By Andrew Warshaw
December 17 – Several of the most powerful officials in world football have now indicated that the 2022 World Cup could be switched to the winter months to avoid the searing summer heat in Qatar.
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Sam Allardyce as the saviour of football is a difficult concept to accept. But judging from the media reaction to his sacking, it would seem the new owners of Blackburn have committed a crime that would be beyond Herod.
They have not only sacked a manager, bad enough, but done it after consulting an agent, Jerome Anderson, and a firm based in Switzerland. To make it worse, the owners themselves are foreign, an Indian group whose business is poultry,
December 16 – Well-known former football administrator George Dick has died, the Football Federation Australia (FFA) has announced.
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By David Owen
December 15 – The timetable for appointing a new Chairman of the English Football Association appears likely to slip, insideworldfootball has learnt.
By Andrew Warshaw in London
December 15 – The battle over the future of the Olympic Stadium post-2012 looks set to be decided by the end of March next year.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 14 – London 2012 deputy chairman Sir Keith Mills today ruled out any chance of becoming the new chairman of the English Football Association as the hunt continues to find a permanent replacement for Lord Triesman who resigned earlier this year after being caught up in a newspaper sting.
December 14 – Olympic champions Dame Kelly Holmes, Daley Thompson and Sally Gunnell are among a host of former British athletes who have made a passionate plea in an open letter for the Olympic Stadium to retain an athletics track after the 2012 Games.
The World Cup is gone. English football now needs some clear thinking about its future relations with the international game.
The disappointment of the Zurich vote that saw the 2018 World Cup awarded instead to Russia brought with it talk of breaking away from FIFA.
Such thoughts, moreover, were not confined to those whom one might easily write off as “extremists” in this context.
By Duncan Mackay
British Sports Internet Writer of the Year
December 11 – Sergei Fursenko, the President of the Russian Football Union (RFU), has claimed that nationalist organisations were behind violent clashes involving Spartak Moscow fans that today claimed the life of one fan and left another 29 injured.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 10 – UEFA President Michel Platini says there was nothing wrong with last week’s controversial World Cup ballots which, he said, reflected a clear philosophy to take the tournament to new destinations.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 9 – Qatar’s insistence that hosting the 2022 World Cup in the heat of mid-summer would be negated by their revolutionary cooling plans has been questioned by the former head of their own confederation.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 8 – England’s beleaguered 2018 World Cup bid chairman Geoff Thompson (pictured) has broken his silence on his country’s two-vote humiliation by adding his voice to those who believe FIFA should have given clearer guidelines to bidding nations.
December 8 – A group of leading international football consultants has acquired Grass Roots Football LIVE, Britain’s premier event of its type held annually at the NEC in Birmingham.
By Duncan Mackay
British Sports Internet Writer of the Year
December 8 – Jack Warner, the President of CONCACAF, has hit out at Jamaica’s national team for a series of cash demands they made during their successful defence of the Digicel Caribbean Cup.
So FIFA is corrupt, full of Executive members who look you in the eye and lie, and England is taking its ball home.
Should such a statement be put to the British public today, I am quite certain it would receive unanimous support. Even before the Zurich debacle, FIFA, and in particular President Sepp Blatter, would have struggled to win a popularity contest in the mother land of football. But I have rarely seen a country and its media so united in its condemnation of the organisation.