As a fan of Stala Mielec, I could not neglect to announcement the cut-off of my club from financing by the Treasury companies. Cuts that do not necessarily should be so tragic, but which announce bad times for athletics in general.
According to the announcements of a smiling ruling coalition, state companies are slow withdrawing from the backing of professional sports. This is influenced by the ideology of fiscalism, austerity and akin liberal dogma. Will this kind of populism not cost us more than the athletics itself so far?
There is not a year in which there is no scandal in the country involving the financing of the sports club by state-owned companies or local governments. And it's the president who builds the house, and the squad falls out of the league, and the club calls for a "loan" from the city, or else he won't join the games, and it's the politician who got the local energy squad giant to burn the money in the proverbial furnace. This all creates a climate in which society, in its cross-section, opposes the subsidies of professional athletics by public means, recognising it as inefficient management and deficiency of respect for the common good. It is hard to do otherwise, but it is worth extending the issue and looking at the doctrine behind financing sport.
Why is it that the state or the local government do this at all? Apart from the subject of individual ambition and the desire to take over public, “no one” means – power likes success and success likes power. In the end, all prime minister will gladly pose for a photograph with volleyball planet champions. And all oppositionist is willing to complain about the failure of athletes. Politics. The large one, but the small one. It besides invests in athletics for social reasons, specified as the request to make an infrastructure for young people, which thus has the chance to form their own physical wellness or to learn the lifestyles of sports. There is usually the first selection in terms of the talent for a peculiar sport. It's a small mythological, due to the fact that to play football, you just request a ball, 4 backpacks and a part of free space. However, this changes and if we want a squad of 40 million people, we can no longer trust on the Brazilian method of breaking through from the yard. incorrect scale. Besides, Brazil has not won the Mundial in over 20 years.
Okay, but what's the alternative? There's no area for besides much anthology, so let's just stick to football. What about this athletics without state grants? They can be replaced by private investors who have "their" resources, usually worked out by thousands or tens of thousands of people, but due to the fact that under economical coercion they are separated from the fruits of their own work, we do not consider specified money to be "public". That's the question of ideological construction. Let's just leave it at that. is simply a private investor a good thought for a football club, considering its value not only as an component of local entertainment, but besides as liable for the access of young people to infrastructure? I'm afraid not. It usually leaves a mess. What does this infrastructure look like present in Wronki, Grodzisk Wielkopolski, Warsaw Polonia, or even in Kraków Wisła? These are all bands abandoned by their “sugar daddy”. Without any scandal, for “the Lord has given, the Lord can take it.” The problem with specified investors is that everything is based solely on their whim, lasting not more than a twelve or decades, so it is hard for any durability. It's a fast success, the Extraclass or the Champions League and the toy got bored, I'm moving on.
Can specified "sport patrons" be replaced without public subsidies? Yes, the German model, which is simply quite a few tiny private sponsors forming the club's budget. Extensible, but in conditions of a prosperous economy, where tiny and medium-sized entrepreneurship is profitable, attached to a place, local communities and afford to advertise in this way.
So in Poland for this minute we do not have conditions for this, which is connected with the robbery economical policy after 1989, which was not about stimulating development, but about looting what Polish people did. We're a periphery, so we don't have that kind of entrepreneurship, and it'd be truly hard to get something out of it. This Stal Mielec tried, but only for the second level of the competition, the first 1 would not be without the support of the Polish Energy Group. Again, the question of scale.
Of course, it is not possible to ignore the thread of the advanced salaries of footballers. It is clear that this is outrageous and that a resident of the municipality or region may not be satisfied with throwing himself on 10 times the wage of an Extraclass player. But we are not the ones who set trends on the globalised football marketplace and without that we will not be competitive. Although the issue is worth the debate, since in the Czech Republic players gain much little and in Europe their clubs do better.
Today, I will not exhaust the subject, there is much to discuss, and I will most likely do it here all now and then, while the conclusion is one: withdrawing public money from professional sports under the current conditions will mean its further periphery and pauperisation, and this will translate into a deficiency of local planning for the improvement of this field. We'll only have gradual destabilization and individual successes depending on where a rich man is going to find himself having an appetite for football at home. It may be, like now, Motor Lublin and Raków Częstochowa, it may be a small Niszcza, but it is adequate that the sponsor gets tired of it and it will be ruined. Is that what we want?
Tomasz Jankowski
photo of wkipedia
Think Poland, No. 29-30 (14-21.07.2024)