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The big teams in South America are facing a serious challenge and there could be more to come. Sam Kelly explains

When the trophy was presented after the final of the 2011 Copa América on Sunday July 24, it was to a burst of sky-blue-and-white confetti. That much was not unexpected. Argentina were, after all, the pre-tournament favourites as well as the hosts. But, at the end of a momentous competition full of upsets, they weren’t the victors. The colours were instead being blasted skyward to celebrate the victory of the hosts’ neighbours and rivals from across the Río de la Plata, Uruguay.

Looking back over the history of the tournament, Uruguay’s win isn’t a triumph for the little men. It is difficult to paint it as such when it took them one clear of Argentina on to a record 15 Copas. But the fact remains that 18 months ago, when they had just barely scraped qualification for the 2010 World Cup, few would have had Óscar Washington Tabárez’s men down as potential winners of that tournament (or, of course, semi-finalists in South Africa).

The story of this year’s Copa has not been one of thrilling matches, even if a good number of them were more interesting than the scorelines suggest. It has, though, been one of unexpected results. The third favourites won it, which is not that far out (although the gap in the odds on betting markets between Uruguay and second favourites and holders Brazil was huge), but they beat Paraguay in the final. And a glance at the teams who played in the third-place play-off the previous day confirms the picture of a tournament in which the continent’s old order has been emphatically overturned.

That match was a 4-1 win for Peru over a Venezuela side who, in reaching the semi-finals, had won two matches – that’s two more than Paraguay, the team who edged them (and Brazil) out via penalty shootouts. Both Peru and Venezuela have come an awfully long way in a very short time. Just before the previous Copa América, which they hosted in 2007, Venezuela were still widely referred to as the continent’s whipping boys, and it was difficult to see where improvement was coming from.

They reached the quarter-finals of their own Copa, and months later appointed César Farías as manager. Farías has also taken charge of the youth sides for some games, and his knowledge of the whole national set-up has been a big plus for them.

Peru have, unlike Venezuela, had some great moments in their past, but were coming to this Copa from an even lower point. They finished rock bottom of the South American qualifying group for the 2010 World Cup, with only three wins. Even those who had a feeling this Copa was going to be one for the underdogs never dreamed Peru would go far.

Their experienced Uruguayan manager Sergio Markarián – who managed Tabárez when the latter was a player at Bella Vista – provided perhaps the off-pitch moment of the tournament when he let rip in a press conference after a question about why his side were so defensive. “It’s easy to say ‘Oh, we’re very attack-minded’ when you’ve got the kind of players they [Chile]have,” he said, before exclaiming: “The day has to be close when we [the ‘smaller’ nations] expect more even standards of refereeing.” Peru did open up when they had the chance, and striker Paolo Guerrero actually ended up as the tournament’s top scorer courtesy of his hat-trick in the third-place play-off. Tabárez was undoubtedly the best manager of the Copa, but Markarián has surely been the most influential in the long term.

If this really is the end of the old order, what lies ahead for Brazil and Argentina? At the time of writing the latter have just parted company with manager Sergio Batista and Alejandro Sabella, the former Sheffield United and Leeds midfielder, looks the most likely replacement. As someone who has actually worked as a coach and manager before, he would be an improvement on Argentina’s last two bosses, Batista and Diego Maradona.

Brazil’s situation is trickier to read. They were always treating the Copa more as a chance to build for the future, and Mano Menezes is highly unlikely to lose his job as a result of the quarter-final exit to Paraguay. All the same, having no competitive matches (discounting the Confederations Cup) between now and the World Cup they will host in 2014 will be a problem for the development of a young team.
It could mean there are yet more chances for the previously smaller nations to improve further and close the gap to the more traditional powerhouses. And with the next World Cup final to be held in the Maracanã, scene of their greatest triumph in 1950, new South American champions Uruguay might be forgiven for hoping they will be riding the wave of that momentum.

From WSC 295 September 2011

Lyon’s huge investment has had a damaging effect on the club and on player development. But sympathy is limited, says James Eastham

For football fans that feel a sense of schadenfreude when big-spending clubs fall short of their targets, Lyon have provided plenty to smile about in the past three seasons. Shortly after the club won their seventh consecutive league title in 2007-08, president Jean-Michel Aulas decided the way to achieve their ultimate goal of adding the Champions League to their list of honours would be to embark on a spending spree bigger and bolder than anything that had taken place before in France.

