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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Poor pay for Malaysian soccer players doesn’t seem all that relevant when the best can still earn megabucks in overseas leagues. Professional soccer is not suffering from a shortage of incentives to be the best.
There are several elements to this, the first is a numbers game – if the population of your country is 300 million, then the chances of one of your people having the genetic abilities to excel in a given sport is far larger than a country of say 3 million. Singapore can tempt people with as much money as it wants, but unless a person is born with the right credentials, they are not going to make it regardless how hard they work as those with greater natural abilities are working just as hard to win those medals.
On top of this you then have the incentives required to get this genetically gifted person to take the risk of dedicating their life to their sport of choice with the high risk of failing (only one person wins a gold after all) or having an injury end your career etc. The financial incentive to go into sports like golf, football etc which have a relatively large pool of well paid professionals, is higher than those like curling, which will find it harder to attract atheletes as the rewards are very limited in comparison. This means that a person with the genetic abilities to be a world champion in one sport may be incentivized to just be ‘professional’ in another. For example let’s say someone might become a journeyman profesional basketball player making a few million a season rather than a gold medal winning high-jumper making, well not as much!
Finally you have the cultural elements – if you grow up in the USA you are far more likely to have the opportunity to become a linebacker, whereas the same person, if raised in Japan, might go into Sumo wrestling. This is because without the infrastructure to nurture talent along the way, it is not going to be used as effectively. This is why so many talented tennis players go to the US as teenagers and why big soccer clubs attract the young talent – without the training and competition you are not going to realise your potential and without the rewards you are not going to take the risk of heading off to live in another country for the outside chance of making it big.
So if you were Singaporean and you want the best risk/reward ratio to get your hands on that million, what do you do? Firstly aim at the poorest paid sport as the $1 million incentive is one the other people do not have. This ensures that several of the potential world champions will be competing in different, more lucrative, sports. You then need to find one of these sports that you are genetically adept at and, even better, with a high barrier to entry in terms of technology or landscape (there are a lot of successful Swiss downhill skiers for a reason) and finally one where you can get better coaching etc than most other competitors….this is where my cunning plan goes awry though as I have no idea what sports this might include!!!
You should find out how much Indian Hockey players get to play each international match….it is $20…yes I repeat $20…the same team which won 8 Olyampic Gold medals…and wont be seen at Beging
Money can revive the game, provided you have capable players
The late PuskAs Ferenc, arguably the best player of his time had a saying: small money – small football, big money – big football.
Hey incentive can do wonders for anyone & in any field as per my exp……
Kaushik
My father, an Olympic medalist for the East German swim team, said that she was always encouraged that her team and country encouraged her to play for the ‘love of the sport.’
So those East German swimmers WERE men! I KNEW it!
I don’t get the question- are you presuming young athletes dream of maximizing income?- if so, people would ask kids what they wanna be when they grow up, 100K, 200K, or 300K