Super Sunday in Malta

Day -438. WorldCup2018

Stop reading now if Maltese football is not your cup of tea. But if small league football is, then carry on.

The Malta FA's PR department went into overdrive this week with its promotion of Super Sunday. The top two teams in the league, Balzan and Hibernians, played each other today followed by the derby between Valletta and Floriana. The difference between these back to back matches in Malta as opposed to a super Sunday in, for example, England is that these matches are taking place in the same stadium. If you, like I did in the past, enjoy sitting outside on a warm Sunday afternoon to watch live football for four hours, it really is a pretty super Sunday. This thought just struck me: how did I sit there for four hours with no phone, no social media to post silly observations on and have inane conversations with somebody across the world? I did. And I never got bored.

Back to the MFA's Super Sunday. It would be easy to laugh at it, at it's attempt to make an event out of something that few people care about. It almost smacks of desperation: please come watch, the football is not that bad and the stories of match-fixing are just stories, they are not true. The MFA even put on a big show with press conferences involving the four teams in the days leading up to today. I have an issue with useless press conferences. They are reported on every Friday in England, prior to the weekend's football and the informations coming out of the players and managers is absolute tripe.

So I could easily have ridiculed the MFA. But I say good for them, and good for the PR and communications departments. It's because most Maltese people don't care about local football because they think it's terrible, and that corruption is rife that the MFA are making an effort. They could just let it go on as it is, but they are trying. Now, it will take a bit more than some "Super Sundays" to quash people's negative perception of Maltese football but it is a start.

I read the newspaper reports of yesterday's Premier League matches in Malta and the attendances were listed as being around 250. Two hundred and fifty people going to watch a top division match. That's about the sum of each player's family going to watch, plus the team groupies (the guys who are always hanging around the training pitch and the team's Clubhouse bar), plus a handful more people like me who prefer live action to that on TV. Today's attendance was listed as 4,500. Hardly Super worthy, but there's a few more thousand people on top of the ones I mentioned above.

And in case you care, Hibernians beat Malta's Leicester, Balzan, and Floriana scored a last minute equaliser to leave the Hibs five points clear at the top. The MFA will be hoping that Hibs slip up soon. Otherwise it's going to a very empty stadium come the last couple of weeks of the season. Competition brings crowds, especially in a small league like Malta's.