Making a Simple Game Complicated

“Football is a simple game.”

This line has been used for decades. After all, the object of the game is to get a ball into a goal in order to score. That goal can be an official, goal, two dustbins or two jumpers on the ground. The game and the aim of it is the same.

Although there are some who are determined to try and make out that it is far more complicated that that.

Since the various Confederations and National Associations realised that they could make money by running coaching courses and forcing teams to have only accredited coaches in charge, some of these coaches have set out to bamboozle most fans by implying that it no longer is a simple game and that only a select few know how it should be played.

To add to the confusion are the studio pundits on television. While some are very good and talk total sense, some are clearly there to try and big themselves up, fool the TV executives who employ them that they know more than they do and hang onto a job by trying to make out that the game is akin to rocket science.

Then there are those who administer the game…

As mentioned football has been around for a very long time. Fans and players alike understand how things work. There is a league competition where teams play each other home and away over a season and the team that has accumulated the most points wins the league. There are also Cup competitions which invariably are knockout games. Here if you lose you are knocked out of the Cup. Two teams progress to a final to ‘play for the Cup.’

Now, there are some countries where this tried and tested method is not as accepted in the rest of the world and Australia is one. With the A-League the most consistent team over the League season are named Premiers; not League Champions. The top six teams, which is fifty percent of the teams in the league, then play off in a finals series of knockout games to be crowned “Champions.”

At the lower levels of the game there are still finals as this is the way things are done in Australia, but clearly in most of the competitions winning the League is the goal as that shows consistency over an extended period of time. It shows the true depth of a team.

So, once again the administrators tried to make a very simple situation extremely complicated.

When the Clubs in the Football West Junior Community League U18 Division 1 signed up for the season they expected to play nine home and away games in the season.

However, at the beginning of the season Wembley who had a team in this division opted to drop out as they were being beaten heavily each week.

Even though the season had already started the fixtures were suddenly changed, and it was no longer a strictly home and away season. To share an example Woodvale played Forrestfield twice away from home, and never played them at home. Sorrento played Gwelup who did not win a game all season on three occasions. Gwelup were one of the poorer teams and conceded more goals than most. Needless to say this enhanced Sorrento’s goal difference when it came to the League ladder.

The big question was why change all the fixtures, make extra work and complicate things?

Surely with Wembley dropping out you simply carry on and every team has a bye. The games that had already been played against Wembley are all 3-0 wins or similar for every team, or they are completely wiped from the League table?

However, the issue that allegedly reared its head was one of parents stating that they had paid for their children to play a set number of games in the League season, and as we all know the fees to play football are deemed to be on the high side.

It would appear that rather than give each of the clubs an appropriate credit for this year or next year’s registration, Football West opted to try and give the teams the agreed number of fixtures. Surely a credit would have been far easier to arrange? Then it would be up to the clubs to share that credit with the parents of their players.

Instead, come the end of the season and Sorrento finished top of the League ladder with a disproportionate goal difference. After complaints from the other clubs in the league Football West ended up deleting all of the games against Gwelup as well, and then calculated the league ladder based on points per game for each team. This was calculated by taking the total Points won by a team and then dividing it by the matches played.

Talk about making things far more complicated than they ever should be! No wonder people walk away from the game.

When historians look back at this season how are they going to interpret it? How many asterisks is it going to need to explain how the final league table was calculated?

Good management is about thinking about worst case scenarios before they happen, and having a plan should they happen.

This looks like it was a case of trying to fix an unwanted situation on the run, without looking at the simplest solution. As it happened a bad decision at the start when Wembley withdrew ended up resulting in two other changes having to be made down the track. Changing the fixtures was crazy and unneccessary. Then having to delete the results from another team’s games was an admission that the administrators had got it wrong. Then finally, to try and make some sort of sense of the season to resort to a points per game formula to decide a league ladder is surely proof that what was once so simple is now being overcomplicated.

After FIFA was accused of trying to influence the outcomes at the World Cup the last thing the sport needs in Australia is people making similar accusations.

Hopefully lessons have been learned and before next season kicks off all clubs are advised as to what will happen if a team withdraws before they do.

The former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly was never afraid to share his wisdom with those who would listen, one wonders how he would have coped with the media today, but his words still ring true today, “Football is a simple game completely complicated by the people who look at it, and the people who think they know everything about it.”