The island of Ireland is a place where history casts a particularly long shadow.
So perhaps I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am that so few people seem to know about a proud episode in the island’s footballing history that took place 99 years ago.
I first stumbled upon this years ago during one of my periodic trawls through the pages of an old Rothmans football yearbook.
With the centenary approaching,
The timing is quite striking.
On July 3, Bob Diamond resigned as chief executive of Barclays, in the midst of a political firestorm touched off by a £290 million fine meted out to the bank by UK and US authorities.
On July 12, it extended until May 2016 its sponsorship of the English Premier League.
By the end of August (with Chelsea three points clear at the top of the table),
By David Owen
So Joseph Blatter doesn’t much care for the “unanimous” package of reform proposals for world football’s governing body published last month by UEFA.
The FIFA President conveyed his disappointment last weekend at a media conference in South Africa just before Nigeria’s triumph over Burkina Faso in the final of the 2013 African Cup of Nations.
I can’t say I am at all surprised.
However,
By David Owen
I came upon a prescient article from the Washington Post today.
It was about a West African country where poverty was said to be fuelling a resurgence of Muslim fundamentalism.
“People want schools, they want medical attention for their children,” a local sociologist was quoted as saying.
“But who is listening to them?
“Islamists, who provide them with water and fertiliser to believe the solutions are found in religion.
Here’s something to ponder in a week when Brazil are expected at Wembley for a friendly international: for more than half a century, the canary-shirted Brazil playmaker has been the embodiment of all that is best about the game that conquered the world; yet, as the sport has grown rich, the home of o jogo bonito has been reduced to a dusty outpost of the shiny multinational that is Planet Football.
For a decade or two now, the leading national cup competitions in Western Europe have been losing their grip on the public imagination.
You might think this would leave the second-string competitions – the league cups – in a seriously bad place.
But for one at least, 2012-13 has brought something of a revival – to the great good fortune of its new sponsor.
The recently released edition of the Deloitte Football Money League raises a few points that are worth taking a harder look at.
The first is about the slipperiness of statistics.
While in euro terms, year-on-year revenue growth among Europe’s 20 highest-earning football clubs is an impressive 10%, a very different picture – of stagnation, basically – emerges if the reference currency is sterling.
I can’t tell you exactly why Pep Guardiola, the hottest property in football management, decided this week to hitch his wagon to Germany’s Bundesliga.
But I don’t think it would have happened had it not been for a choice made by an obscure New Zealand football administrator in Zurich on 7 July 2000.
I hate to be a wet blanket, but I have the tiniest sliver of sympathy for football administrators in the predicament they face following the actions of Kevin-Prince Boateng and his Milan team-mates.
The powers-that-be now have to decide how they are going to respond when a similar walk-off happens in a competitive match – as assuredly it will.
Some thoughts on Euro 2020:
● Yes, a 24-team tournament is too unwieldy for most European countries to take on; but it is simplistic to suggest that this alone forced UEFA’s hand, necessitating the adoption of Michel Platini’s Grand Experiment – a competition spread around the great arenas of the European continent.
Turkey, pipped at the post for Euro 2016, could have coped with the expanded format and would, I’m sure,
Suddenly the 2018 World Cup bidding campaign seems a very long time ago.
At its conclusion in December 2010, relations between the world’s oldest Football Association – whose candidate, England, was among the losers – and FIFA, world football’s governing body, were at a low ebb.
Yet today finds Joseph Blatter, FIFA’s long-serving President, dropping in on St George’s Park, the FA’s new national football centre at Burton on Trent in the English Midlands.
Now that I’ve seen the pictures, I am ready to believe it: Cardiff City are playing this season in red shirts (Heiðar Helguson, pictured below left, in the new shirt).
It feels wrong – like archery at Lord’s or Usain Bolt doing the polevault.
My personal image of Cardiff will always be caught up with Jimmy Scoular’s team that so nearly made it into the top tier of “English” football in 1970-71.
Two years ago, it looked odds-on that the 2020 European Championship would be staged in Turkey.
An impressive campaign for Euro 2016, in which the Turks were edged out by France, many thought unluckily, allied to a vibrant economy and the scale to cope with the tournament’s expansion to 24 teams, left the strong impression that Ankara’s claim to Euro 2020 (pictured below, logo) would be all but irresistible – if they decided that they wanted the competition.
Michel Platini once bemoaned to me the extinction of the old-style ‘Number 10’, a position in which he, of course, excelled like few others.
“They have practically done away with le Numéro 10,” he said, sitting in a large office across the street from the Comédie Française.
“There is practically no longer an organiser.
The latest Premier League television deal may have given some BT and British Sky Broadcasting shareholders the jitters.
But the alarm-bells will have been ringing much, much louder in non-English citadels of European footballing excellence from Barcelona to Munich.
The new tide of money that the £3 billion ($4.7 billion/€3.7 billion) settlement will send flooding into English Premier League club coffers from the 2013-2014 season should do much to restore the competitive advantage of English clubs in the top European competitions.