US striker Megan Rapinoe’s claim that FIFA is “old, male and stale” may have been a comment triggered by disbelief over FIFA’s final nominations for its top female player award, but the wider context does bear closer examination. A look at the top of the FIFA hierarchy shows that half its confederation presidents do not have competing national women’s senior teams.
The US were beaten by lowly Trinidad & Tobago (no, it is one country, they weren’t playing two countries at the same time), lost fair and square and to add to their grief, Panama equalised against Costa Rica with a Thierry Henry type goal (“…the referee’s decision is final”, so don’t expect a Samoura-Senegal type replay decision to bail the US out).
It was interesting to read my colleague Andrew Warshaw’s piece this week recounting Catalán sports minister Gerard Figueras’s thoughts on where the region’s top football clubs might play should the region achieve independence.
“We must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow.” Dwight D Eisenhower
As the Supreme Commander of the allies’ war effort in the European theatre during World War Two who went on to become president, ‘Ike’ knew a bit about budgets. He was fortunate as the 34th President of the US to lead the world’s biggest economy during rampant boom time,
The man who was arrested by the anti-corruption unit of the Guardia Civil in Madrid the other day, former FIFA and UEFA Grande Angel Maria Villar-Llona (alongside his son Gorka who ran CONMEBOL, leaving behind a major shambles) should not have been arrested at all.
July 20 – The G20 demonstrations in Hamburg against Qatar last Saturday were paid for by an Egyptian businessman, according to German reports. The fake event that in turn spawned ‘fake’ news reports is one of an increasingly distorting series of stories and revelations that make the real situation in Qatar hard to understand, especially when trying to put into context any impact the blockade will have on the 2022 World Cup preparations and hosting.
How many times have we heard Hassan al-Thawadi, the public face of Qatar’s 2022 World Cup, utter those words when talking about the Gulf state staging football’s showpiece tournament?
From the vantage-point of today, the Garcia report has something of the air of the Dead Sea Scrolls – an important relic offering vital clues about how life was lived in a bygone era.
She coined the phrase “FIFA Slayer” and prided herself to be just that: the woman who dismantled FIFA.
On Tuesday afternoon, June 6, Captain Horace Burrell, 67, passed away at the John Hopkins Cancer Centre in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He had been battling cancer for more than a year and succumbed to it while undergoing additional treatment.
Politics and sport make uneasy, if unavoidable, bedfellows. This has been underlined plenty of times in just the past few months and is now being highlighted once again by tensions in the Gulf centred on Qatar, host of the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Few seem to understand that former Brazilian chieftain Ricardo Teixeira’s possible/likely/somewhat unexpected crawling to the bosom of the US Department of Justice (for cover?) is potentially the most dangerous reality people like Sepp Blatter, Urs Linsi, Jerome Valcke and one very special Zurich lawyer are facing. And possibly global sportswear manufacturer Nike too.
As the biographer of Foinavon, it should come as no surprise that I think the late-1960s was the greatest period in the history of sport. And on Thursday, another landmark 50th anniversary falls – that of the 1967 European Cup final, the night of the Lisbon Lions, the match that made household names of Jock Stein and Billy McNeill.
It may now be old news rather than fake news and have been somewhat overshadowed by subsequent events in Bahrain but was the invisible hand of the biggest figure in Asian sport behind the surprise election of a relatively unknown candidate to become Asia’s female representative on the FIFA Council last Monday?
He never had a chance but just getting on to the ballot was enough. Zelkifili Ngoufonja (the candidate known as Zul) was beaten 54 votes to 4 by Egypt FA president Hany Abu Rida for the last position on FIFA’s Council. But if there ever was a victory that showed up the deep flaws of FIFA’s easily corruptible and barely governed election system (and the Confederation of African Football’s in particular) then this was it.