In recent days, everybody has been talking about Kuwait losing to India 3/2. As usual, everybody remembers football and the shit state that we’re in everytime we lose. I agree with everyone in saying that Kuwait football is far from being in a healthy position, in fact, it could be said that Kuwait football SUCKS!! But, even with us sucking, we actually have a high chance of reaching the second round of qualifiers for the world cup. If we do that, it would be an achievement, beating China to that spot!

Anyway, my point is that even in the shit recent form that we are in, there are two countries much worse than us. Qatar and UAE. There are lessons to be learnt from their experience.

Qatar spent millions the past 3 or 4 years on football, and instead of getting better as a result of the spending and bringing in foreign players such as Batistuta, Effenberg, Sonny Anderson, De Boer brothers, and Desailly…..to name a few, they got significantly worse. Qatar have no chance of advancing to second round, beaten twice by Iran and once by Jordan with one more game against them. Their only wins were against Laos!!

UAE is in an even worse position. After Al-Ain surprised everyone in the last two years, turning into Asian champions and destroying everyone in their path, the national team sucks even more than either us or Qatar! UAE lost their last two qualifiers against the Asian giants of Thailand and Yemen! LOL! And im not talking about 1-0 loss, it was 3-0 against Thailand and 4-1 against Yemen!

When you look at these results in other countries, who have spent all the money on their football, you wonder if its actually worth us getting into that too and spending millions on an organization which will be corrupt! One look at the clubs’ boards and you’ll see how impossible it will be to run a full football federation on a professional basis. We all know who will head the football federation no matter how bad our results are, and even when they resigned, they were voted back unanimously! LOL!! Absolute joke!!

The problem is that our players are always expected to win, but WHY!? For them to participate with their teams, they risk their work carreers, their education, and more importantly, public scrutiny for every move. We have to remember, they are not professionals!! They do not get paid to play football!! They come in part time after work hours and try their best, sometimes.

So, an argument could be said that we will never do anything until we get professional football which will force players to go to training, to be dedicated, to follow a healthy diet, and so on. To be honest, it would be nice if they did all of that now, but they really are not forced to, in the end, its just a part time thing that will last 4 or 5 years and then they will back in obscurity. For them to be professional, ALOT of money will have to be spent on getting the infrastructure reestablished and changing the whole Kuwaiti mentality on sports, which, according to what was said earlier, is probably useless, judging from the Qatar and UAE experiments.

So in the end, its a loss cause. What we should do is be realistic and decrease our expectation and keep reminding ourselves that sports in Kuwait is created for leisure only. Instead of investing in Kuwait, we should try sending our young exceptional players abroad to gain real experience. Use the model that Nigeria, Senegal, Turkey, Korea, and Japan have used in recent years with excellent results!!

Remember, football will always remain as 6umbakhiyaaa in Kuwait!