Columnists Archives - Page 35 of 78 - Inside World Football

Osasu Obayiuwana: Crossing the gender frontier

Next season is going to be extremely interesting for second division French side Clermont Foot.

Appointing Helena Costa, a 36-year-old Portuguese woman, as its new manager, the club has certainly crossed a gender frontier.

The first female to be put in charge of a male football club in France – and any first or second division side in Europe, for that matter – Costa is certain to receive a level of global media scrutiny that even she might be surprised with.

Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings: Quiet crisis for Italian club football

When Italy won the 2006 World Cup they did so with their club football in turmoil. A corruption scandal engulfed the club game, grave enough for Juventus to be stripped of two league titles and others hit with relegations and points deductions.

No such obvious crisis in 2014. But severe problems are there. We’ll come to hooliganism in a moment but quality-wise Italian football IS in a bad way.

It mysteriously doesn’t seem to be affecting the national team,

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: Regulating modern football is no child’s play, just ask Barbie

“Authority should derive from the consent of the governed. Not from the threat of force.” Barbie, Toy Story 3

When Barbie exasperatedly vents words more suited to a treatise by Friedrich Hayek than to an animated doll, the scriptwriters at Disney gave us one of the truly great lines of movie history. Because although spoken by the very embodiment of infantilism – a plastic doll played with by generations of young girls –

Andrew Warshaw

Andrew Warshaw: Salman breaks cover in bid for total supremacy

The words were worthy enough, the message unequivocal. But the real intentions were cringingly obvious to anyone who has followed Asian football politics.

Last week’s attempt by Asian Football Confederation president Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa’s to mark the first anniversary of his leadership by focussing on his so-called achievements served only to highlight the unedifying rift that continues to divide his increasingly fractious organisation.

Ever since he took over last year,

Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: Europe’s clubs need to stop taking and start sharing

With Real Madrid and their noisy but vastly improved neighbours Atletico, earning well-deserved places at this year’s UEFA Champions’ League final in Lisbon, the fraternity looks forward to what is certainly going to be a keenly contested encounter.

But as Europe’s – and undoubtedly the world’s – leading club tournament grows in competitive and commercial strength, certainly helped by the huge global audience it continues to pull, it is a telling reminder, to African club football,

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: Power games require powerful leaders

One match, or even two never define a season, let alone a trend although it is tempting to draw sweeping conclusions from the way the Champions League semi-finals have panned out. Two Spanish clubs in the Champions League final, and that from one city, Madrid, must surely mark a very dramatic shift from the German domination of the League. After all it was only last year we had an all German final. And Bayern Munich was seen as the team that defined everything that was strong and worth emulating in European football.

Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings:Moyes dis’nae matter to Americans

Imagine the scene on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Shouting and panic, white papers being waved in the air, frantic conversations into cellphones and one lone trader desperately trying to discover the route of the pandemonium.

“What’s the Pwanic?”

“It’s Mwoyes,” says the Wolf of Wall Street, “he’s gahn.”

“Omg get me a cwarfee. Dis is BIG!’

Andrew Warshaw

Andrew Warshaw: AFC political warfare as Shaikh-up hits rails

How much more ugly can the divisions within Asian football become? In a couple of weeks’ time, Jordan stages the latest Soccerex football business conference for the game’s movers and shakers but it does so against the backdrop of festering resentment and unsavoury internecine warfare.

The recent decision by FIFA vice-president Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein, head of Jordanian football, to issue an open letter to the entire Asian football membership denouncing Asian Football Confederation chief Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa for trying to mastermind his downfall by playing politics took most observers totally by surprise.

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: Liverpool build means more than just a new main stand

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” John Donne, No Man Is An Island

Liverpool’s time was the 1970s. This is not at all to diminish their achievements or the anguish that great club enjoyed and endured in the 1980s. But the foundations for becoming the club they are today were laid under Bill Shankly in the decade before.

Inside Insight: Another Stanfordian symphony (atonal)

The Caribbean is one seriously beautiful region in this world.

Plush rain forests, beautiful beaches, sunshine all year round – and dirty little tax secrets amid the pebbled and/or sandy beaches.

Much of the Caribbean was her Majesty’s property for hundreds of years.

The structures that were left behind in the sixties, when nearly all Crown Colonies were thrust into “independence”, are decidedly British, too.

Andrew Warshaw

Andrew Warshaw: The ‘sack race’ is a brutal and dangerous game

A week has now gone by since one of the game’s most high-profile managerial sackings – and what have we learned?

Only, perhaps, that football, far from being “just a game”, as many traditionalists would love to believe, is in fact the most ruthless of businesses. And that the cash-rich Premier League, supposedly the Holy Grail for any coach worth his salt, is the most ruthless league of them all.

Incredibly,

David Owen: Would a European Super-League really be such a bad thing?

Easter Monday brought one of those chance juxtapositions: FIFA Presidential candidate Jérôme Champagne’s third campaign letter bounced into my inbox just as those rumours of David Moyes’s impending departure from Manchester United started seriously swirling.

One of the many things that Moyes’s fate demonstrates is that transition seasons are no longer acceptable among football’s super-elite.

His ousting in this way helps to illustrate the validity of Champagne’s point that a “financial iron curtain”

Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: The big questions need an honest answer

When Liberia’s George Weah became the first African to win the FIFA World Player of the Year title, in 1995, many thought that it was going to be the first of many for the continent’s players.

With their ascendance and growing impact in European club football – which, fairly or unfairly, remains the yardstick for picking the best on the planet – it was taken as a given at the time.

But nearly 20 years have passed since the former AC Milan forward earned the game’s top individual award and it does not appear that another African will be following in Weah’s footsteps anytime soon.

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: Managing change is United’s biggest failure this season

Fifteen years seems a long enough time to prepare for an event you know will happen. That is double the time countries hosting the World Cup or the Olympics get. But despite knowing about it for so long, and supposedly preparing for it, the fact that Manchester United has failed to manage the transition into the post Alex Ferguson age raises serious questions of how it went about this, arguably, the most crucial job the United management has faced since the 1960s.

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: F1’s turbo-charged financial fuel provides a warning for football

“To sell a bargain well is as cunning as fast and loose.” William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost

Football fans today must be as literate in financial matters as in the intricacies of the midfield-diamond formation or of the Cruyff Turn. Recent reports that some clubs will face regulatory sanctions in the first application of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play environment show that to be the case, and columns such as this owe their existence to money’s ever-growing role in the world’s biggest sport.