Muamba urges young players to look beyond football

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Fabrice Muamba’s football dreams came crashing down last year after collapsing on the pitch suffering from a cardiac arrest, and the Bolton midfielder had to retire from football in August 2012.

Today, in conjunction with the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), he is warning young footballers that they should consider what to do after they are through with football. He plays in the backyard with his son, but will not return to the active pitch. He says that it would be great to come back but his health comes first.

Over 100 people leave the game every year so Muamba’s situation is not strange. According to the League Football Education (LFE) only 45% of apprentice footballers get a professional contract. In the following years many of them still drop out.

Fabrice Muamba has now been encouraging players of ages 16 to 18 to consider education, on his many visits to clubs. They need to consider their plans since only 10 – 15 will be accepted into the first teams.

The assistant PFA director of education, Oshor Williams, said that clubs have suffered even as the economy took a downward trend. Players who leave the football pitch and look for jobs find it tougher to secure these positions, and they are unable to adapt to a new career.

He goes on to say that this situation will be aggravated in future since the clubs are taking players into the team when they are aged as young as 9 years. When the player leaves the teams aged 18, half their lives may have been in elite development. Many lose their identity and also have poor self-esteem. This means that they need to redefine themselves as who they are, and not the profession that they had.

 

Argument rumbles on about logos on football shirts

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Football fans have to wear shirts that bear the logo of the sponsor, whether they agree to this principle or not. Many feel that this is an unfair practice given that teams are offered children’s shirts without a logo. A good case study is where the sponsor may be a gambling company.

The absence of the logo may seem to be ethical but it is most probably a means of avoiding hefty fines imposed on company’s that break advertising guidelines. Looking for a sponsor at the start of the season is akin to the frenzied activity that goes on before the transfer period is over. The FA was put in a quandary when, in 1976, the late Derek Dougan secured sponsorship from a company named Kettering Tyres.

The FA put Derek to task over the logo on the shirts, and he, in turn, shrewdly changed the lettering to Kettering “T”; the T standing for both “Tyres”, and “Town”. The following year, the FA had to relax the rules about the logos that go on the T-shirts.

Another Interesting scenario is that surrounding Barcelona’s sponsorship. For 111 years, this team refused all forms of sponsorship logos on their shirts, and only toted the UNICEF logo. In the year 2010, this trend changed and the UNICEF logo was relegated to the back of the shirts, and the logo for the Qatar Foundation was placed on the front. This caused a furour as people took issue with the human rights violations that are experienced in Qatar.

Another team, Sunderland, seemed to embrace positive sponsorship practices when it put the logo “Invest in Africa” on the front of their shirts. This was before it was discovered that the company behind the logo was an oil and gas exploration multinational corporation.

Supporters should be more informed about the ethics behind the logos on the kits that they blindly buy. The office of Fair Trading Investigations is looking at the matter at present.