November 18 – Sometimes you come across a person who appears to have become bigger than the organisation or institution they represent. FIFA seems to have found one – and it isn’t Lionel Messi.
Brazil’s success in winning the vote to host the 2027 Women’s World Cup at the FIFA Congress in Bangkok last Friday will undoubtedly provide a stimulus to, until now, a generally unloved women’s game in the country.
Sepp Blatter, the decorated former President of FIFA, who has more honorary degrees, noble titles and other high awards than almost anyone else who springs to mind, has published yet another ‘book’.
It is not every day that one surveys the annual performance of a venerable 120-year-old organisation, notes a near $400 million loss, and concludes that business is ticking along very nicely. Then again, the organisation is FIFA and the business is football – a realm which, you might often be forgiven for thinking, operates in keeping with a commercial logic that is entirely its own.
The 48th UEFA Congress in Paris on February 8 turned truly interesting after it was over.
By James Dostoyevsky
As if football didn’t have other problems – between a Turkish club president assaulting a referee on the pitch and VAR turning into the most hated new tech distorting football results – a novel and stupefying proclamation emanated from Vlad the Impaler’s homeland, Romania this week.
There is a pretty good response given to a US oligarch (they prefer to call them billionaires, over there) in the series “BILLIONS”, when he wanted to buy an NFL franchise. “When you are allowed into the circle of NFL Franchise Owners, it means you are royalty. You are not”. Short shrift and all, it was a wake-up call for the US tycoon who thought that money can buy it all.
Sometimes, it looks like he can’t do anything right, doesn’t it? He blabbers about football solving the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, he lectures about his being gay today, his being a migrant worker yesterday, and quite generally to be utterly misunderstood – every day.
Will anything change? Ever? Has FIFA cleaned its Augean Stables of US/Latino making? Corruption, bribery, kick-backs, nepotism, favoritism – have they all disappeared, are they gone with the wind? The wind of (US-controlled) change?
“Quo vadis FIFA?”, one might ask, eight years later.
With the Qatar 2022 World Cup gone, with Pelé having succumbed to colon cancer (“every country should now have a Pelé stadium”, GI Joe said), with Argentina having won the Cup, with (North) African football having put its foot down, with Asian football proving what Salman’s predecessor said was right when he claimed that the future was Asia…
By Andrew Warshaw
November 21 – Two weeks ago, as organisers put the finishes touches to 12 years of planning, the president of FIFA and his trusted number two – clearly alarmed about their showpiece tournament being undermined by constant criticism over Qatar’s human rights record – took the unprecedented step of pleading with the 32 finalists to concentrate on the football and not to preach morality.
An All-Star game for the Premier League? I cannot imagine it would be my cup of tea: too much predictable outrage over who’s in and who’s out; too much showboating in a fairly limited competitive context.
August 24 – Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City, Newcastle United: Middle East-based interests have already snapped up their share of Western trophy sports assets. The region has also hosted dozens of high-profile international sports events, none more glittering than the FIFA World Cup, whose kick-off in tiny but mega-wealthy Qatar is now less than three months away.
