From: www.sukulgunda.com

How to qualify for the FIFA World Cup someday?

All Nepal Football Association (ANFA) is in the news again, and as always, for the wrong reasons. Some of our football players have padlocked the ANFA office because they are unhappy about the corruption at ANFA. I think our football association receives like Rs 100+ Karod from FIFA every year and it seems that most of it is spent on salaries and perks for office-bearers and CEO and admin staff, while little is left for grassroots-level development of football.

Our women's team has been doing pretty well in the South Asian region and Samba and Preeti Rai seem to be the main reasons for it but we have to give a shout-out to all the ladies in the team for their achievements in the past decade. And what about the men's team? If ANFA continues to function like it does today, expept our FIFA Rankings to go down to the very bottom of the list in five years.

We have not had a regular men's league in the past decade. What went wrong? ANFA has all the budget but don't want to do the hard work and the prize money keeps dwindling while our players playing for Nepal barely get paid on time and even if they do, it is less than 20K while the CEO and his cronies at ANFA get paid Rs 200,000 a month. ANFA is not a corporate entity but it seems that it has become a cash cow for the Executive Committee members and the admin staff there.

Ganesh Thapa, our former ANFA President keeps on making noise but he is also guilty as hell. He was banned by FIFA for a decade and even the CIAA investigated him for the missing Rs 54 Karod but the case went out the window for political reasons. I think he was also a CA member back then. It helps when your brother is Kamal Thapa. Our brother Ganesh also placed his son at the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) in Malaysia then and the son also received like US$ 100,000 or more from some Qatari for some election campaign inside FIFA.

And one day, Ganesh Thapa was kicked out from ANFA but the ones who took over became as corrupt as the old ones and have done even worse than Thapa when it comes to organizing the annual football league or providing more incentives to the players.

What is ANFA's job? Its job is to build a foundation to develop mentally and physically strong football players and teach them technical and other skills related to football so that one day, Nepal too will qualify for the FIFA Men's and Women's World Cup.

How does ANFA work? The major A, B and some C division clubs have voting rights along with the football associations from the districts. And this where politics come to play since most of the clubs or district associations are either headed by politically-affiliated shady characters or local mundrey dons. I think only the muscle and political ones seem to be in leading roles in most of our sports organizations and they are there to misuse the funds of their respective organizations and also get free tickets and stipends to attend conferences around the world, paid for by the major sporting bodies overseas.

Ganesh Thapa is not a saint but compared to the current leadership at ANFA, he wins more brownie points for doing much for football development although we can't ignore the fact that Rs 50+ Karod went missing somewhere over the years under his leadership and don't be surprised to know that some of it went to the top leaders of major political parties then.

So, now the question is how do we qualify for the FIFA World Cup someday? Well, maybe the same time India and China does. China did qualify in 2002 but lost all three games at the group stage earning zero points but 9 goals scored against them. The lesson for both China and India has been that just organizing major leagues with foreign players will not help to develop football at the grassroots level.

In my opinion, the new government should ask for the guys at Barcelona to teach the ANFA guys on how to start a football academy and start early with like 8-year olds. I thik ANFA had quite a good academy then and many young talented ones emerged from there but in the past decade, it has all gone down the drain. I think if we can focus on the young kids and work hard to train them with enough technical, physical and mental skills like the young ones at Barcelona, then it will take us only a decade and half or two to qualify for the World Cup.

If we look at Maradona and Messi, they are not tall players like the Germans. So, the excuse of us being shorter and physically weak doesn't cut it. We can play the tiki-taka well if we can focus on it for a decade and Spain's World Cup winning team had many players with similar height and weight as our Nepali players. Well, the only stuff we are missing must be the skills but we can work on that. And the same goes for our women's team as well.

Hope our new government will audit all sports organizations in the country to the bone and come up with a solution to get rid of political parasites profiting from the sports associations in the country. Let us focus on our young ones and give them all the resources needed to one day play in the global stage. If we start today, we can qualify maybe for 2046 or even earlier. Japan has been consistent and maybe, we can also learn from the Japanese and the South Koreans as well.

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