Sports leaders are often keen to ascribe a higher purpose to the gloriously trivial pursuits to which they owe their positions. Hence last year’s agreement aimed at strengthening collaboration between the United Nations (UN) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC); hence FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s dogged attempts to use football to help map out a modus vivendi between Israel and Palestine.
I was interested to read Laila Mintas’s recent column on voting reform at FIFA. But while I can see much logic in the position she stakes out, and can certainly appreciate the democratic anomaly of China (population 1.3 billion) having the same voting power as American Samoa and Andorra (populations each less than 100,000), it seems to me there are more important matters to focus on before the introduction of Mintas’s Point-Voting-System can have any bearing on the calibre of governance in world football.
Much has been made of the appointment of a veteran of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s Salt Lake City crisis to chair the new body charged with drafting a package of reform proposals far-reaching enough to salvage FIFA’s battered reputation.
Have we hit peak Sheikh? That was a question being posed in the luxury hotel bars of Kuala Lumpur last week during the 128th International Olympic Committee (IOC) Session.
Few deals tell us as much about what football was, and what it is becoming, as the recent transaction that has seen a second division club based in the Eastern French town of Montbéliard (population: about 26,000) change hands for a reported €7 million.
From the days of Mrs Astor’s New York, and probably long before, all networks have had their must-attend parties. The annual summer party thrown by the late Sir David Frost, the media personality, is a good example of the sort of thing I have in mind. This past week in Lausanne, there was no doubting the invitation that those hooked into the Olympic “network” most wanted to get their hands on: it was for the June 8 reception to mark the inauguration of the new Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC) Headquarters,
Not for the first time, he wrong-footed us all. When the invitation to a FIFA press conference thudded into our inboxes on Tuesday at 3.36pm UK time, I don’t think anyone seriously expected two hours later to be listening to Sepp Blatter, one of the great survivors of our world, setting out how he proposed to “lay down my mandate” as FIFA President.
A week when we learnt that UEFA may soon fine-tune its much talked-about Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations seems a good time to highlight an aspect of the European football body’s payment distribution system that is anything but fair – and which we now know we are stuck with until at least 2018.
At the end of a season in which no Premier League representative made it as far as the quarter-finals of either major European club competition, it seems most odd to be thinking in terms of a new era of English dominance in European club football. Yet, recent developments look to be conspiring to make this all but inevitable.
It being general election week here in the United Kingdom, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the FIFA Presidential election – via the medium of the four candidates’ Twitter feeds. Not because I judge this likely to offer great insights into the identity of the eventual winner: the football officials in whose hands the outcome lies are assuredly far too high-minded to be swayed by anything as trivial as social media.
Remember the date: April 30 may well turn out to be a more significant day for the medium- to long-term future of FIFA than May 29. That might seem a strange claim, given that the latter is the date of the FIFA Presidential election to determine the occupant of the second-most powerful post in sport for the next four years.
It was interesting to read the recent report to the effect that European Club Association (ECA) head Karl-Heinz Rummenigge believes that football’s perennial club-versus-country tug of war is now receding.
Watching developments in English football can be a trying business, whether we are talking on or off the pitch. So it is characteristic that a week which brought a big step forward in manoeuvring a respected English voice on to the sport’s top table should also have featured a proposal from the boss of the Football Association that would, in my opinion, represent a significant backwards step both for the Premier League and the England team he is trying to strengthen.
Chelsea’s dramatic Champions League elimination at the hands of Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday night makes it likely that next week will bring down the curtain on the participation of Premier League clubs in this season’s flagship European club competition, before even the quarter-final stage. Survival in the other big continent-wide tournament, the Europa League, may last only a further 24 hours if Everton cannot get the better of Ukraine’s Dynamo Kiev over two legs.
I don’t often say this, but three cheers to the Football Association (FA) for signalling its desire to continue sending teams to the Olympic football tournament. I just hope that at some point it becomes possible once again for a Great Britain Olympic squad to be genuinely British.