Say you’re a talented young athlete. Would you rather be a doctor, a lawyer, or a Malaysian soccer star?
Chances are, once you realize how little Malaysians pay their professional soccer players, you’d probably choose one of the first two. And maybe that’s part of the reason Malaysia’s two national squads were both defeated by Singapore in the A.F.C. Cup last week.
But can incentives drive a national sport revival?
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I think you should be looking at China in order to examine this matter more accurantly and meaningfully.China is a country where footballers who played awful soccer are paid the rate of Fortune 500 executives…
Singapore has been offering $1 million to the athlete who brings back an Olympic gold medal (http://www.snoc.org.sg/mmdap.htm), but they’ve still only ever won one. Not sure how that speaks to the success of incentives, maybe it’s just that there are other alternative opportunities in that country that have greater certainty or maybe there’s a cultural bias.
Talk about a country with its priorities out of whack – can you imagine a Doctor making more than a professional athlete? Wait a minute… that actually sounds pretty good.
I’m reading your book for the n th-time. lol.
Anyway, being a Malaysian, I am at times disappointed with the performance of the local soccer players’ performances.
Incentives do drive people. That is not very hard to be comprehended by a 17 like me. However, by referring to the comment above made by Dane Cao, I guess incentive is just a piece of puzzle to catapult the potential of Malaysian Football Disciple Nation.
Since incentive doesn’t work, maybe Innovative Football Policies may elevate the standard?
I don’t know the details of the million dollar incentive, but I can see how it wouldn’t help much if it’s the only one, and there aren’t smaller steps along the way.
During the last World Cup, I heard someone mention that the U.S. should do better since “you’d think that in a nation of 300 million they’d be able to find 11 good soccer players”, but you need a lot more soccer player to produce those killer top ones.
In the case of sports, it seems that star athletes are the product of their environment. Without lots of good competition, they can’t grow, so a prize that only rewards the top might inspire only a few people. Only rewarding the person who gets Olympic gold makes everyone else realize that only one person can get the prize, and that they probably won’t even if they’re good enough to do things like win regional championships, so I think the needed support structure might not be there. If the lower ranking athletes don’t work hard, the higher ones can only rise to the top of a small heap before they top out.
Perhaps, instead of worrying about the Malaysian soccer “crisis”, we should try and learn from their example. Imagine what the US would be like if all that money we waste on pro sports teams was instead spent on education or some other useful discipline.
The article you linked to has this terrible dismayed attitude about how Malaysians are interested in being successful and having a good career, and nobody wants to waste their youth trying to get on a sports team. There is not much I can say except good for them.
The incentive lies within the sponsorship of athletes. They excel because they have funds for training. Why do they have funds for training? Sponsorship.
Take the US soccer team example, it seems that Soccer Sponsorship doesn’t do too well, because historically, soccer has not been a big ticket spectator sport.
And in order for doctors to be paid more than professional athletes, they’d need sponsorship as well. Drug companies for example…
The amount of people who can potentially be doctors or lawyers is a minority, so paying those professions more than sportpeople is not going to greatly lessen the number of sports stars. In many countries including Australia, we have a shortage of doctors and nurses. If you look in an Aussie med school, chances are you’ll find a few Malaysians.