Price is not right but more relevant than the lack of control over the stadium’s future is can we really trust football’s governing body to oversee the reinvestment into the grassroots game?It takes some doing to sell a piece of London property for less than it cost you 10 years ago, a decade in which house prices in the capital have risen, according to the Office of National Statistics, by an average of 100%. Yet this magic trick is what the Football Association seems to be on the brink of pulling off, in selling a home that cost more than £800m to the Pakistani‑American billionaire Shahid Khan for around three-quarters of that sum.No wonder Ken Bates was apoplectic. “You never sell...
The rebuilt stadium cost £757m in 2007, far less than the £600m on offer, but the proposed deal makes sense - especially for grassroots footballOf all the questions prompted by the Football Association’s announcement that it is considering selling Wembley for about £600m to the car parts and NFL billionaire Shahid Khan, one, bluntly, was whether that is actually enough money. Related: FA promises £600m Wembley windfall will go to grassroots football Related: FA holds talks to sell Wembley to Fulham owner Khan in £900m deal Continue reading...
Global political turmoil might be set to wreck Russia’s World Cup but, fear not, Gianni Infantino won’t take his eye off the ball and has some interesting other ideas for us allTwo months out from a World Cup hosted by an aspirant rogue state, what is on the mind of deeply scrutable Fifa president Gianni Infantino?Is it the sense of gathering storm in international relations, at the very heart of which is the tournament’s host nation? Is it the mounting air of absurdity that might attend an event hosted by a Russian leader seemingly bent on playing the pariah, who is engaged in gruesome and increasingly provocative proxy conflict in Syria, and who was at the weekend accused of tampering...
Thirty years on, the basic premise of Football Against the Enemy illustrates a different world where the game was a point of resistance against control and oppressionThis summer it will be 30 years since an event that helped inspire what is still one of the most deliciously moreish football books in English.Football Against the Enemy is a collection of excellent, energetically compiled essays by Simon Kuper. It can seem a little dated in parts now, postcards from a world still shrouded in pre-internet mist but in a week of apparently irresolvable moral confusion over Pep Guardiola, yellow ribbons and all that, it also feels like a point of illuminating contrast. Related: Pep Guardiola: I’d take ribbon off if I thought...
Manchester City manager’s yellow-ribbon display of political affiliation sits uncomfortably with a readiness to front for QatarAs they consider the case of Pep Guardiola, who won his first medal in English football at Wembley on Sunday while semi-surreptitiously sporting a yellow ribbon in support of the jailed members of the Catalan independence movement, the leaders of the Football Association might look back at the record of their own predecessors, and in particular at the events of 1938, when they ordered the England football team to perform the Nazi salute in Berlin’s Olympic stadium.History tells they did so under instruction from the British ambassador to Germany, Sir Nevile Henderson, who was having a difficult year. On the morning of the match,...