“FIFA ‘President for Life’ Sepp Blatter wants all of you people talking about World Cup boycotts to know: He’s not trying to hear that noise. According to Blatter, boycotts are nonsense. The only thing that can heal the demons plaguing the world is the glorious, magical FIFA World Cup. It’s Robitussin for the masses.” Fusion

“At 09:00 GMT on Thursday, Fifa published a report that cleared Russia and Qatar of any wrongdoing during the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Instead, the English Football Association came under fire for flouting bid rules. Less than four hours later, it was all change when the Fifa report was criticised by the man who spent two years investigating claims of corruption on behalf of football’s world governing body. What is the background to this story, who is to blame for the controversy and what will happen now?” BBC (Video)

“The deranged run-up to the 2015 World Cup leapt over another ridiculous bar on Monday, with lawyers for a group of prominent players claiming FIFA has threatened retaliation over a lawsuit filed last month. That claim, one that seeks to keep next summer’s event from being played on artificial turf, is expected to be heard before the end of the year, giving both sides a few more weeks to ramp up their crazy ahead of a possible conclusion.” Soccer Gods

“TOMOS KNOX looks at the plight of the team from the tiny Channel Island as they search for more ‘international’ recognition. It’s 2003, and the Island Games, an Olympic themed tournament for islands all over the world, is just about to begin. Hosted in Guernsey, it includes triathlon, sailing, basketball, and of course, football. The opening ceremony, held on the seafront in St Peter’s Port, was a far cry from the multi-million pound Olympic Games ceremonies, but it still attracted thousands of people. Instead of parading around a monsterously large stadium, the 2,500 competitors and officials walked from North Beach to Albert Pier, drawing applause from the crowd. Among the 23 islands were Greenland, debutants Bermuda, and Sark. Although the latter had competed in previous editions of the Games, this was to be the first time that they would enter a football team. …” The Football Pink

“Amidst the usual release of FIFA Rankings recently lay a statistic which only a keen-eyed observer would notice: the biggest drop in places had been awarded to the small nation of Guyana, a Caribbean country geographically located in South America and neighbour to one the most famous footballing nations of all: Brazil. Guyana was a team which only two years ago, reached their furthest ever point in 2014 World Cup qualifiers, and were giving Mexico a run for their money at the Azteca Arena after previously eliminating Caribbean powerhouse Trinidad and Tobago. Yet fast forward to 2014 and the National Team now finds themselves comprehensively losing to St Lucia and St Kitts & Nevis in recent Caribbean Cup qualifiers. The question therefore is: how did this decline occur?” In Bed With Maradona

“Brazil 2014 followed an all too familiar script for the Ivory Coast, with the Elephants of West Africa once again buckling at the key moments. For over a decade the Ivoirians have been plagued by an inability to mould their array of talent into a unit resembling anything near the sum of their parts. At the same they have consistently struggled psychologically with the mental challenges associated with tournament football – their failure to win any of the last five African Cup of Nations (AFCONs) in spite of entering them all as resounding favourites being vindication of that flaw.” backpagefootball

Jan. 4, 2014. “Hipster football: A sometimes pejorative shorthand for various forms of interest in football, from a love of obscure tactical facets of the game to an appreciation of teams you’ve never heard of but should love. Given the usually dedicated nature of football fandom, why do we develop crushes on certain teams, and why do we call that ‘hipster’ anyway?” Huffington Post

“MOST people associate FIFA, the organization that oversees international soccer, with the quadrennial joy of the World Cup. But as the 2014 tournament begins next week in Brazil, FIFA is plagued by levels of corruption, graft and excess that would shame Silvio Berlusconi. Despite the palatial estates, private planes and pompous airs of FIFA’s current leaders, the organization actually has quite humble origins. FIFA was founded in 1904 in Paris as a simple rule-making committee that aimed to regulate the guidelines for a new, rapidly expanding sport when played between nations.” NYT – Opinion

