That the 10 teams for the final knockout round, of the African qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup finals, will be known by the end of the first week in September, following the conclusion of the group stages, is no breaking news.
But the CAF-inspired decision not to allow the continent’s final five World Cup qualifiers emerge, directly, from the league format, as was the case for the 2002, 2006 and 2010 World Cups,
Gareth Bale may be the first British galectico that Real Madrid have signed since David Beckham in 2003, but the differences between the two transfers shows how the world of football has moved on in the last decade. In a sense there has been a revolution in the way transfers are done and mega million transfers of high profile players have truly come of age.
It shows how much more skilful agents are,
Gareth Bale did not have to stand on an 8m-high temporary platform for his unveiling as a €100 million signing to recognise he had swapped Tottenham Hotspur for a truly global stage at Real Madrid. The 24-year-old was already well aware of his commercial appeal.
In March he registered a stylised rendering of his ‘trademark’ goal celebration, which creates a heart shape from the contact of his index fingers and thumbs, as exactly that: a trademark with the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office.
Breakfast with Michel Platini is an annual media gathering on the fringes of the Champions League draw in Monaco that has become almost de rigueur for anyone trying to get inside the head of the UEFA president.
Informal and charmingly mischievous, you invariably get him in an engaging, outgoing mood – in a variety of languages – away from all those official functions and formalities.
Yet among the nods, winks, innuendos and wise-cracking,
Getting a substantial number of women into the corridors of administrative power remains a major challenge for football, which is still seen – not without justifiable cause, I might add – as being a stuffy old boy’s club.
If there is one thing in which Africa is certainly pointing the right way to Europe and the rest of the world, it is in giving women a chance at the top of the administrative ladder.
FIFA. They really are the masters at changing their stance on an issue, taking ownership of it, and complimenting themselves on their new stance.
Please don’t misunderstand me. It’s a compliment. There are some clever operators in and around the Zurich HQ.
Blatter’s nifty footwork to become a racism trailblazer after his horrible gaffe to me in 2011 is one example.
After a weekend in which none of the Premier League’s big three managed to win, it remains tough to predict who will emerge as the 2013-14 champions. But you don’t need too powerful a crystal ball even at this stage to foresee which club is likely to make the season’s biggest pre-tax profit.
Assuming the soap opera of Gareth Bale’s transfer to Real Madrid (or A.N.Other) reaches a consummation before the window closes,
The transfer of Gareth Bale to Real Madrid is set to generate £83 million and more in fees. This is by any measure a staggering sum of money. Whether the world-record sum represents value for money and whether his club can justify it under UEFA’s financial fair play rules are subjective matters for Real and UEFA to consider.
But it is intriguing to wonder whether Real’s owner, Florentino Perez, considered recent legal arguments as he haggled with Tottenham Hotspur’s chairman,
The best football managers in history are often celebrated for their personalities. Their charisma. Their humour. Their temper.
But ultimately a club stands or falls on its team sheet. The players that these managers have selected.
The thing about Ferguson or Zagallo, Shankly, Clough, even Michels is that they knew which players they needed and how to use them, it’s as simple as that. No one-liner, no piece of motivation, not even a footballing philosophy like ‘total football’
‘Spend, spend, spend’, read the notice brandished by a furious-looking man behind Arsène Wenger’s dugout, as Arsenal slumped to a 3-1 defeat to Aston Villa on Saturday. His was the politest exhortation of the day. Echoes of the anger that filled the Emirates Stadium, where groups of Arsenal supporters came to blows in their seats, have been read and heard on social media and radio phone-ins long after the final whistle fell silent.
It is the expression of a profound frustration,
The Premier League season is barely a week old and results for all the hoopla hardly count. But off the field we already have the makings of a fascinating duel between BT and Sky, both of whom have the rights to broadcast live matches. Now on the face of it this is the biggest mismatch ever.
Sky has the rights to most of the matches, it has built its entire broadcasting structure on the back of the Premier League and played a huge role in making the League what it is today.
With Egypt taking one uncertain but dangerous turn after another, as a result of the raging political crisis, the ‘House of African football’ is unwittingly caught up in the crossfire of a domestic conflict.
That’s an inescapable consequence of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) being headquartered in Cairo, the theatre of bloody street battles between rival supporters of the military-backed transitional government and the country’s democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, forced out of office a few weeks ago,
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Greg Dyke has never been afraid to take on the big battalions. His fights with Rupert Murdoch first over the rights to televise the newly formed Premier League and then over Sky’s attempt to buy Manchester United are legendary. And, as has been well recorded, he famously took on Tony Blair, and particularly his PR guru Alistair Campbell, over the dossier about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This ultimately cost him his BBC job but the way he waged that war showed his lust for battle.
Winter or summer?
Confucius say: Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
A summer World Cup has always been the FIFA choice in the past. Ever since the first one in 1930 in Uruguay.
But then, in Switzerland for example, women were not allowed to vote until the sixties – hence women not voting “had always been the choice” until such time as they were allowed to become full-time citizens.