From bloated World Cups to dull club competitions excess is everywhere, but who will stand up against the exploitation?It’s worth asking before launching into a jeremiad where you would have stood on major disruptions of the past. Have I become the old man who yells at clouds and is simply opposed to everything new? Would I have been against professionalism, the 1925 change in the offside law, the advent of European football, the foundation of the Premier League? Is this just the conservative creep of age? Perhaps. But, equally, it’s hard to look at football and where it may be headed and not feel fearful.In some ways, football has rarely had it so good. The Premier League this season offers...
Paris police attacks on Liverpool fans at the Champions League final was yet another example of the hosts’ big game failuresUefa’s report on last season’s Champions League final is impressively uncompromising. It was, it said, “through no merit of those in charge” that another Hillsborough was avoided. “The Préfecture de Police were in effect acting unilaterally to direct supporters toward an entry point that would be unable to cope with the level of demand placed upon it … several key stakeholders have not accepted responsibility for their own failures but have been quick to attribute blame to others.”The report is thorough and unsparing in criticising Uefa and the French authorities. There were supplementary factors, such as the rail strike, problems...
Reference to Hillsborough in pre-match intelligence points to negligence of French police in dealing with Liverpool fansThe truly shocking revelation about the disastrous approach of the French police at the Champions League final in Paris appeared in plain sight in the first, flawed official report into the near-disaster released last Friday. Perhaps unwittingly from the report’s author, Michel Cadot, an official working in France’s sports ministry, it illuminated most clearly so far why European football’s showpiece evening descended into brutality and chaos.The single sentence about police “intelligence” before the match has provided the first glimpse of an explanation as to why the officers were so tooled-up, and acted like self-appointed last-ditch defenders of civilisation rather than guardians of safety for...
The European Club Association has worked with Uefa on a set of competition reforms that would mean more matches, more security and – everyone hopes – more moneySomething of the ridiculousness of modern elite football could be found on the streets of central Vienna on Monday night as hundreds of the game’s power brokers were escorted across the city to make sure they didn’t miss their dinner. Oliver Kahn was hugger-mugger with Michael Ballack, the Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, was being pursued by the Leeds owner, Andrea Radrizzani, and Ajax’s Edwin van der Sar was trying to find out whether Roman Abramovich had been poisoned. They were part of a cohort that resembled a bunch of exchange students as they...
The football authorities have a duty of care to protect the players and Fifa failed with its risk assessment of the gameOne of the many sad things about what unfolded during England’s game in Hungary on Thursday is that it was completely preventable. We knew at Kick It Out there was a high risk of racism and disorder, so Fifa must have known too, but nothing was done to prevent it.So we find ourselves with victims, when there didn’t need to be victims, and we are talking about sanctions when the solution was to put adequate prevention in place. It’s laughable that the stadium ban imposed by Uefa for the discriminatory behaviour of Hungary fans at Euro 2020 did not...