“Nike. Carlsberg. Samsung. Familiar sponsors flash past on electronic billboards. At the same time, red-letter propaganda banners line the pitch, proclaiming: ‘The Chinese Dream. You, I, Gather Together. You, I, Advance Together.’ Apart from its name—the ‘Workers’ Stadium’ — and the socialist realist statue outside the entrance, Beijing Guoan’s home ground shows no signs that it was first erected at the height of the Maoist era in 1959. Today the renovated stadium is ringed with slick bars and clubs; posters advertise an upcoming Bruno Mars concert. China may have not yet made much of an impact on to the world soccer stage. But it is not the country it once was. Along with the meteoric rise of its economy, Chinese soccer has developed rapidly over the past two decades.” Roads and Kingdoms

“Truth be told, it was always going to be an arduous task for Sligo Rovers to retain their league title last season. And so it proved as it was a superior St Patrick’s Athletic outfit who instead took home the crown as the chasing pack wilted in the closing stages. Despite the fact that Rovers began the league campaign excellently by storming to an impressive eight match winning streak, their powers began to wane noticeably towards the business end of the league season. Of course, finishing third is still nothing to be sniffed at and the self-belief to better that performance remains as strong as ever.” Backpage Football

League of Ireland Preview: St Patrick’s Athletic
“As the old saying goes, reaching the top of the mountain is one thing but staying at the summit is an entirely different ball game and that is the task the stares 2013 Airtricity League Champions, St.Patrick’s Athletic right in the face ahead of the new campaign. Liam Buckley will once again take the reins at the Stadium of Light for the 2014 League of Ireland season but perhaps never has there been such expectation and excitement surrounding the “Saints” going into a new year with big name signings such as Mark Quigley and Irish international, Keith Fahey adding to the already hugely impressive Pats armour from last season.” Backpage Football

“When the British ruled India, they had a habit of establishing garrisons in towns across the subcontinent. One of these was located in the ancient town of Sialkot, which now lies in Pakistan’s Punjab province, just shy of the Indian border. To amuse themselves, British soldiers stationed there would, of course, play cricket. But they played football, too, on the many stretches of carefully watered and manicured grass that can still be found across Sialkot’s cantonment area. According to a local legend, at around the turn of the twentieth century, the British officers managed to puncture their ball during a casual kick-about. Seeking a quick and cheap mend, they enlisted the services of a local Sialkoti cobbler, who readily agreed to try and restore the unusual object to its original full-roundedness.” Road and Kingdoms

“In Maputo, the ‘Garden for Sculptors’ behind the Museu Nacional de Arte on Avenida Ho Chi Minh has become a kind of prison yard for Mozambique’s various Ozymandiases, a semi-public dumping ground where colonial monuments now crumble quietly away. A marble European baroness reclines in thick robes, the grasses growing up around her base. Both of her arms have been lopped off, but her amputated left hand still touches the midriff of a black male slave crouched in a loincloth by her side. Nearby, a decapitated Lady Justice presides over a small patch of weeds and bare earth. No longer public art, but not quite garbage, these are the monuments which were extracted like rotten teeth from the city’s squares and public buildings when Portuguese colonial rule finally ended, but which nobody could quite bring themselves to destroy.” Road and Kingdoms

“This is the third year that The Best Football Writing list (2012, 2011) has come into existence. We’ve seen blogs come and go, as well as writers rise and get the recognition they deserve. 2013 was no exception, but the continued domination of social media in sport created a new landscape for writing. With a flood of information hitting us every day, it can be difficult to find the long reads amongst a pile of memes. This year’s list was the hardest to compile, but there was hardly a shortage of quality writing. In fact, we were overwhelmed with tweets and emails recommending great writing in football.” A Football Report

“Football is never far away from its next scandal and allegations of match-fixing certainly dent the reputation of the beautiful game. But is it right to call the recent claims of wrongdoing ‘match-fixing’? Sam Sodje, a former Portsmouth player, was filmed by an undercover reporter claiming he could arrange for footballers to be booked for a £30,000 fee and a sending-off for £50,000 to £70,000 in order to facilitate betting fraudsters. Six people have been arrested, including DJ Campbell, the Blackburn Rovers striker. Emotive terms like ‘plague’ and ‘cancer’ have been used in the media and there have been calls for fixers to be banned for life, but why has no-one asked whether it is actually possible to make substantial amounts of money by betting on yellow and red cards?” BBC

