Comment: Empty Seats In Japan Could Spell Disaster For Asian Champions League

At the halfway point of the FIFA Club World Cup, attendance figures for the early rounds have been eye-catching. Less than 18,000 fans turned out at the cavernous National Stadium in Tokyo for the tournament’s opening clash, in a match featuring one of this year’s dominant Asian teams. The empty seats could spell disaster for the Asian Football Confederation.   

On December 12 the newly revamped AFC Champions League was launched amidst glitz and glamour at a lavish ceremony in Tokyo. The launch was designed to coincide with Japan’s hosting of the Club World Cup, however AFC officials will no doubt have shifted nervously in their V.I.P. seats at the National Stadium during the tournament opener, as Australia’s Adelaide United edged passed New Zealand outfit Waitakere United against a backdrop of empty seats. 

It wasn’t a good look for the host broadcasters – free-to-air network SBS in Australia and New Zealand Pay-TV channel Sky Sports 3 – who had a tough job convincing viewers that there was any kind of atmosphere bouncing around the National Stadium. The truth is that there wasn’t, and the lack of atmosphere inside the ageing venue makes it even harder to fathom why the AFC has decided to hold the final of the 2009 AFC Champions League as a one-off game at Tokyo’s National Stadium. 

The AFC’s decision smacks of an inferiority complex. The UEFA Champions League final is, of course, played as a one-off final at a neutral venue. Yet Asia is not Europe. The vastness of Asia dwarfs the more compact European continent and ensures that Asian football fans must travel long distances if they are to have any chance of seeing their team in action. If history is anything to go by, those fans won’t turn up. 

When Adelaide United went down to Gamba Osaka at Toyota Stadium in the quarter-finals of the Club World Cup, a healthy crowd of more than 38,000 turned out. Yet Adelaide United supporters were thin on the ground. Speaking to three Reds fans outside the ground on a bitterly cold evening in Toyota, they admitted that the majority of fans had been unable to secure time off work to attend. That is to say nothing of the cost of flying to Japan in the first place.  

Contrast that with crowds of 21,000 and 17,000 that packed every available seat at Expo ’70 Stadium in Osaka and Hindmarsh Stadium in Adelaide for the two-legged version of this year’s AFC Champions League final. Instead of rewarding those fans for their loyalty, local fans will next year be forced to pay a heavy price should they wish to watch their team battle it out in the final in Tokyo.  

AFC officials will be desperate for a Japanese team to reach the final, but even that is no guarantee of a crowd turning out. A healthy contingent of Gamba fans may have attended the Club World Cup quarter-final, but it fails to mask the fact that just under 7,000 empty seats remained unsold inside Toyota Stadium – and that was for a Sunday night fixture. Historically Japanese fans have struggled to leave their workplace in time to catch a midweek kick-off, and the sight of thousands of Urawa Reds fans taking their seats at half-time for the Saitama club’s midweek Champions League fixtures bears testament to that. 

Even the choice of the National Stadium as a venue for the final is a strange one. In a country full of high-tech, football-friendly stadia, the home of the 1964 Summer Olympics is hardly the most comfortable from a fan’s perspective. With it’s narrow aisles and cramped seats, the largely open-air “Kokuritsu” is a stadium straight out of yesteryear. Perhaps the choice to use it as the venue for the AFC Champions League final is a nod to Japan’s bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games, but travelling fans will be less than impressed by the running track that obscures the view of the most vocal fans behind the goal.  

So far the AFC has brushed off suggestions that a one-off Champions League final at a neutral venue will prove a mistake. Saburo Kawabuchi is the head of the Ad Hoc Committee designed to increase the professionalism of Asian football, and he is renowned for his work in dragging the Japan Football Association into a new era of professionalism during his reign as JFA President from 2002 to 2008.  

However Kawabuchi’s insistence that the 2009 Champions League final will be a fitting spectacle is ill-founded. It fails to take into account the fact that many Japanese fans remain largely disinterested in Asian football. Worse still, it’s a decision made from within the comfortable confines of the AFC’s air-conditioned offices.

No chance of rain will stop Mr Kawabuchi from enjoying the 2009 Champions League final from the comfort of his undercover V.I.P. seat. But he is in the minority if he thinks that a half-empty, windswept National Stadium in Tokyo is a fitting venue for the 2009 AFC Champions League final.   

Mike Tuckerman