June 17 – Group H takes over with the last of the first round group matches. A much fancied Belgium face North African powerhouse Algeria, while global super powers Russia and South Korea face off. Round 1 winners Brazil and Mexico re-enter the fray.
June 16 – INSIDEworldfootball journalists and columnists are peppered all around Brazil. Here chief correspondent Andrew Warshaw, currently loose in Brazil, rounds up some of the off-the-field activity so far.
June 16 – Ghana beat the US in 2006 and 2010; Iran have won just one World Cup game out of nine World Cup games – against the US in 1998 (should Mr Garcia be investigating this clear threat to national interest?); this is Germany’s 100th World Cup game (still checking but pretty sure they have never been beaten by the US in a World Cup).
Now you may not readily think that democracy can be a hindrance to reform. To suggest that seems absurd. Yet in the case of FIFA that is indeed the stumbling block. Democracy is undoubtedly the best way to run things but the one person, one vote idea can have pitfalls as the working of FIFA demonstrates so vividly.
I say this because hard as it is to believe FIFA, in comparison with many other organisations including the United Nations,
June 15 – Messi vs Dzeko, Msssi has scored once in 571 mnutes of World Cup football, Dzeko scoed 10 in qualifying. France have never played Honduras beore, the Swiss have never played Ecuador.
June 13 – Here are the key stats you need to know before embarrassing yourself infront of your colleagues, opponents or the opposition game day FA president. The first round of Group A closes, Group B opens. Brazil won last night, according to the conventional script, but what do the refs have in store for us today.
So just how historically significant will it turn out to be?
The moment Neymar’s left-foot shot from 22 metres eluded Pletikosa’s outstretched hand, hit a post and trickled across the line.
‘It’s only a game of football’ is a line we have all heard before. Never could it be less fitting than Brazil’s opening match in the 2014 World Cup.
Defeat against Croatia, or even a draw, could have had nasty consequences on the streets of Brazil,
And so, with a final flourish, Sepp Blatter got out his cheque-book and wrote out a cheque for $200 million. No, the FIFA President’s closing gesture at this week’s FIFA Congress was not quite that dramatic. But his promise of $750,000 to all 209 national associations and $7 million to each of the six confederations has the same effect.
To which my question is this: has this $198.75 million of apparently extra expenditure already been written in to FIFA’s budgets?
As dusk fell over Sao Paulo’s spanking new stadium towards the end of the first half of the World Cup’s eagerly awaited kickoff, FIFA president Sepp Blatter and his organisation must have felt the same as the rest of us.
Amidst a sea of yellow and a cauldron of noise, here was an opening match full of entertainment and adventure in contrast to the cautious, cat-and-mouse approach that so often fails to deliver at the start of the biggest sporting show on earth for fear of errors being made and confidence being damaged.
June 12 – You might not believe it but in the hype and excitement around tonight’s World Cup opening match there is in fact another team on the ptich with Brazil. They are called Croatia, they come from Europe and they might be the rollover that the script has writen for them. For each match of the World Cup, in partnership wth the Association of Football Statisticians and its 11.11.com website, we will give you an at-a-glance guide to stats,
“Trade has all the fascination of gambling without its moral guilt.” Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy
When five of FIFA’s six commercial partners spoke out against the most recent corruption allegations surrounding FIFA, people across the world held their breath. Could the sponsors withdraw their financial support for FIFA? Could this effect revolutionary change at football’s world governing body?
Well, what does history tell us? Three years ago almost to the day,
When Sepp Blatter took to the stage during the gala opening of FIFA’s Congress in Sao Paolo and strutted his stuff with one of Brazil’s most glamourous models, it rounded off an eventful day for the 78-year-old FIFA president.
But not one that went entirely his way.
After a tub-thumping round of self-promotional speeches to his loyal followers among five of FIFA’s six regional confederations, and hearing gushing messages of support come flying back,
So, the world is surprised and shocked by what informed followers of the African game and its politics have known, through the grapevine, for ages – that Mohamed bin Hammam, the former president of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), spent significant sums of money to create a sphere of political influence amongst the continent’s federation presidents.
The spread sheet and emails published by the Sunday Times of London, revealing the sums spent on lavish Qatari and Malaysian vacations for several FA chiefs,
There was good news and bad news for European club football in the financial story of the 2012-13 season, as compiled by professional services firm Deloitte in its latest Annual Review of Football Finance.
The good news is that, whether as a consequence of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) initiative or for some other reason, top-tier clubs in the five big west European football markets of England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, do seem to be managing their financial affairs more sustainably.
There is nothing like a western-orchestrated attack on one of its member federations to put Asian football’s nose out of joint and provoke a strong response.
Over the past few days, both the head of the Asian Football Confederation, Sheikh Salman Ebrahim El Khalifa, and Sheikh Ahmad Fahad Al-Sabah, Asia’s Olympic supremo, have joined forces to roundly condemn the corruption allegations being hurled at Qatar over its 2022 World Cup bid.