“… As is often the case, the advent of the Arab Uprisings in 2011 was bathed – in the media and in Western academic circles – with a roseate glow and the belief that Arab exceptionalism had been shown to be a myth so that the Arab world would now enter into the generalised emergence of democratic governance worldwide. There was, to be sure, a residual anxiety, as new governments began to emerge, that the challenge of political Islam as a new force shaping regional political dynamics might find democracy difficult to accommodate. Confidence, however, was placed in the political maturity that such movements seemed to show, a confidence that was not dented by the sudden and unexpected emergence of a new gamut of Salafist movements and parties throughout the region.” Turbulent World

“There comes a point at which the rotten core at the heart of football will become too much for most to take. We have come to accept the greed and the avarice as a part of life, as if there is no other way in which these people behave, and we are pacified only, it seems, by the collection of three points on a Saturday afternoon. Perhaps, though, for the corrupt culture that has burrowed its way into FIFA over as many decades as you choose to select from, some sort of day of reckoning is fast approaching.” twohundredpercent

“Fictionalized films about football are usually a bust. It seems hard to recreate on-field action. And nowadays professional footballers’ lives off the field can be regimented and organized, drained of any real drama. So we are not sure what to expect from the planned biopic ‘Pele’ by the Zimbalist brothers (to their credit, they directed the documentary ‘The Two Escobars,’ which even the Colombians we know, admit is a very good film). The hype for the film ‘Pele’ started in May this year and shooting was supposed to have started in August. That we know and (from the producers’ website) the film will only focus on his early life: from ‘… his impoverished youth to his unlikely rise to futbol stardom in 1958.’ …” Football is a Country

“In the modern footballing era there have been many criticisms of refereeing performance and the clarity of the laws by which our players are to abide by whilst playing the game we all love. One rule that will always come into the spotlight is that relating to the law against handling the ball. ‘That was never deliberate’ or ‘he never meant that’ are two phrases used on countless occasions where a decision has been made where it is deemed a player has handled the ball. But the pain does not end there, when in similar situations, sometimes in the same match, the same decision has not been given. The modern approach seems to accept that referees make mistakes and that is an inherent part of the game, but can more be done to make this problem simpler? We can try to understand the root of this issue by looking at the wording of the relevant law set out by FIFA in their Laws of the Game.” Think Football

“Last year I was in Ecuador, South America, to spend time with a team called Sociedad Deportiva Aucas. Founded in 1945, and originally owned by oil company Royal Dutch Shell, financial troubles have cost them dearly in recent years, resulting in a dramatic fall from grace. They were floundering in the third tier of the league system when I arrived, but had begun to benefit from the backing of local businessman Ramiro Gordon and had ambitious plans to return to the top.” In Bed With Maradona

“While the world and its blogger were getting hot under the collar this week about satirical articles on French football websites, men in Qatar with ties who don’t know anything and a man who probably only lives in Sheffield, a statement on the FA’s website points to the story which ought really to be ringing alarm bells for English football. It’s easy to focus on the big money story, the primal fears of wealthy Arab oil men buying ‘our’ game, but the likelihood is that the prerogative of short-term politics will win the day. There is no Dream league, the major European clubs appear to have dialled back on the breakaway rhetoric which they were employing after the FIFA corruption scandal first burst into life, and the likelihood of Qatar fomenting a revolution against football’s authorities is small. After all, why would they need a revolution when they can just buy themselves a World Cup?” 2nd Yellow

“It was around eleven in the evening when the melody of gunfire and car horns erupted piercing (literally) the night sky. This is how the residents of Baghdad celebrate a victory for the national team, however what goes up must come down, not just the bullets in this case! The Iraqi national team had just squeezed past the hosts Bahrain (after extra-time and penalties) during this year’s biannual Gulf Cup of Nations semi-final. The celebrations were both spectacular and protracted. The ‘the lions of Mesopotamia’ eventually lost the final 2-1 to the UAE (after extra-time, once again) although the tournament had been a success for the nation and it’s near fanatical followers.” World Soccer