So
the 2012 S League season has finished with the culmination of the awards
ceremony, where deserving winners getting the accolades. It has been a dramatic
year of football for the Singapore scene. With the Lions XII participating in
the Malaysia Cup, the kind of atmosphere last seen in Kallang, was being
brought back many times during the season. Tears of joy and disappointment,
elation and frustration at the tactical play, seemed to bring the Singaporeans
back to the glory days of us cheering as one. If the national team, which is
mainly made up of Lions XII players, goes on to achieve respectable success at
the Suzuki Cup, and then this project can be considered a success.
Back
to the local front, even though the competition for S League has seen fierce
competing, right up to the last day of the league, the crowd just don’t seemed
interested in this local product. A new CEO of the S League was appointed in
the beginning of the year, and the campaign that he started, “Support your S
League” simply can’t take off. For a sensible guy who would look at comparison,
it simply means “Save Our S League”. If FAS are able to cough out money to
market the Lions XII, I supposed the same things can be done to the S League
teams, rather than leaving it them to run their own campaigns. If we are
talking about grassroots development, the clubs are the major stakeholders in
development of future generations of footballers.
Sponsors
will always be hard to come by as there is simply no mileage in putting their
brands on the teams with limited coverage. With limited participation in the
regional and Asian level competitions, corporate sponsors looking to expand
their branding to overseas would not be interested in the limited local
mileage.
FAS
may be helping the clubs in some ways or another, in terms of reducing their expenditure,
but I feel that they should let the clubs have a free reign of running the
stadiums which they are being based. Some of the pitches of the clubs are
really poorly maintained, although the property belongs to SSC, I believe the
clubs being the main user definitely can propose better ideas in the maintenances
as it is considered their homes. Just because the clubs do not actually own
their home stadiums, you will only see this type of scenarios happening in
Singapore, where Tampines Rovers are housed in Clementi stadium this year. It
is as if UK Sports asking Liverpool FC to shift their stadium to Newcastle just
because the government wants to do an upgrade of the stadium.
As the
list of players being drafted into LionsXII yet to be released, and with Gombak
United pulling out and a revamp of the S League next year, the majority of the
clubs will be playing a round of musical chairs with the players, the 2013
season is seemingly yet another season of struggling to “Save our S League”.
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