Remember the stock line about England World Cup winner Martin Peters? He was, they said, “ahead of his time”. This for the way he would ghost into the opposition penalty area unremarked.
Steven Gerrard always struck me as the opposite: a player “behind his time”; a throwback.
The season of good will and cheer is always the season of the sack and the managerial changes we are seeing in the Premier League should come as no surprise. However Alan Pardew’s decision to leave Newcastle for Crystal Palace has raised many an eyebrow. The argument, much touted on twitter and the airwaves, is why move from a great club to one whose ambition can be never higher than to hope for a sustainable place in the Premier League?
“History… is the lesson and the example of the future,” Alphonse de Lamartine, Antar.
This time last year this column carried an annual review of 2013 by pretty much the same title (see related article below). It seems worthwhile 12 months later to recapitulate over what it said and to discover whether any of its lessons were valid.
A newly promoted club to the Chinese Super League has suddenly became the club most likely to be bought out. The story surrounding Chongqing Lifan FC, has become the latest major headline in Chinese football.
In the first of a regular series of columns on sports law and sports integrity, Dr Laila Mintas, CONCACAF Director of Integrity, examines the scale and threat of match manipulation to football globally, the difficulties encountered in effectively fighting it, and the urgent need for countries to bring in national legislation to battle the organised crime syndicates.
“There’s not any other profession in the world where investors can buy stakes in a human being.” Theo van Seggelen, FIFPro
Football, said the former England striker Jimmy Greaves, is a funny old game. But so too is the business of it. In no other sector than the sports industry do men willingly agree to become the tradable chattels of others. It is true that the football transfer market has come a long way from the time decades ago when players were instructed to move to a specific club with no input at all into the trade.
As we settle back over the holidays and watch the pictures of the numerous annual reviews, memories of a grandiose summer come sweeping back.
For six weeks the country trembled, hoped and feared, until the final whistle on the wonderful evening of July 13 in Rio de Janeiro.
As Sepp Blatter strapped in his seatbelt, lay back and sipped his first drink, alcoholic or otherwise, as he flew out of Morocco following one of the most tempestuous weeks of his 16-year FIFA presidency, he probably allowed him a wry smile.
By David Owen
It was lost – understandably – in the Kafkaesque farce surrounding the Garcia report, but last week’s meeting of the FIFA executive committee in Marrakech has left us business of football types with another financial teaser to savour.
There’s good money in ethics, really good money. More than you can get for crawling up the greasy pole to a position on FIFA’s executive committee if you are clever. And when you think you have trousered enough of it, you can time your exit with maximum effect, champion the high ground (doubtless standing on your own wallet stuffed full of other people’s cash/stash/development grants) and leave with a fantastic reputation.
“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” Vladimir Iliych Lenin
The Russian bear was dancing when it held the winter Olympics and won its bid to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup. All the while it was growling a demonstration of its aggressive fighting strength in the Caucasus. But, for the moment at least, one of the world’s most historically important nations is cowed.
Covering the murky, newsy, side of football can be an unpleasant business.
Frequently leading you away from what you loved about the game in the first places. Encapsulated in recent years by the scandal surrounding the games governing body.
One of the qualities that have underpinned Sepp Blatter’s long career in sports administration/politics is his bouncebackability. This was on display again in Monaco last week.
On the wall outside DYPatil stadium in what is navi Mumbai, the city that has been developed beyond the narrow confines of the south of the island where I grew up, there is a poster which reads: Come on India, let’s football.
Could this be as good as it gets for the Bundesliga as it challenges its European ‘partners’on the field and off it for European and commercial dominance?