The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
Like a high proportion of my fellow Brits, when that moment comes, I shall be standing silently with my head bowed in a gesture of solemn remembrance.
So why does it make me so angry when November rolls around each year and, like snowdrops in January, Premier League football shirts sprout scarlet poppies?
Dear readers of insideworldfootball
On the occasion of the 13th edition of the International Football Arena (IFA) conference in Zurich, on November 7 and 8, I will present updates and reflections that underline our road towards a different FIFA. The 200 opinion leaders from around the world, gathered at the IFA, will witness our determination to remedy the ills of the past, and how we intend to improve the way we do business.
The Carlos Tévez and John Terry affairs could not be more different. One is a case of an employee allegedly not wanting to do his job; the other is about an employee allegedly behaving badly while at work.
They both illustrate the behaviour problems of today’s footballers, more so during high profile matches which are subjected to unprecedented public scrutiny through the internet and social media.
They also illustrate that those involved in running football including the players union,
Bar one, I have covered every Olympic Games since Tokyo in 1964. The one I missed was Atlanta 1996, when I was sports editing The Observer. Colleagues who were there tell me I was a good judge.
In all those Games, I have also covered every Olympic sport. Bar one.
Football.
How long can Ricardo Teixeira possibly last as the increasingly tarnished head of the 2014 World Cup organising committee? Unpopular in his own country and embroiled in all manner of scandal, Teixeira is the great survivor.
While those around him – the latest being Brazilian Sports Minister Orlando Silva – have either resigned or been kicked out, Teixeira, like a cat with nine lives, seems to wriggle out of every crisis that envelops him and his country.
And so there I was, putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) on an explanation of why Liverpool’s chief executive Ian Ayre was right to bring up the issue of the collective television bargaining agreement that exists in the Premier League, and whether top clubs should go it alone in signing rights agreements with broadcasters.
True, he has less chance of success with this battle in the Premier League boardroom than a tourist has of leaving Mexico without getting clenbuterol into their system – and for that true football fans should be thankful.
The theme of this year’s International Football Arena (IFA) conference, Football: from craze to madness, may suggest we face a sporting Armageddon. But Marcel Schmid, the man whose brainchild the conference is, refuses to take a pessimistic view of the state of the game.
“The football world is upside down, but the world is upside down, isn’t it?,” he says. “It is not only football in a state of chaos,
Sepp Blatter has made much of the need to crack down on corruption following the highly publicised bribery scandal and a raft of other misdemeanours within his organisation. Yet there is mounting criticism of the token punishments handed out by FIFA’s Ethics Committee to those who either took or were offered bundles of cash back in May.
Just when FIFA could have made an example of the guilty Caribbean officials who attended the infamous Trinidad meeting,
The debate about the future of the Olympic Stadium illustrates a very simple sporting truth about this country. The one sport that makes money is football, but only at the highest level.
All other sports, including lower league football, struggle. Any attempt to make money and market a sport other than football, particularly athletics, is extremely difficult and can result in failure.
The Government forgot this sporting truth and the result is that the future of the Olympic Stadium is uncertain and the taxpayer may end up paying for its maintenance.
The most telling information in the Football Association’s recently published 2010 annual report and financial statements comes on page 24 of the 42-page document.
This tells us that, for all the pain and hard work that went into driving up the body’s overall financial performance, stadium and non-FA event management remained heavily in loss – to the tune of £12.1 million ($18.9 million/€13.9 million) at the pre-tax level, against £15.6 million ($24.4 million/€ million) in 2009.
Karen Murphy’s victory in the European Court over showing live matches in her pub without paying Sky’s charges should not be overestimated. It will have consequences, particularly in the lower reaches of the game, but it should not be seen as televised football’s equivalent of the Bosman ruling. It is not.
Bosman has proved such a far-reaching, even revolutionary, judgement, that its effects are still being felt more than a decade and a half later.
The first thing to be said about this week’s European Court of Justice ruling – that promises, for a time, to open a path to cheaper live Premier League football for armchair fans in the UK – is that if this doesn’t make the European Union (EU) more popular in famously eurosceptic Britain, nothing will.
But the potential consequences for the future structure of the European game are just as fascinating.
Please just sort it out. Sit round the table, thrash out a deal and stop the squabbling before everyone gets thoroughly fed up with the whole interminable saga.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Tottenham Hotspur’s refusal to pull out of the race to take over the Olympic Stadium after next summer’s Games, the entrenched positions of all parties has got to an embarrassing and, quite frankly, irritating stage.
How must the International Olympic Committee (IOC) be feeling when,
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English football fans are be capable of much humour, no little inventiveness and a warmth and goodness that can be truly uplifting, but the capacity for some fans to be vile should not be underestimated. Events at some recent matches have once again demonstrated that.
So during their Carling Cup encounter, Manchester United fans were taunted by chants from Leeds fans about the Munich air crash and United fans, in turn, retaliated with chants of Istanbul,
It’s one thing spearheading FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s election manifesto against a single opponent who later pulls out anyway. It’s quite another taking on a sceptical global media to try to repair the organisation’s battered standing in the game.
That’s the task facing FIFA’s new communications chief Walter De Gregorio, who takes up his new post on October 1.
Given the need-to-know basis on which the FIFA communications policy has operated in the past,