Columnists Archives - Page 44 of 78 - Inside World Football

John Yan: The Most Valuable ACL Final Ever 广州恒大：疯狂的足球节日

On November 9, the second round of the Asian’s Champions League Final will take place in Guangzhou. It is widely reckoned to be the most valuable final ever held for a football competition in Asia. It may become a record that takes a long long time to break.

It is still hard to calculate what the TV ratings will be, because normally TV ratings research in mainland China is not trustworthy, with only a couple of research companies operating in the company currently.

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: Why is it impossible to form a WADA to deal with match fixing?

On the face of it seems very easy to find a solution for match fixing. Everyone agrees it is bad and if not controlled it will ruin sport – indeed in China it has all but destroyed Chinese domestic football. But having agreed how dreadful it is we run up against the problem that it is impossible to find a universal system to police it.

How difficult this can be was well illustrated when on Wednesday of this week a conference was held to discuss sport integrity.

Andrew Warshaw: A tricky day for 2014 public relations, but the tickets are selling even if the security stories aren’t

Whoever is being economical with the truth about the reasons for the Soccerex global football convention in Rio being cancelled, the news was timed with a shambolic attempt at promoting Brazil’s World Cup. What started out as a good idea and looked like smart timing for a push to get people to travel to the 2014 party, rapidly went downhill.

When Thierry Weil, FIFA’s marketing director, and Ricardo Trade, head of the local organising committee,

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: Beggars can’t be choosers

“‘Go West, young man, go West…’ ‘That is medicine easier given than taken.’”
Reported conversation between Horace Greeley and Josiah B Grinnell, 1833

Just as the new frontiers of a developing United States were synonymous with new riches in the early 19th Century, in the early 21st Century European football has developed a fascination with lenders registered in exotic locations thousands of miles to the west.

Archive

David Owen: Premiership musings – Moyes’s slow-starting United still look a good bet for title

International breaks have made this a stuttering start to the English Premier League season. With more than a quarter of matches now completed though, the balance of forces is starting to come into clearer focus.

Of the six clubs with genuine, if in some cases remote, title aspirations, Manchester United – with three defeats already and only 50% of matches won – are in the lowest position in the table.

For me,

Massimo Cecchini

Massimo Cecchini: Dall’entusiasmo alla “realpolitik”

Dall’entusiasmo alla “realpolitik”. Ovvero, come i padroni del calcio italiano – in tempi di lotta ad ogni forma di razzismo – hanno scoperto di non poter applicare regole autoprodotte perché i loro stadi risultano ingovernabili. La storia è nota. Sull’onda delle iniziative Uefa, ad agosto la Figc decideva di sanzionare duramente non solo i fenomeni di razzismo, ma anche quelli di “discriminazione territoriale”, definizione esistente nell’ordinamento dalla fine degli anni Ottanta. Non avevano però fatto i conti con gli ultrà,

Archive

Inside Insight: Insulting His Majesty, Whoaa!

So, Ronaldo, the Great Field Marshall, is pissed.

And with him, Ancellotti (Angelotto?) and the whole of Spain, and Portugal, and the Government of Portugal, and – well, I guess GOD and Snow-white, too. Not to mention the Seven Dwarves, Superman, Donald and Daisy Duck and Roadrunner.

Lee Wellings

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: 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,

Archive

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,