Pitch Invasion

It’s been bubbling under the surface for a while now. The collapse of Fifa’s former marketing partners ISL/ISMM almost seven years ago is soon to be dragged through the courts in Switzerland — the scandalous and hugely costly fall of ISL/ISMM almost brought down Blatter at the time, and there’s a chance senior FIFA executives could be named as having taken bribes. It might get ugly for Sepp Blatter.

In the wake of this week’s Uefa/Fifa-G14 accord, Brian Phillips sat down with the two men responsible at, uh, a Red Lobster?

Find out what they had for dinner and how they crushed the G14.

Is the disbanding of the G14 a victory for anyone other than the self-serving elite of world football?

I wrote about the dirty dealings behind the glitz of Fifa’s latest World Cup draw here the other day as well, but writing for print always makes me actually explain things properly.
So anyone interested in the suspect dealings going on at FIFA might want to read my latest column at the Chicago Sports Weekly on […]

Today, the draw for the qualifying round of the 2010 World Cup will take place. It will be beamed to 173 countries, and FIFA’s General Secretary Jérôme Valcke will be centre stage alongside Sepp Blatter.
Yet less than twelve months ago, Valcke, then FIFA’s marketing director, faced ruin following the finding of an American court that […]

So, Brazil in 2014 it is then. As we discussed last week, all is not rosy in this choice, despite the obvious allure of that country; the lack of competition to win the rights to host the World Cup has hardly helped them kick things into shape, either.
I was going to write about this at […]