PETER VELAPPAN (1935-2018)
Asian football lost a good friend among the wider world with the death of the man responsible for turning football across the continent from a fragmented muddle into a coherent entity.
It was an impressive achievement because Asia is the one sporting continent which is horizontal and not vertical, so running Asian football means co-ordinating a cacophony of time zones and climate varieties as well as cultures.
Velappan made this his life’s work during his 29 years as general secretary of the Asian Football Confederation. He retired in 2007 just as the caravan of Middle Eastern sheikhs and their cohorts arrived to bend the game’s architecture to their own ends.
His work laid a foundation on which the millionaires from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia could build their own self-aggrandising political monuments.
Not that everyone appreciated his work at the time, building AFC coherence out of his own back yard in Malaysia. Various presidents have toyed with the idea of shifting the headquarters from Kuala Lumpur but none has succeeded.
That is a tribute to the happy coincidence that Velappan was Malaysian
and appreciated that reaching both west and east extremes of Asian football meant working from a centre that was both geographical and political. The successive failure of others has created only divisive suspicion and resentment.
Velappan’s demands on behalf of the Asian game did not always go down well in a FIFA whose world federation outlook was focused for many decades on Europe and South America. Admiration was grudgingly gained to the extent that Velappan was considered a replacement should Sepp Blatter ever have been levered out of the general secretary’s role during Joao Havelange’s era.
Velappan was born on October 1, 1935 in Negeri Sembilan on the western coast of the Malaysian peninsula. He studied in England at the Birmingham University and Loughborough College, and then McGill University in Canada. He taught English and literature in Negeri Sembilan before joining the fledgling AFC in 1954.
From 1963 to 1980 he was the assistant secretary of the Football Association of Malaysia. In 1972 he was the team manager who guided the national side to the 1972 Olympic Games football tournament.
And in 1992 it was Velappan who persuaded suspiciously reluctant AFC directors to appoint a marketing partner which ultimately enabled it to capitalise effectively on football’s television and sponsorship explosion.
But not everything ran as smoothly. In 1999 he organised a walkout of Asian delegates at FIFA Congress in protest at Asia’s allocation of spots for the 2002 World Cup. He also clashed with various AFC presidents, confident that the support of a wide swath of national associations would keep him in place.
At the 2004 Asian Cup finals in Beijing he was forced to apologise for criticising Chinese fans for bad manners and questioning whether Beijing should host the 2008 Olympics.
The high point of Velappan’s career on the international stage was acting as co-ordination director of the organising committee of the politically sensitive 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea. The finals provided Velappan with his most personally sensitive moments in football – years later he revealed how, as a child brought up on a rubber plantation, he witnessed the Japanese army sweeping across Malaya in 1941.
He crossed swords with his own AFC president, Mohamed Bin Hammam, when supporting Sheikh Salman instead of the Qatari for a seat on the FIFA executive, attacking Bin Hammam’s “undemocratic” approach to football governance and saying: “He was a very good president in the first four years, but after that he was more interested in the power.”
An epitaph for so many in football, before and since.
He was considered a replacement should Blatter have been levered out of the general secretary’s role