Columnists Archives - Page 44 of 78 - Inside World Football

Lee Wellings: Football’s Not The Laughter Business

I’m not sure I’ve that much in common with Cristiano Ronaldo. Though maybe we’ve both had a sense of humour bypass.

Cristiano was of course so offended by the FIFA President joking about him that he felt the need to respond, in a barely concealed waspish fashion.

But I certainly haven’t found much to laugh about from the world of football recently. And just as I baulk at world leaders who latch on to sporting success with hollow congratulations,

Andrew Warshaw

Andrew Warshaw: Uncomfortable games in high places

Amidst all the rhetoric in recent days from FIFA and UEFA over the separate issues of racism and World Cup slots, the bigger picture seems to be one of canny manoeuvrings being played out in front of the world’s media by Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini in order to gain the moral high ground.

“Anything you can do, I can do better” appears to be the basis of the rather silly (at best uncomfortable) mind games being employed by the respective presidents of football’s two main governing bodies.

John Yan

John Yan: Football stories that are not always about football 恒大往何处去？

I am almost becoming bored of writing about Guangzhou Evergrande week in and week out, but the story just keeps building and is completelyly dominating the Chinese football focus?

Guangzhou Evergrande secured a draw in the first round of the final of the Asian Champions League, 2:2, away to South Korean Seoul FC, on October 26. The match happened in golden time on a Saturday, 6:30pm, creating a new record for live football coverage on TV with distribution across CCTV,

David Owen: Mega-events – why FIFA needs to engage the little guy

It is 29 July 2012. I am on a bus with other journalists being whisked through south-east London on a lane reserved for Olympic vehicles. Beside us, I am uncomfortably aware, snakes a long queue of non-Olympic traffic. It is at this point that I spot a road sign that makes me do a double-take. It says: “Ha Ha Road Closed”.

I later checked on a city map and there is, bizarrely, a Ha Ha Road in that area of the UK capital.

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: Football on YouTube – Broadcast Yourself

“Charlie bit me,” Harry Davies-Carr, aged three.

The sight of a three-year-old boy named Charlie having his finger bitten by his baby brother was once the defining image of YouTube. It has been viewed nearly 600 million times and, despite no longer being the most-viewed YouTube video of all time (which once it was), ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ remains in the top 10.

But just as the young faces in that 57-second film from 2007 had to grow up,

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: How Fergie in writing his autobiography has copied from Winston Churchill

Alex Ferguson for all his achievements could hardly be compared to Winston Churchill. To do so would be absurd as football for all its wonder can hardly be compared to issues such as national survival that Churchill had to deal with.

But there is one Churchillian principle Ferguson has been keen to adopt. This is not only to make history but to write history. The Churchillian trick was to present the part he played in history as the most important part of the story –

Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings: Khan-do attitude for American in London

There are now six American owners of English Premier League teams. A statistic that would once have been mind boggling.

The latest is Shahid Khan, and to spend time with him at Fulham FC is an education into the mindset of the new breed of owners.

I say new breed, but he is very much an individual. Smart, practical and innovative, the fact he has been ‘ranked’ as one of the world’s 500 richest people should not surprise.

John Yan

John Yan: An Open Interview With Sun Jihai 为什么不用孙继海？

On my own program The Football Talk, which is broadcast every Friday on www.163.com, I had a long interview with Sun Jihai, China’s most successful ever footballer. In this 90 minutes chat, Sun covered issues about his bewilderment of being omitted from the national team, even though at the age of 37, he is still being voted week in week out as the top centre half in the China Super League. Sun also compared the different football cultures in China and Europe,

Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: Dyke’s FA scores an own goal

As a veteran of several boardroom battles and high-wire conflict with the British Labour party, as he led a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that was extremely critical of the former’s conduct in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, while it was the party of government, one would have thought an English FA chaired by a supposedly media savvy Greg Dyke would be particularly conscious about not embarrassing itself in public.

Resigning in rather dramatic (some would say unfair) circumstances,

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: Crisis, what crisis? Football thrives amid economic turmoil, for now

“With the glamour and opportunity also comes responsibility.” Michel Platini

Those were the words with which UEFA’s president introduced its interim club-licensing benchmarking report. It is a study that makes for fascinating reading and, to a certain extent, Europe’s top clubs have demonstrated they recognise the Platini creed.

Despite the ongoing economic crisis that has seized the global financial system since 2008, club revenues grew almost 7% year on year between 2011 and 2012,

David Owen: Brazil 2014: England will be hoping for something better than Brazil 1950

It isn’t World Cup fever, but Tuesday night’s win over Poland has left England gripped by what I would diagnose as a mild case of World Cup euphoria.

More than 15,000 fans were said to have registered their interest in going to Brazil; bookies predicted a £100 million betting bonanza; and a much-publicised tabloid story about manager Roy Hodgson’s half-time team-talk seems only to have redoubled the country’s determination to get behind the team.

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: Fight against racism is too important to be derailed by tabloid sound bites

The problem with race these days is that the whole subject too often gets reduced to a tabloid presentation with the result that England manager Roy Hodgson, a cultivated man of wide culture and sensitivity, ends up by being absurdly labelled as racist. We can all accept that Roy Hodgson made a mistake in repeating an old NASA joke about the monkey in his half time talk as an illustration to remind English players that they should get Andros Townsend involved in the play as often as possible.

John Yan

John Yan: An insult to the public mood 中国足球，侮辱公众情绪

Away to Indonesia on October 15, the away round of qualification group matches of the Asian Cup, Team China earned an embarrasing draw, 1:1. Indonesia’s FIFA ranking before the match was 170th.

Funny thing happened again. A week before the match, the President of China, Mr. Xi Jinping, was visiting Indonesia, and made some comments about his beloved game of football: “I hope one day that China and Indonesia could meet in the finals of World Cup,”

Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: Is Libya safe for a 2017 Cup of Nations?

As the opening stage of the 2014 World Cup play-offs for Africa ended on Tuesday, another four weeks must pass before knowing, for certain, the quintet that will represent the continent in Brazil.

But Algeria, Cameroon, Cote D’Ivoire, Nigeria and particularly Ghana’s Black Stars, which gave Egypt a surprising 6-1 wallop in Kumasi, will be feeling they are closer to earning their qualification tickets.

Whilst fans were concentrating on the action taking place across the continent,

Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings: World Cup Qualification, a drama you live through over and over again

Apologies to those whose national football teams face a nerve wracking World Cup play-off.

And to those who dreams of reaching Brazil 2014 are already over.

For I’d like to talk about qualification. As in achieving it, sealing the deal.

As an Al Jazeera Correspondent I must be neutral, yet all around me in England there has been the agony, the pain, then the relief at securing a place in the finals.