RIYADH, 15 June — Our national team have come home with their heads down.

After having been defeated in all three matches in the first round, it was the first team to be knocked out of the World Cup. Moreover, in three matches they did not score a single goal, but managed to concede 12.

However, it would not be right to attack the national team. Nor should we put the entire blame on the coach. Just as the French national team will have to give reasons to their society explaining how, as defending champions, they were knocked out of the first round without scoring, we Saudis must look into the deeper causes of the awful performance of our team. We should ask ourselves questions that only we, as Saudis, can answer. We have to deal with our reality, as bad a prospect as that may appear.

Our media is quick to praise officials when our national team win, handing them all the credit for the victory, but then is quick to scorn the team or the coach, who traditionally has taken all the blame and was then fired. No attempt is made to come to terms with the underlying reasons for the failure, or to learn from past mistakes.

We should not depend so much on our national soccer team to achieve our glory among nations of the world. Isn’t it time we looked elsewhere? To our scientific institutes, to our universities, to our thinkers and intellectuals?

Why is it that in the past decades we have always placed our hopes and dreams in eleven players and their coach, as though we could not do without them?

We are a population of 17 million, of which 38 percent were born after the Gulf War. Do we expect soccer to be the solution to the problems of our growing young nation?

The Saudi Football Federation has always gotten the biggest slice of the pie when it comes to government funding. Why?

There are in fact 23 Saudi federations responsible for different sports, including basketball, volleyball and even squash, swimming and cycling. Many of our players in these other sports have earned medals in various tournaments.

Could anyone name any of them?

A conversation between the head of the Saudi Club for Golf (not yet a federation) and a well-known sports philanthropist while the golfers were being honored focused on how players have to practice golf on gravel because there are insufficient golf greens.

And then consider how neither Saudi parents nor the Saudi education system nurture our children’s talents in fields outside soccer.

“Go outside and play soccer with your buddies in the street,” is the familiar refrain.

How many Saudi parents have encouraged their children to go to the library or read? Isn’t it time we got our priorities right?