The Archive

A change in political tactics by the North Korean regime is being enacted through the export of promising footballers, writes John Duerden

It was the definition of optimism. The Reuters reporter stood with microphone in hand after North Korea’s 3-0 defeat to Ivory Coast at the 2010 World Cup hoping to catch a word with the vanquished. Every grim-faced player was asked “Do you speak English?” as he filed past. To say the silence was stony would be kind.

Only the last one out was happy to speak. Jung Tae-se made front pages around the world for crying during the national anthem prior to kick-off against Brazil and was equally forthcoming about the reasons why his team lost and what needed to be done in the future before the visibly annoyed team manager came back to drag him on to the bus.

Next time around Jung may still be the lone striker but not the sole speaker. North Korea believe that the best way to ensure that there actually is a next time is to engage with the international football community on a more consistent basis. For a country that is rarely mentioned in the western media without “secretive” somewhere in the headline it is quite a shift, but the World Cup reinforced a growing feeling that isolationism in football is more stupid than splendid if you want success.

Just weeks after the tournament ended, the government split the North Korean FA in two. The larger section deals with international affairs and was put under the control, not of the party but of the military, headed by Kim Jong-il’s heir Kim Jong-un, thought to be more of a fan of basketball than football.

When qualification for the 2014 World Cup starts in September, the majority of the North Korea starting 11 could be foreign-based, travelling home for matches from such destinations as Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Russia and Denmark (and even Mongolia, now the home of Kim Myung-won, the striker who the team tried to register as a goalkeeper last summer). There could even be movement north across the 38th parallel but only when conservative South Korean president Lee Myung-bak, blamed by Pyongyang for most of the problems on the peninsula, steps down in 2013.

By that time striker Ri Myong-jun and midfielder Jong Il-ju will be approaching the end of their contracts with second-tier Danish club FC Vestsjaellend. The players were just 20 when they arrived on trial last year and did enough to be handed lengthier deals. The club chairman had had some contact with North Korea in the past but, even so, the deal was not a simple process, despite the relative enthusiasm for the idea of exporting talent. “It is not an easy country to sign players from,” said coach Micheal Schjonberg. “It’s like in the old East Germany. They are employed by the military, which belongs to the government. Importing exotic animals would be easier with all the bureaucracy but there is talent there.”

Ove Pedersen replaced Schjonberg at the beginning of July and is happy with his Asian contingent. “I don’t know about North Korea’s plan to get more international experience but here the two players are learning to play football in a different style than what they are accustomed to,” he said. “They will develop as players and become more skilful. They pass well and although their shooting could be better they are young and will make progress. Ri is the better player of the two. He is a player for the bench at the moment but that may change soon. Jong has more to learn but that will happen as the good thing about them is that they both work hard and want to learn. It is difficult to communicate with them but they are learning English and doing well in training.”

Having two North Koreans at the same club means that they can support each other off the pitch in a very foreign environment, but they are also trying to fit in with their team-mates. “With foreign players, you can see when the players accept them or don’t accept them,” said Pedersen. “I can see that our players accept them. They are part of the group.”

It is a trend that is going to continue with more North Koreans heading overseas and it is only a matter of time before one arrives in England. When that happens, it doesn’t mean that every North Korean footballer will be desperate to talk to the press but at least journalists will be able to spot the ones that don’t – they’ll be wearing oversized headphones and talking into mobile phones.

From WSC 295 September 2011

Simon Menary discusses the future of Supporters Direct in the wake of unfortunate publicity and threats to their funding

Supporters Direct (SD) has been briefly reprieved after an unfortunate series of tweets from its former chief executive nearly killed it off (as referred to in the editorial in WSC 294). But its long-term future remains unclear. In May, chief executive Dave Boyle celebrated the elevation of fan-owned AFC Wimbledon to the Football League with a Twitter rant at those responsible for the relocation of the original club to Milton Keynes.

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The big teams in South America are facing a serious challenge and there could be more to come. Sam Kelly explains

When the trophy was presented after the final of the 2011 Copa América on Sunday July 24, it was to a burst of sky-blue-and-white confetti. That much was not unexpected. Argentina were, after all, the pre-tournament favourites as well as the hosts. But, at the end of a momentous competition full of upsets, they weren’t the victors. The colours were instead being blasted skyward to celebrate the victory of the hosts’ neighbours and rivals from across the Río de la Plata, Uruguay.

Looking back over the history of the tournament, Uruguay’s win isn’t a triumph for the little men. It is difficult to paint it as such when it took them one clear of Argentina on to a record 15 Copas. But the fact remains that 18 months ago, when they had just barely scraped qualification for the 2010 World Cup, few would have had Óscar Washington Tabárez’s men down as potential winners of that tournament (or, of course, semi-finalists in South Africa).

