the 2008 Olymics, for example) and
2. Going from Under-23 to Under-20.

So basically the Olympics would become an Under-20 football tournament.


Don’t we already have one of those? It’s called the FIFA U-20 World Cup and is played every two years (next one is this September/October in Egypt).

With the U-20 World Cup being even years and the Olympics being odd years, that would mean three consecutive years with U-20 tournaments. A little bit of U-20 overkill maybe?

I understand that it’s hard to come up with alternatives. I’d personally be in favour of placing no restrictions on players ages and letting the Olympics flourish as a football tournament. Even if clubs don’t have to release players, maybe national teams should just negotiate with clubs and put together the best team they possibly can. Then at least you’d get teams filled with players who definitely want to be there.

But I don’t see FIFA - or the big clubs - letting that happen.

And with Olympic soccer already struggling for respectability, the absence of almost any big name players will probably be the beginning of the end. Olympic football could soon go the way of Olympic baseball and be voted out of the games.
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