Greek tragedy:
How the nation’s game collapsed
Traianos Dellas sounds rueful as he ponders where it all went wrong. Twelve years ago, Dellas was part of a Greece team that won the European Championship against all odds, the defender scoring the decisive ‘silver goal’ in the semi-finals against the Czech Republic. This summer, the national side will not be in France for Euro 2016.
With 24 countries involved it’s the biggest Euros ever, but Greece weren’t even close to joining the party. Instead they became the first country in history to be top seeds in their qualifying group and end up finishing at the bottom of it.
“Those in the current team will understand better, but for us it became obvious from the very beginning of qualifying,” Dellas tells FFT. “The trademark of our Euro 2004 team, and our main asset since then, had been wiped out: the team spirit.
“The main reason was the absence of Giorgos Karagounis and Kostas Katsouranis. They were the last of the champions from Portugal. They knew the way to maintain team spirit.”
Greece had qualified for the previous four major tournaments, and as recently as two years ago they were just a couple of penalty kicks away from the quarter-finals of the World Cup. But then Karagounis retired and Katsouranis was discarded. The final link to that 2004 miracle was broken.
Claudio Ranieri replaced Fernando Santos as boss after the World Cup, and it’s fair to say that didn’t go too well. He lasted only four months, after Greece lost their first three home matches in qualifying to Romania, Northern Ireland and, most ignominiously, the Faroe Islands. “I take full responsibility
for the most unfortunate choice of coach,” Hellenic Football Federation president Giorgos Sarris said when Ranieri was removed. What happened to him, anyway?
At 35, Katsouranis was briefly recalled by the Italian gaffer’s successor Sergio Markarian, but by then it was already too late. Markarian lasted just another six months himself, as Greece lost to the Faroe Islands again.
Caretaker Kostas Tsanas guided the Ethniki to their one and only win in qualifying, beating Hungary 4-3 in their final match. In that game, they scored more goals than in their previous nine qualifiers combined. Former Borussia Dortmund, Bayer Leverkusen and Galatasaray boss Michael Skibbe has since been installed, but his first game was a 1-0 defeat in Luxembourg.
The national team’s miseries are merely a fraction of the problems that Greek football is currently facing, though. Not by coincidence, Greece have struggled at international level just as club football in the country has collapsed. In 2003, Greece’s domestic league was ranked sixth in Europe by UEFA. Right now, it is ranked 14th. The country’s well-documented financial woes haven’t exactly helped matters. “The economic crisis made things worse, but it’s not the main reason,” explains Dellas, now 40 and the manager of Atromitos. “We had the same huge problems before the crisis – corruption, violence, unreliable football administration... The economic crisis just inflated the existing problems.” That crisis means fans simply cannot afford to go to matches as often now. In six years Panathinaikos’ average gate has plummeted from 26,000 to less than 6,000, and ticket revenue in the Superleague is down 42 per cent. Since 2002, the value of the league’s TV rights deal has dropped by 35 per cent, too, so expenditure has been scaled back. The number of foreign players attracted to the league has dwindled from 255 to 140 in the space of seven seasons.
“The decrease in revenues is evident since 2009,” says Zois Sotiropoulos of the company that certifies the league’s annual financial data, Pricewaterhousecoopers Accounting SA. “The drop in tickets, TV rights, sponsorship and advertising revenues – combined with a 20 per cent increase in the tax rates of sports staff – has compressed already marginal budgets.”
Those marginal budgets have resulted in players’ salaries going unpaid, and numerous clubs have had huge financial problems, most notably Aris and AEK Athens, who have both dropped as low as the third tier (though AEK have since returned). With others hit hard as well, the top flight has been reduced to 16 teams.
“I couldn’t imagine how bad things would become in Greek football when I chose to invest back in 2005,” says Fotis Kostoulas, major shareholder and president of Panetolikos. “The biggest problem is the lack of competition. Before every season starts we know who’s going to win the title. People stop caring.”
Indeed, 18 of the last 20 titles have been won by Olympiakos, champions this season for the sixth time in a row. But their attempts to win the Greek Cup for a fourth time in five years were halted by hooliganism, Greek football’s other blight, as their semi-final against PAOK was abandoned when home fans invaded the pitch and clashed with riot police. Determined to take a stand, Greece’s deputy minister for sport took the extraordinary decision of cancelling the cup altogether. Only in mid-april, a full month later, did they back down and agree to let the competition run to its conclusion, after Greece was threatened with expulsion from FIFA, who frown on government interference.
The scenes in Thessaloniki were just the latest in a string of unsavoury incidents, with the Superleague suspended on three occasions last season.
“We’ve reached rock bottom and the problem starts from those who run football,” says Lampros Athinaiou, leader of a Panathinaikos ultras group. “Olympiakos have won the league for so many years, and revenue from the Champions League has fed that system.
“This whole situation is just a gangrene which must be eradicated. Fans’ interest has waned and there are fewer investors. Greek football should start again from scratch.”
Perhaps interest in the domestic game could be revived by an unfancied club upsetting the big boys. A recall for Claudio Ranieri, then? On second thoughts, perhaps not.