By taking a stand over racial abuse he has received, Liverpool’s 17-year-old striker shames those who run the game but offers hope for the next generationIt isn’t easy knowing whether the people occupying football’s ivory towers have actually noted what Rhian Brewster has had to say in the past few days. Unless I have missed it, the executives at Uefa and Fifa have not uttered a word in response and, frankly, that is no surprise whatsoever. Anyone calling Uefa since 22 December would get a cheery answerphone message saying its offices are closed and the lights are out until 4 January. Fifa, meanwhile, is on its own extended Christmas break. “Hope you are not in a hurry,” one of its...
Lindsey Vonn’s outburst against Donald Trump means she takes her place in a complex game where politics and sport have once again become deeply entangledOn the face of it, Lindsey Vonn looks like Donald Trump’s type. Tall, blond, blue-eyed and a former star – naked but for a coat of paint – of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, the champion skier is the epitome of what would once have been called an all-American girl. And she will be one of the main draws of February’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, hoping to repeat her 2010 Olympic downhill win in Vancouver and thus take a measure of solace for her absence through injury in Sochi four years ago.Coming off a 2016-17 season...
Lineker has been one of Fifa’s most visceral critics and it is baffling to find him presiding over events in Moscow, even in an industry where the phrase ’complete moral volte-face’ tends to draw blank looksAs the days ticked down you kept thinking he might still have something up his sleeve. Maybe this is a brilliantly orchestrated inside job. Maybe halfway through the World Cup draw in Moscow, as the balls are divvied up and shark-like Fifa men with faces as blank as the polished granite interior of a Panamanian bank vault yawn behind their hands, Gary Lineker will wink at the camera, drop the mask of sickly corporate piety and get on with trashing the place.This is how it...
Fifa president has already wrecked his flagship event and with the World Cup taking place on Friday has only one of 20 local sponsors in place and has yet to agree terms for the TV rights with Russian broadcastersGood news and bad news once more for Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, who refuses to abandon his delusions of adequacy. The good news is Gianni has pre-announced there will be no racist incidents at the Russia World Cup next summer. “This is a very high priority,” he explained, “and we will make sure no incidents will happen.”The bad news is there may be no local sponsors at the Russia World Cup next summer. I say “no local sponsors” – in fact, there is...
It is tempting to call Fifa’s corruption debacle a gift that just keeps on giving. Except it feels like something else by now, a gift that has, frankly, given too muchAre you feeling it yet? The Fifa corruption fatigue? It has, after all, been seven years in the making, from the oddly homespun excesses of the whistleblower Chuck Blazer, football’s own mobility scooter Liberace; to the cold, gangsterish disdain of the Grondona-Teixeira-Leoz axis, the kind of Fifa men who would carve out your liver with an ivory-inlaid oyster knife if it meant getting a step closer to a secret six-figure TV rights access sweetener.This week the US justice department court case sparked into life in New York. Its first few...