Sri Lanka sports continue to make headlines for the wrong reasons as merry-go-round officials running several entities win gold and silver at a free-for-all in 2022:
First came the warning shot from the world governing body of football and then came the 20,000 dollar fine as battered Sri Lanka was brought down onto its knees and so-called custodians of the game fallen to zero levels thanks to egoistic politics and their vested interests.
Once the island’s most popular sport, more popular than cricket, football in Sri Lanka has presently nothing left to salvage other than the egoism of officials who have run the sport to ruin and the country ranked 207 from 210 nations playing the game.
Football in Sri Lanka in the recent past was initially the private property of one man who was forced out of the scene on corruption charges and the new set of office bearers or fat cats continued to see the game rot by their actions until the group of office bearers who stepped in for their feast found themselves facing the entire wrath of the sport’s world governing body FIFA. The merry-go-round finally came to an end, at least for the time being.
For almost three decades Sri Lankan officials some of them hiding behind their godfather politicians lived like frogs in the well living on borrowed time while the team was slammed into defeat by countries like Afghanistan, the Maldives and Bangladesh.
Sri Lanka which has been benefitting from FIFA grants running into billions of rupees in foreign funding can now see the clock ticking ahead of the January 3 deadline that FIFA has set to either buckle up or stay banned. Some football followers in the country contend the latter is a better option.
According to the January 3 deadline, Sri Lanka has to come up with a new governing system or Constitution that will see the country replace a football secretary with a Chief Executive Officer in line with the rest of the world while an elected president will be allowed to serve a four-year term that has now been reduced by the government to two-years. The government is also against the abolition of the secretary for a CEO.
“We are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea,” a former official of Sri Lanka Football (SLF) told the Sunday Observer.
The only time Sri Lanka’s football team reached some kind of healthiness was in 1995 when the country won the South Asian title ahead of teams like India and Pakistan.
Under the current changes FIFA also wants Sri Lanka to reduce the number of votes that Leagues affiliated to SLF can cast at the impending January 14 election of office-bearers.
Football watchers in the country say the 20,000 dollar fine imposed on the country for failing to field a youth team at a recent international tournament only showed the rot that has engulfed sports in the island with little or nothing likely to change even if a new leaf is turned in 2023.