We confess to feeling a bit embarrassed talking about violence in Italian football. Even though the circumstances are always different, they are all reprehensible, and trigger debates that are very similar and, for this reason, very embarrassing.
“Greek football is a labyrinth.” Petros Konstantineas MP, ex-FIFA referee
Fearsome though the bull-headed Minotaur was, at least Theseus knew what he was dealing with. And if things got too hairy he could always follow the thread of Ariadne’s wool he had laid down on his way into the labyrinth’s heart of darkness. For the modern-day Greek heroes like Petros Konstantineas, the referee who bravely sought to tackle the beast in whose clutches football in that country is held,
Remember the date: April 30 may well turn out to be a more significant day for the medium- to long-term future of FIFA than May 29. That might seem a strange claim, given that the latter is the date of the FIFA Presidential election to determine the occupant of the second-most powerful post in sport for the next four years.
Has there ever been a time when football has been so much in demand, even likely to affect a British general election, yet the people who run the sport are considered so incompetent, if not downright dishonest?
Imagine the outcry if a leading English club was deducted three points just as it was about to clinch the Premier League title – for no other reason than being a victim of its own integrity and honesty.
If one can believe the social media world, Team China should have already qualified for World Cup 2018. Even though the AFC has only just announced the draw for the eight groups, which is only the secondary stage of a long long qualification process for the Russian tournament.
How fast can one game change everything. Until Tuesday, FC Bayern had not shown in the second round that they really had a compelling game to win at the highest level.
When CONCACAF president Jeffrey Webb addressed his constituent federations for the first time at the confederation’s annual congress in the Bahamas last week, his speech was all about business, reflection on their progress to date, and setting goals for the next four year cycle. It was about setting the agenda and outlining the challenges. Three hours later, having been elected unopposed for a second term as president, he gave quite a different speech.
“Ring a ring o’ roses, A pocketful of posies, A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down.” Traditional British nursery rhyme
For centuries British children of what we now describe as primary-school age have been singing this popular tune: holding hands and dancing in a circle before falling on their bottoms together. It is widely believed (though it is disputed by some) that the song dates back to the age of bubonic plague,
That English football sold its soul to television many years ago is hardly a contentious subject any more. And partly because the small screen has enabled to us to consume and enjoy more of the game from across the globe than we could ever have imagined possible. But with football and TV ever more reliant on each other, is there really a need for football to have humiliated itself for television in the way it did for the FA Cup semi-finals?
The politics of football have long been rife with allegations of corruption, hypotheses, behind-the-scenes manoeuvring and a fair share of proven malpractise.
A sad, very disturbing, fact remains constant, over the decades I’ve covered the African game, which is fuelling my deepening pessimism about its future – the ruthless cultivation of a reactionary climate that is extremely hostile to the desperately needed transformation of CAF, the continent’s governing body, into an organisation that will finally command the genuine respect of the global fraternity and use its political capital in the interests of those it ought to primarily serve.
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.” David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Sixpence a year of overspending was all it took to bring misery to the burghers of 19th Century London, as Wilkins Micawber famously observed. Although life in the Premier League today could not be more different to that of Dickensian England, Micawber’s lesson is well heeded,
No, this is not a joke question but a very serious one. The jokey part of it is that once on the afternoon of May 29 in Zurich, the national associations re-elect Sepp Blatter for a fifth term as President, the 78 year old will cavort on stage possibly with a football as he acknowledges the hosannas of his followers like a medieval monarch. He has done that in the past and, as in 2002,
“You just can’t beat the person who never gives up.” Babe Ruth
The fans of football’s middling clubs must go to games right now with heavy hearts. It’s that time of year, the one where those teams who are wrapped in the unambitious security blanket of mid-table are already thinking more about their holidays than points tallies.