FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
While the glow of "EURO 2024" has not yet faded and the red and black jerseys are selling massively, this is also because we expect to be among the best in the world, proving through the "play-off" in March, against Poland.
“Top Channel” has obtained a confidential UEFA research report that reveals a painful truth about Albania. Behind the facade of modern stadiums, there is an infrastructural desert that risks drying up the source of talent. Albania ranks 53rd out of 55 UEFA members in Europe for the number of pitches in relation to population.
But what is behind these numbers and why has the "100-field project" remained hostage to concrete? UEFA's report on basic infrastructure is an open indictment of the government's management of investments and its projects in sports infrastructure.
The main figure is alarming: A football field (11×11) in Albania must accommodate a population of 18,981 inhabitants. To better understand this figure, we can say that the average of UEFA or Europe in general is 3,800 inhabitants per field, which means that Albania is about 5 times worse.
Similar countries in population/economy ratio are in the figures of 5,400 inhabitants per field and still Albania is 3.5 times worse. While Nordic countries like Iceland or Norway, have less than 1,500 inhabitants/field. This means that statistically, an Albanian child has 500% less chance of touching the ball on a standard field than his peer in Central Europe.
This “lack of access” translates directly into decreased participation. Football is no longer the people’s sport; it is becoming the sport of those who can afford private academies or travel far from urban centers.
Even the initiative of the football institution in cooperation with UEFA to build 100 fields has often encountered difficulties in cooperation with local governments, mainly in large municipalities such as Tirana or Durrës. They find it impossible, not to say unwilling, to find free spaces within urban areas. For a Municipality, a plot of land has more value as a construction site for towers that brings impact taxes on infrastructure than as a football field that brings maintenance costs.
New pitches being built are forced to be relocated to extreme suburbs, rural areas, former swamps, or villages. The football economy today is a billion-dollar industry, but we have failed to create the “factories” that are the pitches in this case.
One solution could be legislative intervention that forces urban planning to include mandatory coefficients for sports surfaces for any given number of inhabitants. If we do not bring back the fields to the city, or at least dedicated transport to the suburbs, Albanian football will remain a “consumer” of foreign talents, unable to be a “producer” of its own talents./ "Top Channel"
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