If 2016 has taught us anything, it is not to kid ourselves that we can see too far into the future. With that proviso, it looks ever more probable, almost a decade before the first ball is actually kicked, that the United States will have a leading role in hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Who would have thought that a group of Norwegian bloggers could shatter the glass walls of FIFA, UEFA, etc. What they delivered in terms of conspiracy theories about UEFA’s new boss, and FIFA’s new Audit and Compliance chief is pretty cool – time will prove how correct their suppositions are but questions have been asked.
There is a very important fact worth bearing in mind when seeking to make sense of Gianni Infantino’s FIFA: the 46-year-old Swiss-Italian new boy faces re-election in less than three years’ time.
It only took three days for football’s most important news to disappear from the sports pages. It had never reached further than that to begin with. People are more interested in cats that perform ludicrous acts on the internet than giving a damn for the rampant racism that stares in our face every day. Everywhere.
“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” John Stuart Mill
Greed, egotism, immorality and corruption. These are the vices of which some of the highest-profile figures in English football have been accused as a result of the Daily Telegraph’s undercover exposé of the game. Quite rightly, people ask how can a nation such as ours,
Minutes after chairing his first executive committee meeting as the seventh president in UEFA’s 62-year history, a suitably attired Aleksander Ceferin approached a lift on the lower ground floor at the luxury resort complex where the organisation’s top brass had been staying.
By David Owen
Thursday’s group stage draw provides the perfect illustration of why the Champions League needs reform.
Suddenly, strangely, it has all gone quiet. After days and weeks of eager anticipation about whether Gianni Infantino is being investigated for breaking ethics rules, Fifa continues to leave us all on tenterhooks.
When hundreds of television cameras zoomed in on the climax of Euro 2016, capturing Portugal’s elation and France’s despair, one man was conspicuous by his absence – just as he had been throughout the tournament.
The largest corruption threat to football is the one that its administrators frequently seem most reluctant to face aggressively. Match-fixing cannot be swept under the carpet but the anti-match-fixing fight does need more funding and the acceptance of objective benchmarks to evaluate the independence of the governing bodies in the front line.
Are we really to believe that the indiscretions of FIFA’s finance director Markus Kattner have only been discovered in the past few days? Do they really think that their member federations, the watching press and the rest of the football world are that stupid and will lap it up unquestioningly?
Gianni Infantino, less than three months into the job as the man chosen to lead FIFA into a new era of respectability, turned to his fawning converts and declared: “I can officially inform you here, the crisis is over.”
As Europe’s blazered football leaders filed out of Budapest following one of the shortest UEFA congresses on record, how many of them were examining their consciences?
After the seemingly endless rumors came the official announcement: at the end of the next European Championship the coach of the Italian national team will not be Antonio Conte. It is no surprise. The offer from Chelsea (about €21 million for three years) was too good once it arrived, while the not so good prospects for the Blues (Italian national team, not Chelsea) were not helped by Serie A giving the coach too little room for maneuver in preparing the team.
“Politics, these days, is no occupation for an educated man, a man of character. Ignorance and total lousiness are better.” Aristophanes, The Knights
There was of course no football 2,400 years ago when Aristophanes was writing his plays, and still less a FIFA or UEFA. But were the Old Comedian to be as popular a satirist now as he was then, he might be expected to use the same words to describe the people who have been governing our game for us as he used to describe the polis of ancient Athens.