Do you want to play in the Asian Champions League? It will cost you.

In any case, no one can accuse the Asian football authorities of not paying attention to the little things. After all, it would be easy to overlook the little things when their job is to nurture and promote the world’s most popular sport for the benefit of nearly five billion people spread across a third of the world’s landmass.

In many ways, then, it is admirable that the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) can still find the time to dictate exactly which water bottles and with what labels fans can carry into stadiums. That kind of attention to detail should reassure you that the future of football – from Beirut to Beijing, and from Ulaanbaatar to Hobart – is in safe hands.

Unfortunately, that is not quite the picture that emerges report, commissioned by global players’ union FIFPro, which assesses the merits and shortcomings of Asia’s most prestigious club competition, the Asian Champions League. Instead, the report documents a tournament that serves as a near-perfect microcosm of the general trajectory of football around the world.

There’s plenty of the kind of pushy nit-picking that the sporting authorities are so fond of. In addition to tackling the crucial issue of water bottles, the AFC’s ‘clean stadium’ requirements – the rules that stipulate that arenas for Champions League matches must be free of unapproved advertising – address pressing issues such as the logos on backpacks and the branding on bottle caps.

The AFC appears to be much less concerned about whether the tournament actually works for the clubs involved. According to estimates from two competing teams, just enforcing clean stadium rules costs $50,000 per game.

Traveling for away games is even more expensive. In Europe, teams usually travel first class – for what the report describes as ‘high performance purposes’, a logic that unfortunately does not apply to journalists from The New York Times – but the sheer geography of Asia means this is not the case. an option. The average distance covered for an Asian Champions League road match is approximately 2,300 miles.

That makes even the flying economy particularly taxing: One Australian team reported spending $95,000 to transport and house its players and staff for a single match in Japan, significantly more than the $60,000 subsidy the AFC provided until the later rounds provided by the competition.

That’s where some of the forty clubs that made it through the group stages can make up for the losses they incurred along the way. But just some of them: Half of the $15 million prize money will be awarded to the eventual winner and runner-up. The losing semifinalists could earn $500,000. FIFPro’s findings suggest that the majority of teams lose significant money just by participating.

“The result is that the competition is least affordable for those clubs that are eliminated early, which tend to include clubs from smaller or less developed markets,” the report said. Urawa Reds, the Japanese club that won last year’s edition, told the association that only the finalists would earn enough prize money to recoup their costs.

So it’s probably good news that the AFC has already decided to change the way the competition works. From later this year, the Asian Champions League will consist of just 24 teams.

Instead of the traditional home-and-away ties in the knockout rounds, the quarter-finals will take a format recognizable from the later stages of international tournaments: one-off matches held in one country over the course of little more than a week. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the last stage will take place in Saudi Arabia for the first five years.

The plan, as it stands now, is good. And given the sudden influx of household names into Saudi clubs over the past year, the timing is also impeccable.

Fewer teams means that every game in the new format must be of higher quality. Concentrating the later rounds in one location will allow for more meetings between teams from the east and west of the continent. (Currently, the best players from Japan and South Korea cannot meet the powerhouses from Iran and Saudi Arabia until the finals.) The teams that get that far won’t have to plan or pay for multiple long-distance trips.

However, the relatively scant details that have emerged don’t make for encouraging reading for anyone hoping this is an opportunity to make the competition work for everyone. The AFC can’t do much about Asia’s size, but it also hasn’t offered any reassurance on whether it plans to increase travel budgets or reduce demand for partner-approved stadiums.

What is known – it was all over the news when the transformation was announced – is that the winner of the tournament will receive approximately $12 million. The number two receives 6 million dollars.

As for the FIFPro, there is a good chance that much of the remainder of the “value associated with the later climactic rounds will accrue to the AFC and the host nation.” The final tournament will be a tempting property to sell to broadcasters. No one has yet said how much of the revenue it could generate would go to the league’s clubs.

That would obviously be a significant missed opportunity. It is the stated purpose of the AFC to help spread, improve and support the game in Asia. It has, in the changes in its most prestigious competition, the perfect opportunity to do just that.

And yet the country is likely to reject it, preferring to shower riches on the clubs that need it least, while passing on the benefits the new format would bring to a handful of the strongest and richest teams in the strongest and richest region. competitions.

This will happen because of the persistent belief within football’s top flight that growth in football is a product of pulling rather than pushing, and that change comes from the top down, not the bottom up. A vast majority of the clubs and countries under the auspices of Asia’s football leaders will be left out and left behind. The attention of the authorities will only be drawn if the wrong type of water bottle, with the wrong type of label, pollutes the world. have created.

Choose your tomorrow

Xabi Alonso could really do without this. It is three months and twelve games before he gives Bayer Leverkusen its first Bundesliga title. He could still end his first full managerial season by winning the championship, the German Cup and the Europa League. The economics of modern football dictates that this is not really the intention.

You have to go back a long way to remember a more promising start to a managerial career: to Pep Guardiola’s glorious debut season at Barcelona in 2009 perhaps, which culminated in a Spanish title and the Champions League trophy; or further, to José Mourinho’s success at Porto six years earlier.

Unfortunately, through no fault of his own, Alonso can now expect an achievement that should be celebrated on its own merits to be relegated – at least in terms of how it is presented – to little more than an audition. Whatever Alonso delivers to Leverkusen in the coming weeks will be interpreted as either advancing or detracting from his candidacy to become the next manager of Liverpool or Bayern Munich.

That is of course as much in the nature of modern football as it is in the economic reality that Alonso so spectacularly defies, but it is also a shame. What he was able to achieve this season at Leverkusen deserves to be celebrated for what it is, not for what it could lead to.

Everything has a price. It is not clear why.

It is no surprise that Manchester United have selected Dan Ashworth as the ideal candidate to lead the club’s (late) modernization. His work – with West Bromwich Albion, England, Brighton and his current team, Newcastle – has been undeniably impressive.

It’s also no surprise that Newcastle are so keen not to lose him that he has been given almost two years of what the British call gardening leave: Newcastle have essentially let Ashworth stop working, but will stop him from taking another job by to pay him. to do nothing until his contract expires. Newcastle have suggested that only compensation of around $25 million would take place convince the club to change their minds.

What’s a bit strange – and this is a genuine inquiry – is why Newcastle should charge a fee at all. Ashworth has a desk job and wants to do another desk job. It’s hard to think of another industry where his current employer could demand money from a rival company to make that happen.

We will of course accept transfer fees if they relate to players because that is the way football has always done business. Managers also increasingly have release clauses in their contracts. Whatever form they take, they are essentially compensation payments designed to convince a club to tear up a contract.

However, when they apply to people who are not present on the field in any way, to those squads of workers who exist near or across the border where football becomes less of a game and more of a business, they feel more than a little dissonant; Shocking enough, certainly, to make you wonder why they exist at all.