Columnists Archives - Page 35 of 78 - Inside World Football

Mihir Bose: Power games require powerful leaders

One match, or even two never define a season, let alone a trend although it is tempting to draw sweeping conclusions from the way the Champions League semi-finals have panned out. Two Spanish clubs in the Champions League final, and that from one city, Madrid, must surely mark a very dramatic shift from the German domination of the League. After all it was only last year we had an all German final. And Bayern Munich was seen as the team that defined everything that was strong and worth emulating in European football.

Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings:Moyes dis’nae matter to Americans

Imagine the scene on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Shouting and panic, white papers being waved in the air, frantic conversations into cellphones and one lone trader desperately trying to discover the route of the pandemonium.

“What’s the Pwanic?”

“It’s Mwoyes,” says the Wolf of Wall Street, “he’s gahn.”

“Omg get me a cwarfee. Dis is BIG!’

Andrew Warshaw: AFC political warfare as Shaikh-up hits rails

How much more ugly can the divisions within Asian football become? In a couple of weeks’ time, Jordan stages the latest Soccerex football business conference for the game’s movers and shakers but it does so against the backdrop of festering resentment and unsavoury internecine warfare.

The recent decision by FIFA vice-president Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein, head of Jordanian football, to issue an open letter to the entire Asian football membership denouncing Asian Football Confederation chief Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa for trying to mastermind his downfall by playing politics took most observers totally by surprise.

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: Liverpool build means more than just a new main stand

Liverpool stadium build

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” John Donne, No Man Is An Island

Liverpool’s time was the 1970s. This is not at all to diminish their achievements or the anguish that great club enjoyed and endured in the 1980s. But the foundations for becoming the club they are today were laid under Bill Shankly in the decade before.

Archive

Inside Insight: Another Stanfordian symphony (atonal)

The Caribbean is one seriously beautiful region in this world.

Plush rain forests, beautiful beaches, sunshine all year round – and dirty little tax secrets amid the pebbled and/or sandy beaches.

Much of the Caribbean was her Majesty’s property for hundreds of years.

The structures that were left behind in the sixties, when nearly all Crown Colonies were thrust into “independence”, are decidedly British, too.

Andrew Warshaw: The ‘sack race’ is a brutal and dangerous game

A week has now gone by since one of the game’s most high-profile managerial sackings – and what have we learned?

Only, perhaps, that football, far from being “just a game”, as many traditionalists would love to believe, is in fact the most ruthless of businesses. And that the cash-rich Premier League, supposedly the Holy Grail for any coach worth his salt, is the most ruthless league of them all.

Incredibly,

Archive

David Owen: Would a European Super-League really be such a bad thing?

Easter Monday brought one of those chance juxtapositions: FIFA Presidential candidate Jérôme Champagne’s third campaign letter bounced into my inbox just as those rumours of David Moyes’s impending departure from Manchester United started seriously swirling.

One of the many things that Moyes’s fate demonstrates is that transition seasons are no longer acceptable among football’s super-elite.

His ousting in this way helps to illustrate the validity of Champagne’s point that a “financial iron curtain”

Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: The big questions need an honest answer

When Liberia’s George Weah became the first African to win the FIFA World Player of the Year title, in 1995, many thought that it was going to be the first of many for the continent’s players.

With their ascendance and growing impact in European club football – which, fairly or unfairly, remains the yardstick for picking the best on the planet – it was taken as a given at the time.

But nearly 20 years have passed since the former AC Milan forward earned the game’s top individual award and it does not appear that another African will be following in Weah’s footsteps anytime soon.

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: Managing change is United’s biggest failure this season

Fifteen years seems a long enough time to prepare for an event you know will happen. That is double the time countries hosting the World Cup or the Olympics get. But despite knowing about it for so long, and supposedly preparing for it, the fact that Manchester United has failed to manage the transition into the post Alex Ferguson age raises serious questions of how it went about this, arguably, the most crucial job the United management has faced since the 1960s.

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: F1’s turbo-charged financial fuel provides a warning for football

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“To sell a bargain well is as cunning as fast and loose.” William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost

Football fans today must be as literate in financial matters as in the intricacies of the midfield-diamond formation or of the Cruyff Turn. Recent reports that some clubs will face regulatory sanctions in the first application of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play environment show that to be the case, and columns such as this owe their existence to money’s ever-growing role in the world’s biggest sport.

Archive

David Owen: Saadi Gaddafi, Libya’s most notorious footballer, and the politics of names

Names can be powerful things, particularly today when almost no-one is beyond the reach of electronic media.

In these superficial times, your name can be one of the most important factors in determining what people think about you and, hence, your destiny.

It is worth bearing this in mind when contemplating the fate of Saadi Gaddafi.

Now in prison in his native Libya having recently been extradited from Niger where he took refuge following the overthrow of his father,

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: India’s passions – cricket, Bollywood and…football

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“The song of the future must transcend creed.”   E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

In India, some call it Sachinism. The legacy of Sachin Tendulkar, cricket’s greatest batsman ever to emerge from the South Asian sub-continent, is so great that he has achieved the status of a demigod in what is already a pantheistic culture. The doleful impact on popular consciousness there of the day he was run out for 99,

Massimo Cecchini

Massimo Cecchini: L’Italia e gli stadi di Proprieta

Dicono che i momenti di crisi siano quelli che portano alla rinascita. Si spera davvero che per il calcio italiano l’affermazione abbia del fondamento, visto che nel ranking europeo ormai anche il Portogallo – approfittando della nostra debolezza – si sta preparando al sorpasso. Per questo, dopo gestito con poca oculatezza per quasi un ventennio le enormi risorse provenienti dal mercato televisivo, i club italiani provano a mettersi al passo imboccando decisamente la strada virtuosa da tempo intrapresa da Gran Bretagna,

Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: UEFA’s self interest makes a joke of the ‘global’ solidarity pitch

When UEFA and its member countries take a decision to fundamentally restructure the way in which international football, within its continent, is played, it ought not to concern the rest of the global fraternity.

What European football does within its borders is, in principle, their prerogative.

BUT – and this is a big but, obviously – when a continental decision is taken without any cognisance of the effect that it would have on the WORLD game,

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: What should football care of the child stars who fade?

“Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.”  William Blake

When Barcelona received a two-window transfer ban for their trade in minors last week, the reaction among the internet wits was predictable. “Must be horrible,” was the gist of it, “a life at Barça earning millions to play football. Wish I was suffering like them.”

But that kind of commentary misses the target as spectacularly as when Lionel Messi hit the bar from the penalty spot against Chelsea in the Champions League a couple of years ago.