Just to demonstrate you how globalization works and why I think your views
are totally misguided.
15 years back, Germany was a football superpower. I just had won the World
Cup (1990 in Italy) and with the additional players from Eastern Germany,
after the reunification, the future looked rosy.
15 years later, today, Germany has fallen from grace. It has recovered a
bit
during the last World Cup tournament, here in Germany, but it's clubs
still
cannot compete with clubs from Italy, Spain, or England anymore.
What happened? The end of the 90s and the beginning of this millenium saw
an
explosion in player salaries. Germans thought it was crazy that a football
player should earn like 5 to 10 million euros per year. That clubs should
pay
to other clubs a 120 million euros for the transfer of a top notch player.
After all it's just a *game*. Likewise, Germans didn't want to have to pay
for seeing football games, but in England, for example, the pay TV brings
the
English clubs enormous amounts of money.
So? The top players didn't want to come to Germany anymore. They want to
the
other leagues, where they could earn more money. After a few years of
this,
the quality (and thus the reputation) of the German league has suffered so
much now, that even now that Bayern Munich, Germany's top club, is ready
to pay
as much as the English or Spanish clubs (Bayern Munich had been saving
money
for years), the international top players don't want to come to Germany to
play here.
Because we have refused to play along, we have lost ground in competition.
That is the basic point of it. You can try to resist the competitive
mechanisms all by yourself, but you will change nothing and you will just
end
up losing ground and *therefore* *influence* to change the nature of the
game
itself. One just loses importance.
*Therefore* my proposed strategy is to stay on top of the game and to try
to
start a concerted effort by multiple participants to change the entire
system.
A single nation's resistance against the forces of competition is
pointless.
One needs to organize against it.
Also note that this doesn't mean that the gms of English, Spanish and
Italian
clubs are *necessarily* ruthless, power-mongering, money-grubbing people.
They are not the slave drivers, they are driven themselves, driven by how
the
game of globalized competition works.
But I would agree that quite a few of them don't mind being driven that
way,
as long as it works in their favor. That needs to change.
Alex
--
Waiting for you to return.
--
To email me, please have 'alt.suicide.holiday' as the subject line.
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