Columnists Archives - Page 53 of 78 - Inside World Football

Lee Wellings: The value of giving it a little bit of time to cook

If the case of Sir Alexander Chapman Ferguson doesn’t serve as a warning to trigger-happy football club owners and chief executives, nothing ever will.

Three trophy-less years into Alex Ferguson’s reign as Manchester United manager the fans were restless.

But the board stuck by him in those dark days of 1989.

24 years and a record 38 trophies later – including 13 Premier League titles – it’s just about safe to say Ferguson repaid the club’s faith.

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: Sir Alex Ferguson, why we will never again see the like of him

It is a measure of how much Sir Alex Ferguson changed football that his retirement should have overshadowed the Queen’s speech and led to newspapers printing souvenir editions. It is hard to imagine any other football manager leaving his job, and that too at the age of 71, having such a profound impact. Indeed the amount of time and space devoted to his retirement suggests he is no longer regarded as a football coach but more like a statesman or world thinker who shaped all our lives.

David Owen: Will football’s loss be horseracing’s gain?

News of Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement brought to mind two scenes nearly three decades apart.

In the first, it is 11 May 1983 and I am with friends clustered around the TV in a cramped London apartment.

A strong Scottish contingent is hoping to witness a miracle: the humbling of Real Madrid by Ferguson’s new kids on the block from Aberdeen, a side built around the indefatigable Gordon Strachan and the formidable centre-back pairing of Alex McLeish and Willie Miller.

Money rules The Game (what else is new)

Questions arise, and only the un-inducted don’t have answers. Why does football play such a central role in the world today? What is it that makes the wealthiest people in the world and the poorest sods alike flock to The Game religiously and cherish it beyond comprehension? What is it that makes football different, to the extent that pundits, writers and idiots alike make a living commenting about The Game, about those who own it,

Andrew Warshaw

Andrew Warshaw: A classic tale of football powerbroking

Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al-Khalifa’s runaway success in becoming the new leader of Asian football – on paper only until 2015 but in all probability far beyond – was about as clearcut as you can get. But it nevertheless contained all the elements of a classic Shakespearean plot: revenge, intrigue, conspiracy theories, false promises – and just as many questions as answers.

Revenge, says the old cliche, is a dish best served cold.

Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings: Fuentes doping scandal taints football

Keeping Jose Mourinho out of the spotlight is near impossible. And his impending divorce from Real Madrid after a loveless marriage was the talk of Madrid and the football world when they failed to overturn the Dortmund deficit

But something more significant than football results – yes even the Champions league results, even Jose Mourinho’s future – had concluded in Spain earlier in the day.

The trial of Doctor Eufemiano Fuentes in Madrid.

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: Can we any longer allow football to regulate itself?

The recent disclosures about the scandals in world football, so graphically documented on this website, not only raise serious questions about football and its lack of morality but also about how such issues are treated in the western media.

That football has become a business is now so taken for granted that it hardly seems worth repeating. However the problem with the football business is that the business is self regulated. That may be true of all sport but no sport is such a huge business that football has become in the last two decades.

Andrew Warshaw

Andrew Warshaw interviews Hassan Al-Thawadi on his bid for FIFA’s executive committee

During the increasingly fractious battle in Kuala Lumpur to become President of Asian football, it has been conveniently overlooked amid the political in-fighting that the position is effectively transitionary and only for 18 months.

Potentially far more significant is the other separate vote for a spot on the FIFA executive committee – the most powerful elite gathering in world football. Not least because it is a four-year term as distinct from just keeping the seat warm for possibly someone else.

Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: Football, racism and me…

I had initially planned to do a piece on the parlous state of Cameroonian football, after the humiliating failure of the not-so-Indomitable Lions, four-time champions of the continent, to qualify for the last two Africa Cup of Nations tournaments.

But, when a nosey-parker journalist – me, in this case – ends up in the news, rather than being in the preferred position of reporting it, one is left with no choice than to make the proverbial lemonade out of lemons.

Jean Francois Tanda

Jean Francois Tanda: Could FIFA Museum already be a thing of the past?

FIFA’s media office sent the invitation to media representatives twice. Obviously, the international football federation wanted to make sure that numerous journalists attend the event. On Twitter, FIFA President Joseph “Sepp” Blatter announced a “hugely exciting major project”. Only a few minutes later, he revealed he was talking about the FIFA Museum in Zurich.

The campaign worked well, and in front of numerous cameras and microphones Blatter could tell many journalists about his dream and his gift to the “sports city Zurich”.

Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: What is talent without character?

After watching this pint-sized Uruguayan, on a bitterly cold winter’s night, at Johannesburg’s Soccer City, blatantly cheat his way to the 2010 World Cup semi-final, in front of nearly 90,000 witnesses, as well as have the temerity to subsequently gloat about his act of theft, I have found it very hard to have any regard for Luis Suarez.

And so do many people around the African continent, especially folks that come from Ghana.

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: Old Trafford’s Overlords have always picked it right

As Manchester United celebrate yet another Premiership, and a record haul of 20 of the most sought after prize in English football, spare a thought for Dave Whelan. Had things turned out differently the Wigan owner would today not be fearful that his team may not survive in the Premiership. Instead he would be lording it over Old Trafford and joining the celebrations of the fans as the owner of greatest club in the land.

Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings: Biting the hand that feeds you. Are fans cheering the indefensible?

The chances are that at least one of those eleven footballers you are cheering is what English people might call a wrong’un. A ne’er do well. A nasty piece of work. Increasingly you suspect it’s far more than the odd bad apple, but half the team.

I raise this of course because of Luis Suarez, arguably the third best player in the world and with a charge sheet longer than the bite marks in Branislav Ivanovic’s arm.

Inside Insight: No Irish, no blacks, no dogs.

The most recent spell of hooliganism in England (Millwall-Wigan and Newcastle-Sunderland matches) appears to have rung in a renewed era of primitive and vulgar fan behavior that had led to the ban of English clubs and the England team from international football in the 80s. Hooliganism defaced the English game throughout the 1970s and 1980s: in 1974, a Blackpool fan was stabbed to death at Blackpool’s home match with Bolton Wanderers. In 1985, after vile hooliganism of Liverpool fans led to the deaths of 39 Juventus supporters before the European Cup final at the Heysel Stadium,

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: Why football cannot have its cake and eat it

In Britain this has been a great week for turning the clock back promoted by the death of Lady Thatcher and a necessary look back at her legacy.

Yet it is too simplistic to see the riots by Millwall fans at the Wembley semi-final as a return to the old spectre of football hooligan. There is, of course a historical twist to this. With the riots coming just days before Thatcher was laid to rest it was natural to reflect that it was Millwall and their riotous fans back in 1985 filling British television screens with violence which first prompted the Lady to think that the only solution for such behaviour was more stringent police control.