Olympic soccer getting Messi

With just days to go before the start of the Olympic soccer competition, some of the world’s best players are caught in the middle of a court fight between their national teams and their club teams.

It’s another typically farcical situation that seems to hit soccer just when the world’s most popular sport is trying to improve its battered image.

Barcelona doesn’t want Lionel Messi to be in Argentina’s lineup even though he was picked in the squad a month ago. German clubs Schalke and Werder Bremen are trying to bring home Brazilian stars Diego and Rafinha and a final decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport should come Wednesday.

Leaving aside women’s Olympic soccer, which doesn’t have these problems but is also struggling to broaden its list of realistic gold medal contenders, the men’s tournament has never had the same impact as athletics, swimming or gymnastics when the games come around every four years.

That’s probably because competitors who take part in those other sports, although they have their own world championships, get far more fame from winning an Olympic gold medal.

Soccer is different. The World Cup is its equivalent of the Olympics and although the likes of Nigeria’s Nwankwo Kanu and Argentina’s Carlos Tevez are proud of winning Olympic gold medals, they’d get far more adulation if they had World Cup titles.

The Olympic men’s tournament is restricted to players age 23 or under with teams allowed to call up three overage stars.

Yet look at some of the stars who have graced the Olympics.

The Brazilian team of 1996 in Atlanta included Ronaldo, Roberto Carlos, Bebeto and Rivaldo, who all played in the World Cup final two years later. Argentina’s lineup in Atlanta included the likes of Roberto Ayala, Javier Zanetti, Diego Simeone, Hernan Crespo, Ariel Ortega and Jose Chamot—all became regulars on the powerful national team.

Italy’s team from four years ago had Andrea Pirlo, now one of the most highly rated midfielders in the game and the winning Argentina lineup had Tevez, now scoring goals for Manchester United.

Going back in Olympic history, Uruguay’s gold medal winning team from 1928 in Amsterdam was the nucleus of the side that won the first World Cup two years later on home turf.

But then Olympic and World Cup soccer went in different directions and the sport’s impact at the Olympics dwindled.

The game became professional and, because only amateur—non-paid—athletes could only compete in the Olympics, the stars were unable to go to the games.

But there was another twist which did the reputations of soccer and the Olympics no good at all.

After World War II, many of the teams from behind the so-called Iron Curtain got around the word “amateur” by putting their players in the armed forces. That meant that effectively they were full-time players but allowed to play in the Olympics and what followed were a list of gold medal winning teams from Hungary (1952, ‘64 and ‘68), the Soviet Union (1956), Yugoslavia (1960), Poland (1972), East Germany (1976) and Czechoslovakia (1980).

The Hungarian side that triumphed by winning all five matches in ‘52 in Helsinki included a stunning lineup that thrilled fans wherever it played— including 6-3 and 7-1 victories over England in friendlies. Ferenc Puskas, one of the game’s all-time greats, was the star of stars, some of whom, Puskas included, fled to the west to break away from the restrictions imposed by the Communist regime.

It was only when pros were allowed into the Games in 1984 that a western European team, France, ended that streak and won the title. But that competition in Los Angeles was, like the rest of the games, hit by a Soviet-led boycott of the Olympics anyway and organizers also imposed a restriction that anyone who had played in a World Cup could not take part in the Olympics.

Now the restriction is by age. FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, has imposed it to prevent the Olympic competition ever rivaling the World Cup.

That seems very unlikely.

To the clubs, the men’s Olympic soccer competition is irrelevant, inconvenient and gets in the way of their attempts to prepare their players for the domestic season.

To the national teams, it gives them a chance to put young players in the spotlight of an Olympics and the chance to win a gold medal which should have the same value as the ones likely to go to swimmer Michael Phelps, who is trying to beat the seven won by Mark Spitz at Munich 1972.

If Barcelona loses its appeal on Wednesday, Messi could well go home with an Olympic gold medal.

But more people will remember Phelps.