Sport in Asia

As every one knows, Sport is the best way to communicate amongst races just like Olympic. In Asia, the most popular world event may not be Olympic, but World Cup.   FIFA, which is a prime national football association, President Blatter flattered the regional representatives of football from the continent with the world’s largest population and highest economic growth rates that the ‘future of football is Asia’. This indicated that football is not just a simple game anymore; it now consists of other factors such as commercialization.

In 2002, South Korea – Japan World Cup, only two Asian teams were able to qualify together with the host nations, compared to 13 fixed places for European nations with only half the number of ordinary football players thus, it can be seem Asia is part of the outside edge on the global football map where compare to traditional European nations.

In qualifying for the 2006 tournament, Asia’s minor position is further expressed in no Asian nation was entered the final round of 16 knockout stage hence, this showed that Asia lags behind the any other contingents, Europe and South America. However, we know that as football are commercializing the size of television audiences, and accordingly economic activity and income generated by the game are the most influential factor nowadays.

The growing of football in Asia is closely related to the commercialization of the game, which itself is a consequence of the crisis of the Fordist production system which simply means the player must be paid a higher level of wages in order to perform better.

Shifting the focus from well developed football markets towards new territories such as Asia would corresponded with the expansionary of capitalism. For the profit-making aspect, the transnational television broadcast of football open a high way to giant population like China which can also funding the football clubs with large amounts of income from sponsorship revenues and television rights. An example is SkyPerfecTV! in Japan, which competed with other broadcasters for exclusive coverage of the entire 2002 World Cup Finals for approximately 100M Euro and final turned profitable in 2004, and Wolfram and John believed this largest sum ever for a single sport event was just an temporary step in the network to enlarge its subscribers size by sport.

In short, although the Asian quality of football is improving, it still lags behind other contingents. And there are some problems Asian need to resolve such as improving the quality of team manager and players, improving training facilities in order to overtake other contingents. Asian is a large market which contain huge amount of resources, large population in Asia is a great advantage that Asian should wisely exploit. If these things can be solved, then ‘future of football is Asia’ which can be proven.