The story of this year’s Copa has not been one of thrilling matches, even if a good number of them were more interesting than the scorelines suggest. It has, though, been one of unexpected results. The third favourites won it, which is not that far out (although the gap in the odds on betting markets between Uruguay and second favourites and holders Brazil was huge), but they beat Paraguay in the final. And a glance at the teams who played in the third-place play-off the previous day confirms the picture of a tournament in which the continent’s old order has been emphatically overturned.

That match was a 4-1 win for Peru over a Venezuela side who, in reaching the semi-finals, had won two matches – that’s two more than Paraguay, the team who edged them (and Brazil) out via penalty shootouts. Both Peru and Venezuela have come an awfully long way in a very short time. Just before the previous Copa América, which they hosted in 2007, Venezuela were still widely referred to as the continent’s whipping boys, and it was difficult to see where improvement was coming from.

They reached the quarter-finals of their own Copa, and months later appointed César Farías as manager. Farías has also taken charge of the youth sides for some games, and his knowledge of the whole national set-up has been a big plus for them.

Peru have, unlike Venezuela, had some great moments in their past, but were coming to this Copa from an even lower point. They finished rock bottom of the South American qualifying group for the 2010 World Cup, with only three wins. Even those who had a feeling this Copa was going to be one for the underdogs never dreamed Peru would go far.

Their experienced Uruguayan manager Sergio Markarián – who managed Tabárez when the latter was a player at Bella Vista – provided perhaps the off-pitch moment of the tournament when he let rip in a press conference after a question about why his side were so defensive. “It’s easy to say ‘Oh, we’re very attack-minded’ when you’ve got the kind of players they [Chile]have,” he said, before exclaiming: “The day has to be close when we [the ‘smaller’ nations] expect more even standards of refereeing.” Peru did open up when they had the chance, and striker Paolo Guerrero actually ended up as the tournament’s top scorer courtesy of his hat-trick in the third-place play-off. Tabárez was undoubtedly the best manager of the Copa, but Markarián has surely been the most influential in the long term.

If this really is the end of the old order, what lies ahead for Brazil and Argentina? At the time of writing the latter have just parted company with manager Sergio Batista and Alejandro Sabella, the former Sheffield United and Leeds midfielder, looks the most likely replacement. As someone who has actually worked as a coach and manager before, he would be an improvement on Argentina’s last two bosses, Batista and Diego Maradona.

Brazil’s situation is trickier to read. They were always treating the Copa more as a chance to build for the future, and Mano Menezes is highly unlikely to lose his job as a result of the quarter-final exit to Paraguay. All the same, having no competitive matches (discounting the Confederations Cup) between now and the World Cup they will host in 2014 will be a problem for the development of a young team.
It could mean there are yet more chances for the previously smaller nations to improve further and close the gap to the more traditional powerhouses. And with the next World Cup final to be held in the Maracanã, scene of their greatest triumph in 1950, new South American champions Uruguay might be forgiven for hoping they will be riding the wave of that momentum.

From WSC 295 September 2011

A new website tracking the accuracy of transfer rumours has started up. Adam Powley assesses the implications for football journalism

It’s the silly season, and while some fundamental questions are raised about the media, police and political establishment, it is business as usual for football. The contrivances of the transfer windows mean that almost as soon as a season ends in May, the speculation and gossip about which millionaire wants to play with which other group of millionaires begins to flow. It is easy to just blame the journalists, but there is undoubtedly a public appetite for human dramas of ambition, loyalty and greed that the business entails.

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It’s the 40th anniversary of a season that began with a dramatic garden party, a tape recorder and a set of match-fixing allegations that shocked West German football, writes Gunther Simmermacher

A pall of gloom hung over the Bundesliga as a new season started 40 years ago. The clouds had started to gather just over two months earlier, at a garden party to celebrate the 50th birthday of a fruit importer. June 6, 1971 was a sunny day. Horst-Gregorio Canellas, the gravelly-voiced Kickers Offenbach president, welcomed the luminaries of the German FA (DFB) and influential journalists to his home in the Rosenstrasse in the village of Hausen. At exactly ten minutes past noon, a sound engineer clicked the play button of a centrally-placed tape recorder, Canellas sat back as he theatrically flourished a cigarette, and West Germany’s biggest football scandal broke.

Film footage shows a perplexed national coach Helmut Schön hearing Bernd Patzke of Hertha Berlin – who had played in the World Cup semi-final against Italy a year earlier  –  and another Hertha player, Tasso Wild, proposing to fix games to manipulate the relegation battle that had concluded only a day earlier, followed by Schön’s number three keeper, Manfred Manglitz of FC Cologne, offering to throw his club’s game against Kickers.

