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Inside Insight: Down under. Seriously?

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The FFA – Australia’s Fabulous Football Association – have started to shout. Sometimes, one gets the feeling that people think the louder they scream, the more their argument rings true. Not so. Content still rules over tactics and style. And Australia’s most recent style is unique, to say the least.

There goes a sore loser. Nearly three years after having secured just a single vote (where two were promised “for sure”, and another 10 at least confirmed with hugs between old men,

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: Player trades boost third party balance sheets

“We are financial products. A football club is like a factory, and we are its outputs. You have to be realistic.”

It is not often you hear a human being reduce himself to the status of a balance-sheet item. But with these words that is exactly what Eliaquim Mangala, a France-international defender at the Portuguese champions, FC Porto, has done. Mangala’s words were in response to being confronted with the fact he is not merely an intangible fixed asset belonging to his club but also to two offshore funds whose investors’

Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: Admin bunglers keep bungling the basics. How hard can this be?

How difficult can it really be for the officials of a football association to keep accurate statistics, as well as master the eligibility rules, of players entitled to feature for their countries in crucial international matches?

One would assume it does not take the genius of Albert Einstein to carry out basic record-keeping duties.

But the recurring drama of administrative ineptitude, leading to the cancellation of several World Cup qualifying results across Africa,

Andrew Warshaw: Forget the legals, it’s staying put, but May change?

Ever since FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s exclusive interview with this website explaining his preference for switching the 2022 Qatar World Cup to winter, time has hardly stopped still over the issue.

Everyone, it seems, is having their say and whilst many stakeholders have expressed intelligent, sensible, well-argued points, many other so-called experts have been jumping on the bandwagon for no other reason than to cynically question Qatar’s right to host the event.

Let’s make a few things clear,

Archive

Inside Insight: That twisted thing

By Paul Nicholson, Editor-in-chief, Insideworldfootball

Disappointing habits are alive and well – actually thriving across all media. Insideworldfootball’s big scoop on Monday set the agenda for the day and a couple of days after – we’re proud of that and stand by every word of the interview as it was printed.

But let’s get this straight from the start. At no point did FIFA’s president ever say that awarding the World Cup to Qatar was a mistake.

Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings: Give Moyes some Fergie time

Manchester United fans won’t want to hear it, and David Moyes certainly won’t be thinking it…but it might be best for them to write this season off. Give him time.

If they win a big trophy of any description it will be a huge bonus.

This is no ordinary club and Moyes is no short term solution. He has been put in a desperately difficult situation which short term will be a nightmare,

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: Will Platini use his nuclear bomb?

Sometime later this month Michel Platini will tell his fellow UEFA bigwigs, gathered in in Dubrovnik, Croatia’s capital of charm, whether he wants to be President of FIFA. For years the Frenchman has insisted he would never enter a contest against Sepp Blatter. And until recently the confident expectation was that he would not have to. After all, has not Blatter declared that he will not stand again, once his present term finishes.

So it should be all neat and tidy.

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: Following the cash trails

From Abidjan to Zagreb this week, after the last of the FIFA World Cup group-stage qualifiers, football fans will have a pretty good idea about their nations’ chances of playing at the finals tournament in Brazil next year.

What awaits those who travel to Brazil might not be the samba and carnival that has been promised by organisers but instead a protest against the corruption and cynicism that a maturing nation’s growing middle class angrily rejects.

Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings: The Real Illusion – where DO they get the money?

How do Real Madrid do it?

No it’s not a rhetorical question, really how do they do it?

For over 100 days the question was when will Gareth Bale join them in a world record deal from Tottenham.

With the deal finally, mercifully done, we now need to ask a more interesting question. How did they do it? I can’t be the only one to believe that world record transfers should be more plausibly made by clubs with oil money behind them.

Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: Blowing the whistle on CAF 2014 qualification

That the 10 teams for the final knockout round, of the African qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup finals, will be known by the end of the first week in September, following the conclusion of the group stages, is no breaking news.

But the CAF-inspired decision not to allow the continent’s final five World Cup qualifiers emerge, directly, from the league format, as was the case for the 2002, 2006 and 2010 World Cups,

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: From Beckham to Bale, a tale of two transfer eras

Gareth Bale may be the first British galectico that Real Madrid have signed since David Beckham in 2003, but the differences between the two transfers shows how the world of football has moved on in the last decade. In a sense there has been a revolution in the way transfers are done and mega million transfers of high profile players have truly come of age.

It shows how much more skilful agents are,

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: Carved out transfer deals and the £630m mixed messages

Gareth Bale did not have to stand on an 8m-high temporary platform for his unveiling as a €100 million signing to recognise he had swapped Tottenham Hotspur for a truly global stage at Real Madrid. The 24-year-old was already well aware of his commercial appeal.

In March he registered a stylised rendering of his ‘trademark’ goal celebration, which creates a heart shape from the contact of his index fingers and thumbs, as exactly that: a trademark with the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office.

Andrew Warshaw: Breakfast with Platini, Qatar 2022, but don’t mention the FIFA presidency

Breakfast with Michel Platini is an annual media gathering on the fringes of the Champions League draw in Monaco that has become almost de rigueur for anyone trying to get inside the head of the UEFA president.

Informal and charmingly mischievous, you invariably get him in an engaging, outgoing mood – in a variety of languages – away from all those official functions and formalities.

Yet among the nods, winks, innuendos and wise-cracking,

Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: Breaking down the doors of the old boy’s club

Getting a substantial number of women into the corridors of administrative power remains a major challenge for football, which is still seen – not without justifiable cause, I might add – as being a stuffy old boy’s club.

If there is one thing in which Africa is certainly pointing the right way to Europe and the rest of the world, it is in giving women a chance at the top of the administrative ladder.

Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings: FIFA were right to move goalposts on technology

FIFA. They really are the masters at changing their stance on an issue, taking ownership of it, and complimenting themselves on their new stance.

Please don’t misunderstand me. It’s a compliment. There are some clever operators in and around the Zurich HQ.

Blatter’s nifty footwork to become a racism trailblazer after his horrible gaffe to me in 2011 is one example.