Gentlemen: Insert Your Dummies by Matt Riley: 2014

Gentlemen: Insert Your Dummies
by Matt Riley
4th November, 2014

Buriram United are once again champions of the Thai Premier League. They won the title by two points over Chonburi. But, if you are a Siam Sports reader, that would be news to you. The Kingdom's biggest media syndicate decided that, in retaliation for Buriram United's Newin Chidchop telling their reporters they weren't welcome to come to his stadium or write about his club, they would carry on as if his club didn't exist. Whoever is right and whoever is wrong, everyone loses out.

When Buriram refused to accept the trophy after their title in 2011 it denied a regional promotional opportunity for the whole league of a successful team in a world class stadium advertising the health of Thai football. Instead, the trophy was hurriedly handed over in an airport lounge and both sides will have felt vindicated but neither had risen to the behaviour levels of a Kindergartener.

The power base of Thai football is now dangerously skewed with all-powerful Siam Sport bankrolling a team rapidly becoming also rans. This decline is being exacerbated by the increasing power of provincial clubs that won't bend a knee and have their own regional agendas they don't need help with. The team should be the delivery system for a media empire filling acres of magazine pages with stories of success and glamour. But, instead, they hover  on the fringes of success as Buriram United sweep forward with an increasingly-developed regional profile.

It has now been two long years since SCG Muang Thong have tasted the champions' champagne after previously strolling to annual titles at every league level.  But this won't be the end of the story for the mighty SS. Newly-promoted Nakhon Ratchasima have very close ties to Siam Sport and plans are in place to transfer the Muang Thong GM Ronnarit Suewaja and his sidekick to them so they can come at Buriram from a different angle.

They have finally woken up to the fact that their power base is narrowly confined within a deeply unpopular and marginalised FA whilst Buriram supremo Newin Chidchop has been making alliances with self-sustained clubs. This has given him enormous leverage which continues to grow with every brainless FA initiative and national team defeat (which he can help sustain by denying them his high calibre players).

But like mister Nero and his Roman fiddling, what the two groups of toddlers fail to notice is that they are undermining confidence in the product that has given them so much power and profile. Thai football may be underwritten by politicians' money, but the increased input of international sponsors requires adherence  to global standards of conduct or, like Emirates' plug-pulling of FIFA after the latest corruption allegations, the product becomes poisonous for everyone.

Spitting your dummy out doesn't make you the winner: it only makes you more angry, frustrates everyone around you and repels everyone who is forced to observe it.