Fifa’s and Uefa’s response to the solidarity shown by players with George Floyd needs to be more than platitudesTalk is famously cheap and out of the mouths of international football administrators tumble platitudes that are not worth the paper they will soon be written on. While encouraging, the apparent freedom granted by Fifa to players who wish to throw their collective shoulder to the wheel of protest against the sickening death of George Floyd at the knee of a Minnesota policeman should perhaps be greeted with scepticism.“For the avoidance of doubt, in a Fifa competition the recent demonstration of players in Bundesliga matches would deserve an applause and not a punishment,” said Gianni Infantino after on-field gestures made by the...
The coronavirus crisis has instilled a spirit of unity among football’s leaders – but the sport’s calendar has been shreddedAs Gareth Southgate put it so eloquently, this is hardly the moment for football to take centre stage. Yet after a week in which almost all of the sport’s global calendar was suspended amid the growing coronavirus pandemic, England’s manager can be forgiven for wondering if what Pelé described as the “beautiful game” will ever recover from this crisis.Thursday’s joint announcement by the Football Association, the Premier League and the EFL that the provisional date of the first weekend in April for the resumption of men’s and women’s professional football had been pushed back almost a month until “no earlier than...
As the coronavirus crisis deepened this week, it was heartening to see Uefa, Fifa and others show some leadershipCoronavirus – latest updates | See all our coronavirus coverageIn normal times, last experienced in Britain only a week ago, it might have been fanciful to imagine that in some unprecedented global crisis football’s squabbling and often self-seeking administrators would step up and behave like leaders.Of course, faced with an unthinkable pandemic they have had little other choice than to put their sport immediately on hold but as they did so it was almost weird to see them striking the right tone. Related: Premier League, EFL and WSL football will not restart before 30 April Related: Mikel John Obi: 'Players were scared....
The Spanish Super Cup in Jeddah and the proposed Club World Cup are just more ways of the rich becoming richerTippi Hedren sits on a bench outside the school. Behind her, crows gradually settle on a climbing frame. She smokes, distracted. By the time she finally notices a crow pass above her, it is too late. The frame, the roofs behind, the telegraph pole, the fence are laden with crows and the attack on the children cannot be averted. This is the greatest scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and it is also modern football.Every week, there comes a new detail, stat or report of an initiative. Individually they can be laughed off. What’s the Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli banging...
If the scourge of the game is to be stamped out, then Fifa cannot be soft on transgressorsL ast Monday Fifa’s The Best football awards were held at La Scala opera house in Milan. It was, as usual, an excruciating affair, full of turgid speeches and embarrassing links by the presenters. But amid this face-reddening fanfare the president of Fifa, Gianni Infantino, appealed to the audience of football celebrities on a serious matter. He noted that there had been another episode of racism in Italian football at the weekend and declared: “We have to say no to racism in whatever form.”A short while later, Megan Rapinoe, winner of the women’s player of the year award, ribbed Infantino for stealing her...