As he prepares to show his face on FIFA duty for the first time outside Switzerland since the sky came crashing down on his scandal-tarnished organisation, Sepp Blatter could be forgiven for enjoying a wry smile on the flight to St Petersburg for the 2018 World Cup draw.
Zhang Xizhe has returned to Beijing Guoan Football Club the club that sold him to the Bundesliga club Wolfsburg 166 days ago. He didn’t play a minute for the hugely improved German club, under the price tag of €2 million. Dispritied and tired, he told me that he would never play abroad again.
Any organisation in crisis prompts outlandish ideas on what should be done to reform it. But even then some of the ideas proposed to reform FIFA are so absurd as to make you wonder if those proposing them are really serious or just seeking sound bytes. That FIFA needs reform is a given. But to reform FIFA we need to understand what kind of an organisation it really is.
The setting is certainly fascinating and the event promises to be a media heaven. But, as ever, the danger is in the ambush that lurks around the corner. On July 28, in Milan, under the “world” banner offered by the Milan Expo, will be the draw for the calendar of the 2015-2016 Serie A season, which will open on the weekend of August 22-23. But should we be so sure?
For those who like to think before they foam at their keyboard, the editorial reprinted here from the Trinidad Daily Express raises some important, generally forgotten, issues. Jack Warner may be a crook, he may be a bad man but this editorial points out where much of the media have been going wrong. It suggests a lot of physicians in and around the world of football need to start with healing themselves, or at least a health check.
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any crazier at the HQ of football’s world governing body, along came Simon Brodkin. That’s the British prankster who suddenly showered Sepp Blatter with fake dollar bills in his attempt to “secure the 2026 World Cup for North Korea”.
“The danger is that the indulgence and attachments of the people will keep a man in the chair after he becomes a dotard, that reelection through life shall become habitual and election for life follow that.”
“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” Thomas Jefferson
Young nation though it still is,
It has been a long journey to Old Trafford. Bastian Schweinsteiger, as an impetuous youngster, made his Bundesliga debut in late 2002 and quickly became a beacon of hope for the team – at Bayern and in the German national set-up.
“What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.” Charles Baudelaire
There is something visceral, something deeply emotional, about the transfer window. For fans of clubs who are apt to sell their best players, it stirs deep pangs of jealousy at the threat of a love lost to a more potent rival.
In a week’s time, FIFA’s new-look executive committee is due to decide on a date for the eagerly-awaited extraordinary congress that will elect a successor to Sepp Blatter after 17 often turbulent years in charge.
It was a nasty video, the link been posted on my weibo (Chinese version of twitter, but under governance for sure) account for several hours, and with quite a few football supporters impatiently asking me to take a look.
“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” Albert Einstein
When Einstein wrote the most famous equation in physics, he identified his inputs very clearly as energy, mass and the speed of light: E=mc2. But then the relationship between energy and mass is itself intrinsic, a fact represented in the paradox about what counts and can be counted.
When FIFA’s new chief ethics investigator Cornel Borbely took over back in March, he insisted he would not be influenced or sidetracked by anyone within the heirarchy of football’s world governing body when it came to making independent decisions.
Few deals tell us as much about what football was, and what it is becoming, as the recent transaction that has seen a second division club based in the Eastern French town of Montbéliard (population: about 26,000) change hands for a reported €7 million.
One year ago they suffered the most painful, humiliating defeat in the history of football. Somehow things have got worse. To the extent that remarkably we have to ask ourselves: is there a way back for Brazil? Can the nation synonymous with football ever regain its special status?