By Andrew Warshaw
November 11 – As inappropriate gaffes go, they don’t come much more untimely. Just as he was locked in a public and hugely anticipated debate with members of parliament on the subjects of inclusion and diversity, so English football boss (make that EX-football boss) Greg Clarke goes and puts not one but both feet in it.
At a time where the Swiss are engaged in some legal house-cleaning, having appointed a Special Prosecutor to investigate the former Swiss AG Lauber and his motley crew (as well as the odd birds that flew in from the increasingly legendary Canton of Valais: birthplace of Blatter, Infantino and local celeb AG Rinaldo Arnold), Infantino’s professional defenders have decided unequivocally that they don’t see eye to eye with Swiss Legal Eagles and declare, to anyone who will listen,
By Paul Nicholson
Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. FIFA’s ethics folk don’t do much that isn’t in their own interest either.
Will FIFA’s so-called independent ethics committee dare show its teeth in arguably its most important test case to date? That is now the all-important question after three days of unprecedented trouble-shooting by the organisation’s administration in defence of its under-fire president, Gianni Infantino.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s insistence that he will continue in post and brazen it out in face of the criminal investigation into his own behaviour – repeat, CRIMINAL investigation into his own behaviour – is no small thing. On multiple levels.
By Paul Nicholson
The fate of Trinidad and Tobago’s 2020 World Cup qualifying campaign currently looks to be lieing in the hands of a Port of Spain High Court judge rather than at the feet of a team on the pitch.
June 5 – Brace yourselves, Premier League bosses. Extrapolating the forecast in yesterday’s Tottenham statement to gauge the possible league-wide revenue loss attributable to Covid 19, does not make pretty reading.
June 1 – The bubble has burst. Covid-19 will not stop some Premier League clubs from turning a profit for the current season, even though it now looks set to be played out behind closed doors.
The past few weeks openly reflect the insanity of what global football’s governors consider to be intelligent conduct. They also unveil the stench in the trenches of Swiss justice and more so, on the proper administration of justice.
By Paul Nicholson
May 4 – FIFA and its president Gianni Infantino’s insistence on the Swiss judiciary pursuing a criminal case against former FIFA president Sepp Blatter could blow back on the governing body and potentially become a PR embarrassment for beIN Sports and PSG boss Nasser Al-Khelaifi.
In April 1967, in an era when sports rights-holders were apt to worry about the impact of television on attendance figures, Football League chairmen in England took less than half an hour to turn down a BBC live television proposal worth a then highly respectable £781,000.
When two [or more] elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers” – African proverb.
When FIFA, CONCACAF, CONMEBOL and the OFC were brought to their knees, in 2015, as a result of the financial scandals that exposed shocking levels of graft and maladministration in the game, informed watchers of the African football landscape always wondered when the continent’s inevitable moment of reckoning would come, as it was virtually unscathed during this tumultuous period.
By David Owen
One line in Watford’s recent annual accounts jumped out at me. Explaining a near 15% increase in turnover, the strategic report said this was “mainly due to an increase in Media & Broadcasting revenue because of a higher finishing position consequently attracting increased centralised distributions from the Premier League”.
January 28 – Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp is facing accusations of undermining the game’s oldest domestic cup competition in a row over whether English football’s first winter break is being fairly applied.
“We must find an African solution to our problems” – Kwame Nkrumah (Prime Minister of Ghana, 1957-1966)
Anyone with an acute sense of history will remember how, in the late 1980s, the master-servant relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Western financial institutions, on the one hand, and financially troubled African nations on the other, led to the imposition of flawed ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ (SAP) that devastated the economies of the countries that borrowed money under these onerous SAP terms and conditions.