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Sepp Blatter has always been insistent that football should control itself and not be run by politicians.
Yet the great irony is that he is the ultimate football politician, the man who could teach many a professional politician a trick or two.
Football works best as a dictatorship, not a democracy.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask Sir Alex Ferguson.
He was never happy with the Manchester United board when it was run as a plc. Indeed he refused to take up the shares when the club floated, although this may have reflected his deep socialist convictions of equal shares for all.
The British have a great capacity to invent new sports. But, having got the world playing, they are very hostile to any change to the sports they have invented.
The British genius for sports has been well documented. The country may not be a sporting super-power but nearly all modern sports were either invented in this country or their laws codified here.
The problem arises when the sports the British have invented are changed,
This year’s FA Cup should have been a classic, one that should have helped to relaunch the oldest cup competition in the world.
History may not always repeat itself first as tragedy then as farce, as Karl Marx said, but there are some very curious and interesting similarities in the latest attempt to get West Ham into the Olympic Stadium.
In the 1930s, when the British were trying to hold on to India and defeat Gandhi’s attempt to get rid of them, the province that gave the most trouble was Bengal. The British could not understand that.
What are the chances that the present debt crisis in football will lead to a regulator being appointed to administer the game?
A walk down memory lane is not always a game for the old. But it can be very useful for the football fan.
It is this thought that makes me ask: will the Red Knights plan to buy Manchester United go the way of Project Merlin?
Just hours before Sir Alex Ferguson won yet another trophy, when Manchester United lifted the Carling Cup beating Aston Villa, there was a very interesting programme on ESPN Classic.
The child outstripping the father in any sphere of life is always news.
Olympic Games always bring up this comparison for, after all, it was the success of the 1924 Olympic football tournament that prompted the French to organise a football World Cup for professional players.
There is a story going round the many lawyers, accountants and other professionals who advise football clubs. The story goes as follows. Some years ago, when Leicester City were in financial trouble and being hounded by the Revenue for non payment of taxes, Keith Vaz, the local MP, rang Gordon Brown then Chancellor of the Exchequer.
History is not always a good precedent for judging the present. But, in the case of Manchester United, history of its ownership and the fans reaction to different owners, tell us a great deal of why the club is once again in turmoil.
The story of footballers, their wives and girlfriends and what they get up to is always news and can have dramatic impact, as the following story illustrates. It is the night before a crucial England World Cup match. An England player has been told stories of his wife’s antics and he is quite frantic to know whether these stories are true.
We all know that the two great certainties of life are taxes and death. But in football there is a third: bungs.
Football and debt have never been strangers. All football clubs have had debts but, until the mid 1980s, not only was this debt fairly small but mostly a local matter.