David Owen Archives - Page 9 of 14 - Inside World Football

David Owen: A big step forward, but where do you draw the new technology line?

I don’t know if Michel Platini is a fan of Ashes cricket.

If he is, he might have allowed himself a wry smile at the way debates relating to the sport’s attempts to harness technology to improve the quality of on-pitch decisions have provided an engrossing sub-text to the live action as the series has progressed.

Platini as far as I know still opposes use of the sort of goal-line technology that the Premier League will deploy for the first time at Anfield on Saturday when Liverpool and Stoke City kick off the 2013-14 season.

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David Owen: Putting football into perspective

The anniversary of Hiroshima fell this week, as it usually does, in the middle of football’s silly season.

Millions for a few weeks consecrate every spare minute to fretting over what coloured shirt a dozen or so millionaires will be wearing next month; or to reading significance into meaningless matches.

Yet 68 years ago this happened.

It’s progress, I suppose.

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David Owen: Why Sky versus BT may turn into a long-running Premier League fixture

The season has yet to kick off, but this is a big week for the Barclays Premier League.

On August 1, the seed sown in spectacular fashion just over a year ago by BT, a traditional telephone company, is scheduled to bear its first fruit with the launch of its BT Sport channels.

Two days later, BT Sport will begin its live football coverage with Liverpool and England captain Steven Gerrard’s testimonial match against Olympiacos of Greece.

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David Owen: Why Turkish Airlines boss finds delight in Dortmund

A summer Thursday on the shores of Lake Geneva. I am in a salon in Lausanne’s plush Palace hotel talking to Temel Kotil, President and chief executive of Turkish Airlines.

We are just days away from the curtain being drawn on the airline’s sponsorship of Manchester United, arguably the world’s favourite football club (Aeroflot have become the club’s sponsor). Yet I don’t think I have ever met a business leader so bursting with enthusiasm about the effect sporting partnerships can have on multinational companies.

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David Owen: Balancing a £1bn profit with reality

I don’t know about you, but I always thought that company accounts were supposed to reflect financial reality.

Not, it seems, when the value of professional footballers is concerned.

Over the five years between 2008 and 2012, clubs competing in England’s Premier League booked a cool £1 billion-plus in net profits from the sale of players.

This means, in effect, that those players were undervalued by the same amount in the clubs’

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David Owen: Protests show it’s time for Big Sport to shake off complacency

Demonstrations in Istanbul; a protest over high ticket prices by football fans in London; demonstrations in Brazil.

Decidedly, the world has changed, but the question is, ‘Have the grandees who run Big Sport taken notice?’

Yes, it is simplistic to bracket these three manifestations of frustration and rage together.

The Istanbul protesters seemed indifferent to, or even mildly positive about, their city’s prospects of hosting the 2020 Olympics – although they have thrown a spanner in that particular works.

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David Owen: Financial fine print makes interesting reading, especially for Arsenal and Villa fans

I have been trawling the fine print of the new Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance (so you don’t have to).

Since football fans like league tables, I have used the data to put together 26 top-threes ranking English Premier League clubs according to different financial parameters.

I wouldn’t read too much into them without scrutinising the big picture.

However, Arsenal supporters, starved of real on-field success, may have mixed feelings about the north London club’s top ranking for most cash,

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David Owen: Not being there – how television became football’s chief paymaster

Nothing in recent years has changed football as much as television.

The box in the living-room corner has spawned Manchester United fans from Tacoma to Tahiti and made top players as wealthy as successful bond traders.

Few of us now, not even the most avid groundhoppers, consume as many matches live as on TV.

Even professional football reporters, who think nothing of covering 100 games a season, will turn instantly to the screens scattered around the press stands to assess whether a foul has been committed or the ball has crossed the line.

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David Owen: Is Spain signposting the way to a European Superleague?

Carlo Ancelotti may be about to inherit a problem.

The former Chelsea manager is, as I write this, prohibitive odds-on favourite to succeed the new Chelsea manager José Mourinho in the hot seat at Real Madrid.

If he does, the Italian will be looked to by the Spanish club’s fans to deliver a 10th European Cup to the Bernabéu’s church-like trophy-room – and the first for more than a decade.

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David Owen: The FIFA Club Protection Programme – delving into the detail

I have been delving further into the detail of FIFA’s new Club Protection Programme (CPP), the scheme designed to remove a longstanding bone of contention by compensating clubs when players they employ are injured on international duty.

I was concerned lest an unforeseen spate of injuries sent costs soaring to the point where they absorbed most or all of FIFA’s positive annual result. This stood at $89 million in 2012.

The world football governing body has now told me that they have moved to protect themselves against unexpectedly high costs.

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David Owen: Ja, ja, it’s German week in London – but should we be congratulating the FA for its foresight in rebuilding Wembley?

Yes, OK, this is the German renaissance – and the juxtaposition of Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich in Saturday’s European Cup final certainly indicates that German football is doing something right.

But, in one small detail, the match is a notable coup for the English game: it is being played at Wembley, the second time in just three years that European club football’s flagship occasion has been staged underneath the now famous arch.

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David Owen: Why Rooney and Europe are the big questions for Moyes at Old Trafford

In 2004-05, the most profitable club in the Premier League was unfashionable Everton.

How did Merseyside’s second club outperform more illustrious rivals such as Arsenal and Manchester United, let alone Chelsea, which ran up a £140 million pre-tax loss on the way to lifting the Premier League title?

Four words: they sold Wayne Rooney, the teenage prodigy who had made Europe sit up and take notice at Euro 2004.

This simple fact reminds us of how long the careers of Rooney and David Moyes,

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David Owen: Will football’s loss be horseracing’s gain?

News of Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement brought to mind two scenes nearly three decades apart.

In the first, it is 11 May 1983 and I am with friends clustered around the TV in a cramped London apartment.

A strong Scottish contingent is hoping to witness a miracle: the humbling of Real Madrid by Ferguson’s new kids on the block from Aberdeen, a side built around the indefatigable Gordon Strachan and the formidable centre-back pairing of Alex McLeish and Willie Miller.

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David Owen: Will Club Protection Programme hand wealthy a bigger slice of the cake?

It was on 23 June 1998 – Sepp Blatter’s 15th day as FIFA President – that it started to dawn on me that the governing body was probably going to have to do something about compensating clubs for players injured on international duty.

In just the fourth minute of what turned out to be a drab group match between Italy and Austria in the Stade de France, Alessandro Nesta, the elegant Lazio and Azzurri central defender,

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David Owen: Why Valcke can breathe again – but not China

Here are a few preliminary thoughts on the reform proposals approved yesterday by FIFA’s Executive Committee.

1. Jérôme Valcke can breathe again.

The third of the 10 points indicates that the ExCo has headed off a proposal put forward recently by the 53 European FIFA member associations that could, I think, have excluded FIFA’s general secretary from running for the FIFA Presidency.