That final round of the 1970-71 season had ended with Offenbach’s relegation after a  4-2 defeat in Cologne  –  Manglitz didn’t play after Canellas alerted FC captain Wolfgang Overath to the goalkeeper’s corruption. Rot-Weiss Oberhausen had saved themselves on goal difference with a suspect draw at Braunschweig, and Arminia Bielefeld survived with a 1-0 win in Berlin  –  as the crowd’s perceptive chants of “fix, fix” echoed through the Olympiastadion.  

Much as the revelations on Canellas’ tapes shocked the public, the clues had been there before. Schalke’s home defeat against Bielefeld in April had been regarded as highly suspicious (as if to make up for it, Schalke went on to lose also against Offenbach and Oberhausen).  Canellas first became aware of match-fixing in early May when he received a telephone call from Manglitz, who asked for an incentive fee to not accidentally “let in a few” against Offenbach’s relegation rivals Rot-Weiss Essen, who would finish bottom of the table. Canellas paid, and Cologne won. He could do nothing about Cologne’s 4-2 home defeat to Oberhausen three weeks later  –  that game was fixed.

Astonishingly, some players claimed to be unaware that they were breaching ethics. Braunschweig’s international Max Lorenz even wanted to issue receipts for the bribes he received, as if these were legitimate business transaction. His teammate Franz Merckhoffer later recalled in a TV interview: “I didn’t think much of it. If the senior players were taking the money, I thought I was entitled to do so myself”.   

Canellas hoped that the incontrovertible evidence would move the DFB, whose secretary-general was present at his birthday party, to relegate Bielefeld, thereby saving his club. Instead, the federation swiftly banned Manglitz, Patzke, Wild  –  and Canellas, on the grounds that he had admitted to having made bribery payments. Offenbach went down; Bielefeld and Oberhausen were allowed to kick off the new season in the top flight. Feeling betrayed, the whistleblower turned sleuth, uncovering an impressive quantity of dirt. He had even warned the DFB of corruption, in early May, when he reported Manglitz’s approach in regard to the Essen game, the one he paid for and for which he would be punished. The DFB had dismissed his allegations as “vague suspicions”.

When Canellas uncovered evidence of Schalke’s fixed defeat against Bielefeld, eight Schalke players sued for libel. These players, who included the great Reinhard Libuda and future West Germany internationals Klaus Fischer and Rolf Rüssmann, eventually were found guilty of perjury and fined, earning their club the moniker FC Perjury. That game would become emblemic of the scandal.
Their hand forced, the DFB initiated a thorough investigation, headed by its relentless chief prosecutor, the judge Hans Kindermann. More than 50 players from seven clubs, two coaches and six club officials were punished. Altogether 18 games were officially declared fixed (remarkably, none of the results was annulled).

As a result of the scandal, attendance records dropped sharply over the next couple of seasons, from a match average of 20,661 in 1970-71 to 17,932 the following season and a record low of 16,387 in 1972-73  –  at a time when all members of the West German sides that went on to win the European Championship in 1972 and the World Cup two years played in the Bundesliga.

Indeed the 1971-72 season was something of a high-water mark for the quality of football. Bayern Munich and Schalke (strengthened by the arrival of the Kremers twins from relegated Offenbach) played brilliantly in their neck-to-neck race for the championship which culminated in a title-decider on the last day of the season, held as late as June 28. In the inaugural game at the new Olympic Stadium, Bayern won and became the only side ever to score more than 100 goals in a Bundesliga season.

The following year, Schalke’s young squad fell apart as several of their scandal-tainted players were banned or left West-Germany. A purple patch in 1976-77 apart, the club never recovered. Bielefeld might have started the 1971-72 season like everybody else with 0 points  –  but that’s the points total with which the club finished. In mid-April, the DFB finally pronounced its punishment: Arminia would be relegated with 0 points, with all their results counting only for or against their opponents. Bielefeld was allowed to play out their final six games, winning only one of those, a 3-2 before 9,000 spectators that helped send Dortmund down with them. With 19 points, Bielefeld would have been relegated anyway. Taking their place in the following season was Kickers Offenbach. Rot-Weiss Oberhausen was not punished and survived for another year.

The DFB was proactive in fixing the root causes of the scandal: the federation abolished the maximum wage system, and it set up a second professional tier, starting in 1974, to cushion the harsh consequences of relegation on players.

And soon the spectators returned in even greater numbers than before. West Germany’s success in hosting and eventually winning the 1974 World Cup reignited a passion for football in the country. The clouds of the scandal were lifted.

From WSC 295 September 2011