I don’t know about you, but I always thought that company accounts were supposed to reflect financial reality.
Not, it seems, when the value of professional footballers is concerned.
Over the five years between 2008 and 2012, clubs competing in England’s Premier League booked a cool £1 billion-plus in net profits from the sale of players.
This means, in effect, that those players were undervalued by the same amount in the clubs’
Do any supporters anywhere openly suffer as much as those of Newcastle United Football Club?
No club moves from stability to disruption, from good stock to laughing stock, from hope to despair, like Newcastle. They are world champions at humiliation, and they could probably do with any silverware this brings.
Their latest drama has fallen snugly into the ‘you are joking?’ category they occupy so frequently.
The appointment of Joe Kinnear as ‘Director of Football’,
Demonstrations in Istanbul; a protest over high ticket prices by football fans in London; demonstrations in Brazil.
Decidedly, the world has changed, but the question is, ‘Have the grandees who run Big Sport taken notice?’
Yes, it is simplistic to bracket these three manifestations of frustration and rage together.
The Istanbul protesters seemed indifferent to, or even mildly positive about, their city’s prospects of hosting the 2020 Olympics – although they have thrown a spanner in that particular works.
解雇主教练是一种经济省钱的危机公关手段，职业足球环境下绝对如此。
因为当一支球队成绩一塌糊涂的时候，作为管理者，无法解雇一支球队、无法解雇一代球员，于是解雇一名主教练，既能平息民怒，又能转移视线，还能节约人力资源投入成本，不论从管理学角度，还是经济学角度，这都是最容易的解决方案。
哪怕这未必是最正确的解决方案。
Tradition has increasingly taken a back seat in the modern age of football. Sometimes, it has to be said, for the right reasons but not when it comes to the English FA Cup, the game’s oldest domestic knockout competition.
For the last few years, the cup final, watched by billions of armchair fans worldwide despite many of them getting out of bed at some ungodly hour, has been shunted into unfamiliar territory, given whatever end-of-season slot can be found for it –
Brazil is rocked by (justified) demonstrations. While numbers vary, it is safe to assume that hundreds of thousands have and are taking to the streets to voice anger, frustration and dissatisfaction. With what, exactly, that remains a question to some. But it is a question that seems to get a wide spectrum of answers, depending on where the writer stands and from where the “independent” observer hails.
It is clear that Brazil’s economy,
Dealing with the tough demands of earning one’s crust, as a professional in top flight European club football, whilst serving one’s country – regarded as a sacred duty, by compatriots, during World Cup and Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers – has always been a high-wire balancing act for players.
Unlike their European counterparts, who can normally reach any part of their continent within a few hours and return to their clubs rather quickly,
It was almost inevitable that the UEFA Under 21 tournament should have once again focussed English discussion on the perennial problem in English football: why is the national team so bad? More so, when the Premier League is so powerful and rules the world, at least in terms of the spectacle it provides week after week, and in its reach, exposure and ability to make money?
This is a problem that seems to be always with us like death and taxes.
I have been trawling the fine print of the new Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance (so you don’t have to).
Since football fans like league tables, I have used the data to put together 26 top-threes ranking English Premier League clubs according to different financial parameters.
I wouldn’t read too much into them without scrutinising the big picture.
However, Arsenal supporters, starved of real on-field success, may have mixed feelings about the north London club’s top ranking for most cash,
What on earth are Tahiti doing in the Confederations Cup?
They will be the biggest Tahitian whipping boys since Captain Bligh sailed the south Pacific in the 18th century and there was a ‘mutiny on the Bounty’.
It underlines the problem FIFA have had since Australia became part of Asia’s football family, and even they would not be an ideal ‘eighth’ team in a major tournament on current form.
Australia’s departure in 2006 has given opportunities to New Zealand in international and club football that may not be entirely fair,
Nothing in recent years has changed football as much as television.
The box in the living-room corner has spawned Manchester United fans from Tacoma to Tahiti and made top players as wealthy as successful bond traders.
Few of us now, not even the most avid groundhoppers, consume as many matches live as on TV.
Even professional football reporters, who think nothing of covering 100 games a season, will turn instantly to the screens scattered around the press stands to assess whether a foul has been committed or the ball has crossed the line.
Michael Emenalo is, without question, one of European football’s interesting oddities.
As the technical director of English Premiership side Chelsea, where he undoubtedly has the listening ear of billionaire owner Roman Abramovich, the Nigerian belongs to the exclusive club of Africans who’ve transcended their club careers into positions of power in the game’s corridors.
Pape Diouf, the Senegalese who started out as a journalist and player’s agent in France, eventually becoming the president of French club Olympique Marseille and Finidi George,
So, FIFA have had their congress which by some – mainly FIFA – was called “historic”, and by others a “whitewash”, “irrelevant” or worse.
Under the rainy skies of the African island nation of Mauritius, 209 FIFA Members met and the individual delegates cast their electronic vote. Actually, they also cast their more traditional manual vote in a secret ballot that determined which one of three women candidates would be FIFA’s first elected Executive Committee (Board) member.
Jose Mourinho has nothing in common with Richard Burton. But the Portuguese, like the great Welsh actor, is about to discover what it means to go back to your first love. And, while not even the most devoted Stamford Bridge fan will argue that Chelsea is football’s Elizabeth Taylor, the way Mourinho has expressed himself in recent weeks, leading up to return, leaves no doubt that his great love for the west London club almost matches that of Burton for Taylor.
Carlo Ancelotti may be about to inherit a problem.
The former Chelsea manager is, as I write this, prohibitive odds-on favourite to succeed the new Chelsea manager José Mourinho in the hot seat at Real Madrid.
If he does, the Italian will be looked to by the Spanish club’s fans to deliver a 10th European Cup to the Bernabéu’s church-like trophy-room – and the first for more than a decade.