Erceg has forgotten what sport is supposed to be about
The Football Ferns captain isn’t owed a living by kicking a ball around.
Abby Erceg, the captain of the Football Ferns, retired from international football this week. Erceg thinks she and her teammates are being short changed by New Zealand Football but the real bottom line is that they occupy a fantasy world of professional sport that does not exist.
The root of Erceg’s grievances is money and a complete lack of understanding about what sport represents. I do not blame her for that. Most professional sportsmen and women have absolutely no concept of the social and political implications of sport.
But a far greater tragedy is that they have also lost sight of the personal nourishment of sport.
The Greeks, who did understand this sort of thing, had a word for it. They called it eudaimonia, which roughly translated means a human flourishing connected to happiness and welfare.
And sport did flourish, both under the ancient Greeks and under the Victorians who were wise enough to recognise its welfare value and went about inventing loads of games. And then greed turned up. The mad capitalists of the late 20th century corrupted sport and turned it into a vehicle for making money.
The former England cricketer Ed Smith, in a programme for the BBC, described how many of the childhood emotions and qualities that made him good at sport were poisoned by the professionalism of first class cricket. Fun, selfexpression, enjoyment, playfulness, flair and instinct were beaten out of you by coaches and self improvement questionnaires.
Smith asserted, ‘‘People usually argue that the rest of his life is damaging Tiger’s golf. In fact, maybe it’s too much golf that has harmed the rest of his life.’’
The same thing has happened to Erceg and many like her. The real problem is not too little money but too much football.
Erceg’s beef with New Zealand Football should be that training programmes are absurdly in the afternoon and not in the evening, as they are for most amateur sports. Her beef should be with centralisation and with the amount of sessions required of women who are essentially at best semi professional.
But when Erceg talked of ‘‘a long and hard road’’, of ‘‘committing your life to this game’’, of ‘‘fighting for what we think is right’’ and of ‘‘sacrifices’’, it was clear she had lost the plot. She belongs to a generation who think that pressure, or ‘‘being stressed’’ as Erceg puts it, is playing a game for your country.
As the Australian cricketer Keith Miller once famously said, ‘‘I’ll tell you what pressure is. Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse. Playing cricket is not.’’
Bill Shankly, the great Liverpool manager, put it another way. He said, ‘‘Pressure is working down the pit. Pressure is having no work at all. Pressure is trying to escape relegation on 50 shillings a week. Pressure is not the European Cup or the Championship or the Cup Final. That’s the reward.’’
Sadly Erceg has lost sight of the reward. Playing in the Olympic Games or the World Cup finals, sponsored by taxpayers like you and me, is no longer reward enough. Never mind that many young girls playing up and down the country would give anything right now for just 15 minutes of the same experience.
But Erceg no longer sees this. Absurdly she thinks the game owes her a living. I say absurdly for a number of reasons. There is no professional women’s football in New Zealand and just one professional men’s club. The game does not generate anything like enough money to do more than foster the game from grassroots through to national level. And those aims should indeed be its priorities.
Australia does have a semi professional women’s league. The average crowd attendance is 1425. So Erceg ‘‘plies her trade’’ in America. The club she played for last season has had to relocate from New York to Carolina. Average attendances last year were 5558, way, way under the big college sports games. Fox did not renew its small broadcast deal.
There are spikes in viewing. The Portland Thorns, a complete outlier, averaged nearly 17,000. Lots of people will tune in to watch women’s football during an Olympics or a World Cup because, despite FIFA’s appallingly sexist attitudes, there is some value in the international game.
But the Football Ferns represent the tiniest fraction of that value. At last year’s Olympics they were technically humiliated by France.
Erceg euphemistically said, ‘‘Results didn’t go our way.’’
Er, no, they didn’t, and it would have been a fluke if they had. In three World Cups the Ferns have played 12 matches, lost nine and drawn three. In three Olympics they have played 10 matches, won two, drawn one and lost seven. So when I hear Erceg say she is ‘‘fighting for what is fair’’, I am struggling to know what she is talking about.
Certainly she is not going to earn much money in performance bonuses. Nor is she going to earn much money from paying spectators or TV deals. It seems to me that Erceg wants to genetically modify her sport in order to be paid money that it does not merit as a failing product in the entertainment business.
The woman is living in a fantasy world and we, as a society, should take much of the blame for our share in creating that world. Erceg needs to realise that ‘sacrifice’ is working down a mine, doing a dangerous job that you hate, in order to feed the family. Sacrifice is not kicking a ball about for a pretend ‘living’.
Erceg needs to realise why she played sport in the first place. She needs to look at the joyous smile on the face of Eliza McCartney. We look at the New Zealand pole vaulter and we see the personification of ‘‘fun, selfexpression, enjoyment, playfulness, flair and instinct’’, all those things that Smith talked about.
And we love her for it. We break down the city wall so that McCartney can be carried through in triumph.
She is the bringer of joy and bestows honour on the country, in the ways that the Athenians first envisaged.
So, Abby, don’t fight for some childish concept of what is fair.
Fight for a game of football with a training schedule that is fun and accessible for semi professional athletes. Fight for a game of football that reminds everyone, including you, of the sheer joy of sport.