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Can Sepp Blatter turn round the fortunes of FIFA like Juan Antonio Samaranch once did the International Olympic (IOC)?
To even pose this question shows how far we have come from the dark days of the Olympic Movement back in 1998.
Also, it shows how much we now need to re-evaluate the role of the Spaniard.
FIFA is providing the press and blogs with ample ammunition this week and continues to run the risk of imploding or perhaps rendering itself irrelevant with almost daily announcements.
In fact, the world probably feels FIFA is more a soap opera rather than a highly respected world sports governing body.
The biggest question so far I have seen is how FIFA should deal with governance issues.
The past, in football, is not a foreign country. It is ever present and always points the way to what is going to happen. The FIFA Congress in Zurich was a wonderful illustration of that.
What it showed was that Sepp Blatter uses the football past as if he owns it, and the English Football Association never seem to learn from history.
Sepp Blatter proved the ultimate politician, as he has done so often in the past,
An emotional Sepp Blatter’s first task after being re-elected FIFA President by a landslide will be to restore his battered reputation.
Despite his final four-year mandate being a foregone conclusion, Blatter looked genuinely moved as he re-entered the Congress hall clutching a bunch of flowers and hugging members of his family after sweeping to victory with 186 votes.
It was widely anticipated that supporters of Mohamed Bin Hammam, the Asian football chief who was Blatter’s challenger until pulling out of the race on Sunday,
Brave and courageous where no-one else feared to tread, or foolhardy and ill-timed in the extreme?
I freely admit I have mixed feelings about England’s doomed effort to have the FIFA Presidential election postponed, the latest blow to their global credibility following the 2018 World Cup debacle.
Anyone in their right mind, given the cloud of collective suspicion and skullduggery enveloping FIFA, should applause a genuine attempt to bring about change after the most sordid episode in the organisation’s history.
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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.
Reform is the cry of the hour for FIFA. But, the question is: where does the reform start? It is not enough to open up FIFA in Zurich.
For real reform, we need to go to the heart of the organisation which extends beyond Zurich around the world. Without a worldwide fundamental structural reform, no amount of changes in Zurich will enable FIFA to come out of the crisis that has engulfed it.
Ever since FIFA announced that its Ethics Committee will conduct a hearing this coming Sunday into allegations of bribery supposedly committed by my opponent in the race for FIFA’s presidency, some remarkable, some very concerning, some serious but also some truly asinine comments were made.
To make a point very clear, let me say this: I take no joy in having to observe yet another Ethics Committee hearing and investigation. And I take absolutely no joy in seeing my friends and colleagues of many years dragged before the ethics committee which was convened after the United States ExCo Member Chuck Blazer filed a complaint against my contestant and his own Confederation President.
Can next week’s FIFA Presidential election possibly go ahead on schedule as a result of the latest seismic bombshell to hit football’s world governing body?
The decision by FIFA to investigate claims that Sepp Blatter’s only challenger, Mohamed Bin Hammam, and the organisation’s longest-serving vice-president, Jack Warner, were both caught up in a bribery sensation is by far and away the most damning of all the recent scandals to strike at the heart of the governing body’s hierarchy.
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Lord Triesman’s testimony in Parliament may not prove to be quite the defining moment for FIFA that the media coverage suggests. Triesman’s statements have been seen as FIFA’s equivalent of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Salt Lake City moment. That ended with the IOC cleaning up its act and expelling 10 members.
My worry is that the Triesman intervention could be great theatre but not lead to any real change.
I say this based on having witnessed an even more explosive drama at the IOC’s headquarters in Lausanne back in December 1998.
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,
Laurent Blanc may have escaped censure from the French Government and the French Football Federation this week, but French football’s reputation is still hanging by a thread following the row which has erupted following revelations by Mediapart that senior football officials in the country wanted to limit the number of African and north African players in their academies.
The French Football Federation report into the revelations cleared Blanc and the organisation reaffirmed their faith in their national team coach,
As Sepp Blatter prepared for a press conference at FIFA House in Zurich on Tuesday about new ways of making football a better spectacle, the only line of awkward questioning he was probably contemplating was why the three most high-profile members of FIFA’s newly-established Task Force 2014 had failed to show up for its debut session.
Then someone, presumably his general secretary, told him the bad news. That in London at exactly the same time,
Queen’s Park Rangers return to the Premiership will make their fans want to know is whether their rich owner will follow in the footsteps of Roman Abramovich. He is after all richer than Abramovich, indeed he is the richest man in Britain with a net worth of £24 billion ($39 billion).
But that’s not how Lakshmi Mittal sees things. QPR will not be a passion for him as Chelsea is for the Russian and,