Teóricos da Bola

It's not the size of the country

By Ron Koffman, Haaretz, Israel



Europe doesn't get it. Nobody bothered to prepare the elite squads in European football for the arrival of an unknown and unranked club - one that lacks glittering stars and a phalanx of public relations and marketing experts - and that such a squad might win a prestigious tournament. Europe now has four years before Euro 2008 in Switzerland and Austria to digest what happened this year. The truth is, Greece's triumph was no surprise.




No doubt Greece's achievement can be seen as a painful failure for Europe's football association, UEFA, which has been taken over by a coterie of power brokers, of wealthy owners of a few of the continent's leading clubs. These owners vie to acquire a few superstars, and this competition has taken a tremendous emotional and physical toll on a few premier figures who play for squads in England, France, Spain, Italy and Germany. Such athletes played this year within several different frameworks: their squad's league championship and cup, the European Champions League, and the Euro tournament. It's little wonder that they eventually cracked under the pressure.

The elite European national teams will recover from Euro 2004's surprising twists; but Israel, which up to four or five years ago ranked itself on the level of Europe's middle-level squads, is moving backward. Turkey and Greece were thought to be on Israel's level a few years ago. Then Turkey reached the semifinal round of the 2002 World Cup in Japan/South Korea, and Greece - in a still more startling development - is now Europe's champion.

The heads of Israel's sports establishment have for the past five decades embraced an excuse concerning the size of the country's population. According to this theory, Israel has trouble competing against countries with greater populations of millions of citizens, such as England, Germany, Italy, Spain and France.

Euro 2004 made of mockery of this inane theory. Latvia, whose population is just 70 percent of Israel's, made a respectable showing in the tournament. Denmark and Sweden, two relatively small countries, are soccer superpowers; and two other small countries, Portugal and Greece, vied in the Euro 2004 final.

Israeli sport in general, and soccer in particular, is plagued by a syndrome of excuse making. Portugal, a backward country by European standards (15 percent of its citizens have inadequate reading and writing skills, 13 percent are unemployed), invested $6 billion in a campaign to upgrade its sports sphere, and it ended up with one of the most impressive athletic infrastructures in the world...