By Andrew Warshaw, chief correspondent
May 3 – FIFA President Sepp Blatter, with typically deliberate timing, has re-opened the prickly debate over World Cup slots by promoting Asia’s case for more representation.
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,
By Tom Parsons
May 2 – The English Rugby Football Union has announced that eight football grounds will be used to host games at the 2015 Rugby World Cup. The tournament, predominately held in England, will be staged at 13 different venues around England and Wales during September and October 2015.
By Mark Baber
May 2 –Alisher Usmanov claims Arsenal’s majority shareholder Stan Kroenke “doesn’t show any wish” to create a winning team according to reports in the British press.
By Gareth Messenger
May 2 – The doctor at the centre of Spain’s biggest doping scandal has been handed a one-year suspended sentence after being found guilty of endangering public health. But the big winners in the case are the alleged dopers from sports other than cycling, and including football, who will retain their anonymity.
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.
By John Duerden in Kuala Lumpur
May 2 – It is hard to know which was the most extraordinary sight at the Asian Football Confederation’s Extraordinary Congress at the Mandarin Hotel in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday morning: Sheikh Salman Ebrahim Al-Khalifa winning the election to become the next president of the AFC in the first round of voting, his bitter rival Yousuf Al Serkal coming in last or Sepp Blatter lecturing delegates about the necessity of returning to core football values.
By John Duerden in Kuala Lumpur
May 2 – FIFA President Sepp Blatter congratulated Sheikh Salman Bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa for his “brilliant election” victory to the Presidency of the Asian Football Confederation but not before cautioning that Asian football had to put its house in order.
By John Duerden in Kuala Lumpur
May 2 – Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al-Khalifa of Bahrain won a landslide first-round victory to become the 10th president of the Asian Football Confederation on Thursday, trouncing his stunned opponents as he promised to lead Asian football into a new era of stability.
By Monica Villar
May 2 – The new President of the Valencia Foundation, Aurelio Martínez thinks Valencia CF should copy German team Borussia Dortmund’s economic and sporting model.
By Richard van Poortvliet
May 2 – The head of Referee’s Department and Inspectorate for the Russian Football Union, Roberto Rosetti, has announced that he has no plans to invite foreign referee’s to adjudicate matches in the Russian Premier League in the foreseeable future.
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.
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.
By John Duerden in Kuala Lumpur
May 1 – The talking will shortly be over, the daggers are drawn and the tension is as thick as the cigarette smoke filling the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in the Malaysian capital.
