Frank Lowy retains his optimism

Frank Lowy knows how to survive. When Frank was just thirteen, Lowy’s father was dragged away from him at a Budapest railway station trying to buy tickets for his wife and four children to escape Hungary after the Nazi invasion.

Frank managed somehow to escape and eventually made his way to Paris with the help of some friends. His father was taken away and beaten to death at the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp.

Frank had no idea what had happened at the time and only found out fifty years later about his father’s horrible and pointless slaying. “The sense of loss was so great, it still traumatises me now,” Lowy said in an interview with The Australian newspaper late last year.

But somehow he managed to survive. “The human being is very resourceful. When you fight for survival, you don’t think much, you just do. If you think too much, you just sink,” Lowy said in the interview.

Frank Lowy eventually made his way to Australia and settled here. His first foray into business was a local smallgoods business in the Eastern suburbs of post-war Sydney.

Doing business was one of Frank’s strong points and over the years the Lowy Empire has grown spectacularly to now be the biggest shopping mall owner in the entire world and Frank himself the richest man in Australia.

One of Frank’s great passions in life has been his love of football and he has never made a secret of that fact, devoting a lot of his time to football management and donating a lot of his own personal money to help his football ventures succeed.

Frank Lowy recently met up with Mike Cockerill of The Sydney Morning Herald in his plush twenty-fourth storey offices overlooking Sydney Harbour. It was his first searching interview since the crushing disappointment of our failed World Cup bid – Frank’s own personal dream of holding a World Cup in Australia, some might say.

Frank of course was bitterly upset about the loss and puts it down as one of his life’s great personal sporting disappointments. And Frank takes the whole thing personally and as the Chairman of the Football Federation of Australia and to his credit, the buck stops with him.

”I take full responsibility, absolutely,” he says. ”There is an explanation required to the country. We took precautions before we started on who will be in the competition. China was not in it, and that was one of the conditions for moving forward. “

“Qatar was not on the scene. We believed it would be a competition between Australia and America, and they believed it would be a contest between America and Australia.”

“Well, Qatar just popped up. Not many people thought they would succeed. But the unexpected happened.”

“Did we make mistakes? Yes. But I could have stood on my head for 24 months and we still wouldn’t have got it.”

Clearly, a lot of people are focussing on Lowy and his involvement in the process, what he did and didn’t do, what he said or didn’t say. But it’s not just about Lowy, it’s about the game.

The World Cup bid is over. We can only pontificate now about what might have been, how the game might or might not have gone ahead in leaps and bounds with a World Cup about to be staged here. But that’s just a hazy faded memory now.

The realities that face football and the A-League in particular are real and stark by comparison.

Is Lowy the one to try and regain some of the A-League’s lost ground? After all, he turns eighty one later this year, but Cockerill remarks that he looks fit, healthy and focused.

“In a couple of months, Lowy will be standing for his third and final term as chairman. He has the appetite for the challenge, and with no contenders in sight, he remains not only the only man for the job, but also the right man for the job. His next and last four years as the boss will unquestionably be the hardest, but he’s up for it.”

And no one is talking up the Ben Buckley influence either. The man who allegedly got the AFL their last TV Broadcast Rights bonanza has not quite measured up to the role of FFA CEO. It’s really Lowy who is seen as the A-League’s saviour, not Buckley.

A-League clubs are losing up to $25 million a season, Football Federation Australia has just reported a $5.6m loss, chief executive Ben Buckley is getting hammered from all quarters for a lacklustre performance, A-League crowds and ratings are down, and there are big doubts about the size of the next, all-important, TV deal.

But things can’t be all bad, with Nathan Tinkler approaching the FFA with a $25m offer to help underwrite the league for at least one year, so A-League clubs can go into the next season without any debts.

But Lowy is a proud man and has a bit more beer money than Tinkler does and wouldn’t even consider his gesture.

“Nathan Tinkler came and talked to me. But it was one meeting, and things didn’t proceed any further. My opinion is that the A-League will not be able to support itself without the FFA. But let somebody come forward, and we can consider it.”

So Lowy is a realist and recognises that most A-League clubs will never make a profit, just like most football clubs in the world don’t make a profit. After all, the mighty Manchester United lost a mammoth 330 million pounds last season.

Lowy insists that the FFA will have to provide funding to the A-League over time to keep it going and he says that the FFA will have the money to do it.

Does Lowy think that football is in crisis and will the A-League survive?

”The only thing not where I’d like it to be is the A-League but the rest of the game is doing very well,” he maintains.

“We started with nothing, and today we are an $80 million dollar business. We have a national team that was 84th [in the world] when we started, now we are top 20.

“We have hosted the Asian Cup for women [and won it], now we’re going to host the [men’s] Asian Cup in 2015. We now have unprecedented co-operation with the states.

“You will see the results because we will be able to introduce a uniform code throughout Australia from the children to the senior game. We have that set up and financed. We will have an FFA Cup in the near future. These are all achievements, aren’t they?

“If we get the A-League right, I’d give us a [score of] nine out of 10. I have an expectation that by the time the Asian Cup [2015] comes in, the A-League will be fixed [for good].”