I POLL

The iPoll is a synergy between MaltaToday, the Internet and you the readers.

Every week the web sites www.maltatoday.com.mt and www.maltamag.com will feature an opinion poll on a particular issue. The results of this Internet poll will then be published in MaltaToday the following Sunday along with an opinion article.

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Today’s issue concerns a subject that is raised very often by sportsmen and women. For some reason or other this country never managed to agree on the introduction of the erstwhile popular football pools. We bring you the opinion of a man who has been clamouring for their
introduction for a number of years.

Football pools and sport economics

By John A. Consiglio

I have been thinking along the lines of Malta having its own football pools for a very long time. And I have made concrete suggestions to both shades of government in the past about how this can be done. But all along, I have insisted that the main and indeed the sole motivation for introducing them must be clearly accepted, by whichever minister introduces them, to be one and simple. All net proceeds from such a gaming measure go only to the benefit of Maltese sport.

When Dr George Abela was President of the Malta Football Association I had once submitted to him a detailed memorandum as to how an Italian style 13-match ‘schedina’ could be structured, to appeal very strongly to both followers of the Maltese game and the many others who follow the Italian, English, and other national leagues.

This structure, with the help and approval of national overseas football associations, could be such as to ensure next-to-complete impossibility of fraud. In my proposals I had set out many administrative and security details, including my suggestions as to partitioning of the operational costs and direction of proceeds.

Over the past months I have formed part of a National Sports Council subcommittee charged with drafting a Report to Parliamentary Secretary Jesmond Mugliett on the subject of the Funding Structures for Maltese Sport.

There I held the position that: (a) The government should seriously consider my proposals on the introduction of football pools in Malta, and (b) That the current privatisation process of the government's gaming operations was a golden opportunity which was available to the nation for some serious funding for Maltese sport.

But of course the latter was very much subject to the acceptance of the principle that "in Malta gaming exists ONLY for sport and culture funding, and NOT for any other purpose".

Isn't this, after all, the type of thinking that motivates the immensely successful British and other national lotteries? Acceptance of such a policy stance is of course essentially a political matter, and such matters are decided upon at Cabinet level. And there I simply stop.

The fact however remains that funding structures of sport are a very big area of study and analysis in foreign countries. And it is an area, which comes squarely under the wider macroeconomic topic of ‘The Economics of Sport’. This is an approach, which nobody in Malta seemed to consider up to recently.

At this point in time the prevalent feeling amongst most Maltese who love sport is that the official levels do not have at their disposal basic raw data which can really help them make the right decisions.

For starters, the National Statistics Office should certainly be instructed to undertake a National Survey of Sport in Malta, from an economic and social point of view.

So yes, let's have football betting-pools in Malta, but let us go about it with the right approach.

Mr Consiglio is a visiting lecturer in the Banking & Finance and European Studies departments of The University of Malta and was an avid sportsman in his youth.