Three years and tens of millions of wasted euros later, Lyon are counting the cost of what turned out to be a recklessly expensive policy. Aulas has admitted his strategy proved spectacularly unsuccessful, although it would have been difficult for him to argue otherwise considering his previously all-conquering side have failed to win a single trophy since deciding to go for broke. Reaching the Champions League semi-finals for the first time in their history briefly stemmed the criticism, but that momentary high 16 months ago cannot mask the wider failings of an ill-advised plan.

There’s usually a fall guy in these situations and at Lyon it’s Claude Puel. He was the manager Aulas hired in 2008 to maintain Lyon’s domestic dominance while guiding the side towards European glory. He failed on both fronts despite receiving a level of financial support his predecessors never enjoyed. It was anything but a surprise when the club sacked him at the end of last season. Equally predictably, the affair has now turned bitter, with Puel demanding that the final, unfulfilled year of his contract is paid up. “Having backed him against everyone’s advice, I expected him to behave with more dignity. I put everything in place for him to succeed here,” growled Aulas.

The president has a point, in that he gave Puel bags of money, but looking at how the funds were spent it’s easy to see why Lyon came unstuck. Fees such as €18 million (£16m) for Brazil international Michel Bastos, €14.5m on Jean Makoun – sold for less than half that to Aston Villa last January – and the €14m gamble on a midfielder called Ederson appear more absurd the longer you stare at them.

An overall outlay of €163.5m from 2008 to 2010 in transfer fees alone felt misguided at the time – as if by spending money Lyon would automatically graduate to a higher plane of European football – and looks like seriously bad business when set against the smarter activities of their main domestic rivals during the same period. Marseille’s net spend was around €30m less, yet they ended a trophy drought going back 17 years by winning the league and two league cups. Even more alarmingly, four of Lyon’s signings each cost more than the entire Lille squad that claimed the league and cup double in style last May.

This combination of poor results and unsustainable spending levels has persuaded Aulas to change tack – the idea from now on is to operate along more austere lines. Aulas has replaced Puel with one-time Arsenal captain Rémi Garde, who was assistant to former Lyon managers Paul Le Guen and Gérard Houllier. His experience of heading up the club’s youth scheme should prove useful.

With money running out, Lyon will turn back to the highly regarded training academy that has produced France internationals Karim Benzema, Hatem Ben Arfa and Loïc Rémy over the past decade, but was effectively mothballed by the previous regime. One of the major frustrations of Puel’s final 12 months in charge was that Lyon had five members of France’s 2010 European Under-19 Championship-winning squad on their books but the manager ignored them even though first team performances were below par. After being thwarted by what Aulas now calls “the elitist policy of recent seasons”, this exciting generation of youngsters will finally get a chance to impress.

Garde has been handed a one-year deal but frugality seems to be a long-term proposal. Aulas says the club will sell players consistently over the next few seasons to get their finances in order as they prepare for life in the new 60,000-seat stadium they hope to move into before Euro 2016. And while expectations remain high – a top-three finish is the aim – there will inevitably be less pressure on Garde than Puel because of the financial constraints within which he’s working.

One of the enduring joys of football is that money doesn’t guarantee success. There are plenty of neutrals who believe if a more prudent Lyon get their hands on a trophy, it would be a victory not only for the club but also the wider French game.

From WSC 295 September 2011

Saul Pope follows offical attempts to control rising racism in the Russian Premier League, which are proving ineffective and ill-targeted

The first phase of the Russian season has been a busy one but unfortunately most of the action has involved incidents in the crowd rather than excitement on the pitch. In 15 rounds fans have twice racially abused Anzhi Makhachkala’s Roberto Carlos with bananas, and other black players with monkey noises. Zenit, Spartak and Dinamo Moscow supporters have torn out seats, fought the police and thrown fireworks at several venues. There has also been tension between Moscow sides and the newly powerful teams from the Caucasus.

