European football is proving more resilient than many businesses in the face of the fiscal and economic shadows hanging over Europe.
But, as the new Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance* makes clear, not everything is rosy in the rose-garden.
Take Spain, home of arguably Europe’s two leading clubs – Barcelona and Real Madrid.
An era may be about to end in French football.
As I write this, AJ Auxerre sit 20th and last in Ligue 1, the French First Division.
There is still time for them to save themselves, but they are three points adrift, six points from safety and the days are getting longer.
On February 29 at the bijou Bonifika Stadium in Koper, Scotland take on Slovenia in one of those rather pointless friendly internationals.
The match takes place with Scottish independence high on the UK news agenda and a referendum expected in 2014.
You might think the fortunes of the Tartan Army have little if anything to do with the complexities of Scotland’s constitutional arrangements with the rest of the United Kingdom.
Here we go again.
England needs a new football manager, setting off a new cycle of speculation, unrealistically burgeoning expectations and disillusionment, as surely as, well 55,000 Twitter-users follow the Anfield cat.
Actually, the speculation bit looks like being much diminished this time, since everyone thinks they know the new man’s identity: step forward Harry Redknapp, cheekie-chappie manager of Tottenham Hotspur, surprise package of the 2011-12 English Premier League season.
Like other writers, I spent the first two hours of 2012 engrossed not in a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, but the intricacies of the famous October 15 altercation between footballers Luís Suárez and Patrice Evra.
And a right riveting read the 115 pages of findings drawn up by the Independent Regulatory Commission that imposed an eight-match ban – subject to appeal – on Suárez, the Liverpool striker, turned out to be.
It aroused in me all manner of reactions –
I latched onto a major story on Friday.
This was the day, remember, that Britain turned its back on Europe.
That tensions ratcheted up at the Climate Change summit in Durban.
The weekend reports claiming that João Havelange had resigned as a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) brought to mind two images from recent IOC Sessions.
The first is from Copenhagen in 2009.
The Brazilian, who as FIFA President once shared with the late Juan Antonio Samaranch the billing of ‘Most Powerful Man in World Sport’, is inviting fellow members of the IOC club to Rio de Janeiro to celebrate his 100th birthday in 2016.
Here’s a thought for these turbulent financial times in Europe: Could UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations (FFP) survive a collapse of the Euro?
These are the rules through which the governing body’s boss Michel Platini hopes to save European football from itself by, to oversimplify outrageously, obliging clubs to operate on a break-even basis.
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?
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.
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.
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So David Beckham is wanted by Paris Saint-Germain, according to a BBC headline.
It is an arresting story, but would it make sense?
Well, yes, actually, I think it would – though the reasons have little to do with the former England captain’s capacity for delivering pinpoint crosses from the right touchline.
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One is rarely quite 100 percent sure with FIFA.
But it now looks like Joseph Blatter will get the go-ahead on Wednesday to extend his stint in the governing body’s top seat to 17 years.
Unless 75 percent of the organisation’s 208 member associations vote down the congressional agenda, it is hard to see what can stop the ‘election’ from going ahead, in spite of a campaign that has achieved the seemingly impossible by turning FIFA into even more of an international laughing-stock than it was before.
Former Football Association chairman Lord Triesman’s allegations last week to a UK Parliamentary Committee concerning four FIFA Executive Committee members certainly caught the eye of the media.
And they have already resulted in one of the four – Worawi Makudi of Thailand – claiming he is planning to sue the former UK Foreign Office minister, who also headed England’s unsuccessful bid for the 2018 World Cup until forced to resign a year ago.
“Congrats to Mark van Bommel for being first player to win league titles in four different countries (PSV, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and AC Milan).”
When I read this on Twitter on Sunday morning, I nearly went straight back to bed.
If there is a player who epitomises the way the Dutch national team has been transformed over the past decade from Europe’s foremost footballing artists to a group of efficient, but soulless functionaries,