It was a so-called Group of Death and the richest went out of the competition first. After two matches in Group D England were out and Costa Rica were through. When the two teams play each other in their last group game in Belo Horizonte on Tuesday, the contrasts will be sharper than ever.
England manager Roy Hodgson earns $5.87m according to respected football finance website Sporting Intelligence . Of the World Cup coaches competing in Brazil, only Fabio Capello earns more per year, on $11.2m.
Costa Rica coach Jorge Luis Pinto earns “just” $4,40,590 and is down in 26th place in the wages league, with only six coaches earning less. Capello also earned $32.6m from his four-year stint with England from 2008 to 2012. The English FA has been throwing money at the coach’s position for long enough now to know that it seems to make little difference to the outcome of the tournaments they compete in.
ADVERTISEMENT
English football also massively outspends Costa Rica in terms of money for facilities. The FA have invested an estimated $765m on English football over the last 5 years. Costa Rica have invested only $3.4m in the same period.
St. Georges Park is the English Football Association’s $204m centre of excellence, where on many hectares of Staffordshire countryside 12 football pitches and the latest sports technology have been built-up over ten years of planning and construction.
The FA hope St. George’s Park will produce a generation of super-coaches.
ADVERTISEMENT
The England team play their home matches at the re-built Wembley Stadium, completed in 2007 at a cost of $1.28 billion.
The Costa Rican team, in contrast, qualified for the World Cup using the country’s athletics stadium as their home ground. The Costa Rica National Stadium was built in 2011, has a third the capacity of Wembley, and cost $100m to build.
As England look to reinvest again after another failed campaign, many will point towards the need for better facilities above and beyond those already in place, and there will be calls for more English players for the national coach to choose from.
But the excuses are given short shrift by Uruguay striker Luis Suarez. The 27-year-old says: “With the quality and quantity of players that England have, and with the facilities they have to train in, it’s what in Uruguay we call first world.
“If that counts as a lack of resources I hate to think what it is that we have. The secret is in the desire to win.” Uruguay’s passion in Group G was in evidence as they beat England in Sao Paulo on Thursday, after England’s earlier defeat by Italy.
And Costa Rica showed great spirit to beat both Uruguay and Italy, leaving them favourites to top the group going into the last round of matches.
“When we arrived in Brazil most people had no idea who we were and everyone said that the big three teams in the group would all have three points guaranteed against us,” said keeper Keylor Navas, who plays for Levante in Spain.
In the world’s richest football league, the English Premier League, each club earns in the region of 60m pounds from broadcast rights per season. Some argue that it’s that wealth that encourages foreign ownership and the flooding of foreign talent into the league, reducing the national coach’s talent pool.
It still looks a weak argument when a country of 3 million, Uruguay, beat them in their second group game, and a country of under 5 million, Costa Rica, qualified at their expense.
In international football, and especially, it seems in Group D, success cannot always be bought.