Left Field: HKFA's clock is ticking again
Local soccer governing body claims Fifa rankings are not a good gauge of success, but they are the indicator people will look to most
It was a shame Mark Sutcliffe couldn't take my call a few days ago. He was in England at a private function. I had called the chief executive of the Hong Kong Football Association to get his comments on an article which was being published the following day headlined - "'Lift your game' to justify funding".
The piece reported how the government's lead man on sports, Jonathan McKinley, said more money would be pumped into local soccer over the next five years.
The sum, which will be made official soon, will be well over HK$100 million and will be a measure of continued government support that began four years ago with Project Phoenix. In 2011, the government committed HK$60 million and that funding is now coming to an end.
At the end of the day if we are still sandwiched between countries like Guam and Swaziland [in Fifa rankings] then it would be evident things are not working
McKinley said the feeling of the football task force, which reviewed the entire process, was that "it would be a mistake to turn [our] back on it" at this stage, but added, importantly, that the government would be "upset if at the end of the next five years, Hong Kong's world ranking was still in the 160s".
The inference was crystal clear. Raise your game, or else the government would not continue to pump taxpayers' money into local soccer.
That is the tone in which the article was written, captured perfectly by the headline. But Sutcliffe has taken exception to it, claiming the HKFA has not been told of this "carrot and stick" approach and funding was linked to the trajectory of the representative team's progress in Fifa's world rankings.
He is right. The government wouldn't have told him or the HKFA that. But it would be naive to assume the pipeline would be kept open indefinitely if there were no signs of progress.
For all the improvement we have seen during Project Phoenix, what matters to the man on the street is how the national team are faring. That will be the ultimate benchmark to measure progress.
At the core of Project Phoenix was the target of lifting our national team into the top 100. At the start of the project, a document entitled "Develop - Deliver" outlined 33 recommendations and prime among them was raising our world ranking.
Even top HKFA officials have admitted as much. When Project Phoenix was officially launched, HKFA chairman Brian Leung Hung-tak said raising the standards "was the core of the entire Project Phoenix".
Right now we are ranked 163. When Project Phoenix kicked off we were 169. To find ourselves still around this same mark is worrying.
This must have been the same feeling McKinley had when he said the government would be upset if in five years, with another HK$100 million (minimum) pumped in, Hong Kong was "still in the 160s".
Sutcliffe says Fifa rankings are just a benchmark and not a performance indicator. This, he stresses, is because in the strategic plan the improvement in the rankings is dependent upon many other things that are outside the control of the HKFA, including the provision of better and additional pitches, the investment made by other countries and so on.
It sounds like semantics to me. Benchmark or performance indicator, at the end of the day if we are still sandwiched between countries like Guam and Swaziland then it would be evident things are not working.
Yes, every effort has to be made to give Hong Kong the best chance to rise up the rankings, highlighting the urgency for a national football training centre.
Sutcliffe is right when he says better facilities are a must for improving Hong Kong's ranking - our national team still do not have a base where they can train. The long-awaited Tseung Kwan O facility is still in the planning stages.
Already the project is well overdue and over budget. Ten years ago it would have cost around HK$100 million. Today it has ballooned to more than HK$750 million and the longer we wait, the more expensive it will become.
More crucially, it will delay giving our representative teams the best possible climate to train in.
There is no point hiding behind words like "benchmark" or "performance indicator". Ultimately, five years from now, the government will look at what's been achieved.
Hopefully, there will be many accomplishments but in the end what will matter most is where our national team are ranked.