The problems are not new but they are on the increase. The most disappointing aspect has been the failure of the football authorities to find an adequate way of dealing with them. It is disappointing, yet to Russian football fans not surprising.

The Russian Football Union (RFU) regularly fines clubs whose fans have offended, but seems impotent when it comes to punishing individuals – and much less powerful than the clubs themselves. The identities of those who abused Roberto Carlos remain a mystery. Following the first incident at Zenit St Petersburg, RFU president Sergey Fursenko told the press it was “essential that Zenit seek out this perpetrator, prevent him from coming to matches, and give [us] his name and place of work”. He suggested this would teach like-minded people a lesson, but Zenit didn’t agree – the club claimed to have found and disciplined the racist, but wouldn’t reveal his name “for his own safety”.

An image of the fan who threw a banana at Roberto Carlos at Krilya Sovetov three months later was published just hours after the incident. Fursenko said he would be immediately brought to justice and the  Premier League’s security director said they would get his name. He is still at large.

Part of the problem is that current laws are outdated. A new “fans’ law”, which would make it possible to blacklist individual troublemakers, was first mentioned more than two years ago in WSC 265 and is supposed to be enacted later this season. Fan groups – who get the blame for much of the trouble at stadiums – are opposed, fearing the police would abuse any extra power they were given, and claiming they’re being made scapegoats for a general slide towards a more violent society.

The authorities are at least making a show of taking their concerns seriously, probably because they fear the worst. Led by intelligent but shadowy individuals with disaffected, nationalistic youths as footsoldiers, fan groups make up considerable parts of crowds and are capable of causing mass disorder as well as creating more articulate demonstrations. At the Russia v Armenia Euro 2012 qualifier held in St Petersburg in June, fan groups revealed a banner saying: “Before the law.” During the second half they emptied an entire stand, leaving behind a second slogan: “After the law.”

Of course, the fan groups may be resisting something that won’t work in any case: observing the law properly is a weakness of both law enforcers and citizens in modern Russia. Writing in Sport Express, Evgeny Dzichkovsky felt only draconian measures would truly overcome the problem: “If we don’t want fans to kick Russian football to the gutter, they need to live in fear of real punishments, not cardboard ones. Pavlov created an efficient mechanism for this a long time ago… So that the clubs don’t simply buy their way out of trouble and work seriously with their fans, they [the fans] need to be put into a situation where they are unable to act in any other way but one.”

Maybe efforts would be better put into tackling the root causes of the problems. While the talk is currently of punishment, few are asking why there are growing nationalistic and aggressive cabals at stadiums in the first place. Racists are usually criticised with the caveat that the whole world is battling with such problems, as if the monkey noises and the flying fruit are a regular part of matches everywhere. That such a famous player as Roberto Carlos was abused seems to have caused more upset than previous incidents among ordinary fans. However, regretful comments on Championat.ru were combined with banana jokes, moaning about political correctness gone mad and claims of Russians being victimised.

The first step to solving such problems might lie in Russia realising – at all levels of society – that their crowd problems are worse than in other European leagues of similar stature. The second would be trying to understand why. Expensive and long-winded it might prove to be, but it would bring about better results than even more cardboard laws.

From WSC 295 September 2011

Players used to keep themselves busy by swapping sports on a seasonal basis. Si Hawkins looks at why that’s no longer the case

A few months ago, as the news broke that a house fire had cruelly curtailed the long innings of England batting stalwart Trevor Bailey, a lesser-known strand of his career cropped up in conversation. “Old ‘Stonewall’ Bailey,” mused my grandad, fondly. “I used to watch him play for the Avenue.”

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Aleksander Goryunov is concerned about Skonto Riga, struggling against economic downturn and a huge sporting rival

The end of April saw the reigning Latvian champions Skonto Riga, managed by the former Southampton striker Marians Pahars, host leaders Metalurgs. Over 800 fans turned up at the 10,000-capacity Skonto Stadium to witness a dominant performance by the visitors. With the home team 2-0 down we were treated to the surreal sight of the 30-odd Skonto ultras behind the goal “doing the Poznan” in the near-empty ground. It will take much more than this to inject some life into Latvia’s most successful club.

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