David Owen: What Luís Suárez has in common with Diego Maradona

Hands up everyone who thought that Liverpool would be top of the Barclays Premier League at Christmas.

In truth, the Merseysiders are precariously perched: their next two games are away at Manchester City and Chelsea respectively. Lose those and they would probably be back below local rivals Everton and out of the Champions League places before the year-end. A New Year’s Day engagement back at Anfield against newly-promoted Hull then has the look of an ideal fixture with which to stop the rot – until you remember that the Tigers claimed their first-ever win over Liverpool on Humberside less than a month ago.

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Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: Pieth’s farewell to football

With just days to the end of the year, and his tenure as the chair of FIFA’s Independent Governance Committee (IGC), you would think Mark Pieth is extremely glad to be well rid of an assignment he admitted has been extremely difficult to manage – getting the game’s chieftains to radically change the way they do business.

In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Pieth was quoted as telling the German newspaper that he “would not take on the task again,

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John Yan

John Yan: China’s CSL shows growth but can it grow up? 职业化二十年，价值几何？

The 2013 edition of China Super League Value Report was recently released by Netease.com and Total Sports. This is the second edition of the annual report on professional football in China.

The report is divided into four parts: the management of the China Super League Company, which is a body like the English Premier League Committee; the second part covers the financial situation of the 16 clubs in the top division; the third part looks at a hot issue –

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Archive

UEFA sanctions clubs over FFP rule breaking

uefa flag

December 23 – UEFA has enforced its Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules with sanctions of fines and exclusion from European competitions for five clubs and a reprimand for a sixth. The sanctions all relate to overdue payments and were handed down by the UEFA Club Financial Control Body’s adjudicatory chamber.

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Archive

Blame games: Qatar labour issues and a never-ending supply of workers

Qatar construction 2

By Paul Nicholson
December 23 – Human rights abuses in Qatar have made the Gulf state the whipping boy of the western media. If there was no World Cup planned for 2022 in Qatar then probably the rest of the world might not be so interested – perhaps a comment on the west as much as the Qataris. But the World Cup will be in Qatar and the world has been drawn into the story.

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Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: The streets with no names but only numbers that show the other Qatar

Bose pic 9

Much has been made in recent weeks of the terrible working conditions of migrant labour in Qatar. As the hosts for the 2022 World Cup, the spotlight was always going to be on the Gulf state but even then Amnesty International’s report on migrant workers presented a dreadfully bleak picture of the conditions of those involved in the infrastructure projects Qatar is undertaking as it prepares for its historic moment in the sun.

The Amnesty report mentioned that more than 80 migrant construction workers,

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Andrew Warshaw

Andrew Warshaw: The Sack Race is on but are there really any winners?

It’s a familiar jibe at almost every game whenever a manager is under pressure to save his job. “Sacked in the morning, you’re getting sacked in the morning,” goes the refrain, belted out with gusto by fans of the opposing team as they taunt the manager in question.

The chant has become part of the fabric of the game in English football and it is around this time of year – in other words close to the mid-season transfer window –

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