What the club committee was deciding

A volunteer coach at a small football club in Fujairah has an idea he is sure of. Open the Friday morning sessions to children whose families are not members. The pitch sits half empty, the boys would get more games, and some of the new families would join.

He takes it to the club committee with the reasoning laid out. It is sound. It goes nowhere.

He is tempted to take that personally. He should not. A committee is not one sensible person weighing the options. It is several people, each choosing what feels safe for them, this season.

So the idea waits, because waiting costs nothing and the person proposing it may not be around next year. It slips behind whatever is pressing: the broken floodlight, the fixture list, a complaint from a parent. Pressing beats sensible in almost every room. Then someone asks whether any other club in the emirate does this, and the honest answer, not yet, ends the discussion more firmly than any objection could.

Underneath, each member is running a private sum. Will this mean more work for me? Will my son lose his place in the side? Who gets the credit if it works, and who carries the blame if it does not? Because they have to agree as a group, the version that survives is the one nobody minds: a trial, perhaps, or one Friday a month, or next year.

None of this is foolishness. It is how groups protect the people inside them.

But it means the coach was arguing with the wrong thing. He made the case for the better idea, and the committee was never really weighing the idea. It was weighing delay, noise, the neighbours, each member's own stake and where everyone would stand afterwards.

Against all of that, being right counts for very little.