As Herman Ouseley announces his impending retirement from Kick It Out after 25 years, a game that can gift Richard Scudamore £5m can surely fund the campaign properlyIt is probably a measure of the man – and the fact he would never draw attention to this himself – that I must confess that, until the last week, I did not realise Herman Ouseley had never received a penny in wages during all the years he has been at the forefront of football’s anti‑racism campaigning.He announced on Tuesday that he will be retiring from Kick It Out at the end of the season, when he will be 74, and it probably sums up the modern‑day sport that he will be lucky...
FA’s departing chief executive will leave through the revolving door in May but with the ruling body in a stronger positionOn top of the congratulatory statistics with which the Football Association showered Martin Glenn when announcing he will stand down as the chief executive at the end of this season, is another, the most pertinent figure of all. Glenn’s decision, made just before Richard Scudamore takes his leave of the Premier League with his famous £5m thank-you card, means no fewer than six FA chief executives have gone or announced their departures during Scudamore’s single 19-year span.Glenn was 55 in 2015 when offered the dream/nightmare job in Wembley’s corridors, and is said to have told the then FA chairman, Greg...
Lower-division sides help young players develop and benefit from having them but there’s growing disquiet about demands that loanees play regardless of form“You can get a player, an 18-year‑old who’s on 10 grand a week, and you do a deal with the club on his wages,” says Darragh MacAnthony. “Then they not only want the wages, they want you to pay for his accommodation. They’re then on you all the time about ‘Why is he playing?’, ‘Why is he not playing?’ They’re on at you every day. If the player then has an attitude issue and we go and complain they say: ‘Get on with it, you’re not sending him back, you’ve agreed a contract, pay his wages.’”Forthright opinions, such...
North American bid was the rational choice to host the 2026 World Cup but it is difficult to see less privileged countries ever getting the opportunity nowSafe, rational and bountifully lucrative as the Fifa decision is to have the 2026 World Cup hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico, it is also disappointing for romantics fancying another tournament in Africa – and laced with contradictions, too.Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, looked opportunistically quick to immediately put himself forward for re-election next year, and he was followed by US president Donald Trump with a self-congratulatory tweet. Hosting World Cups and Olympic Games is openly a politicians’ prestige-burnishing project now, not only for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin or Qatar’s Emir, seeking soft power...
Infantino is threatened by resistance within his own ranks and political volatility worldwide – not least in the ramifications of a vote to host the 2026 tournamentThe World Cup in Russia has sailed into view with a new Fifa captain at the helm, two and a half years since Sepp Blatter’s presidency crashed on the rocks of corruption and ethics breaches. Gianni Infantino seemed a callow, unlikely president when he was elevated to succeed the banned Blatter in February 2016 as, his tie slightly askew, he tapped his heart in wonderment at winning the vote of the Fifa congress.Yet the better clue to how Infantino would operate has turned out not to be that moment of youthful elation but the...