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Reply | Millwall Game Streaming???
at 16:19 3 Aug 2026
DaZN are carrying the match. Which is ideal as I can watch it at a time that suits me better than 6:00 am. |
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Reply | More money...more, more, give me more.... the ever increasing greed in football
at 17:12 31 Jul 2026
Excellent letter on this in the Grauniad:
"Right, the Fifa statement. "Nobody is selling football" is technically true, in the way that a Goop candle is technically a candle.
Fifa can't sell itself because it isn't a company. It's an association under Swiss civil law, the same legal box as a hiking club in Appenzell, only with 211 members and a very large trophy. No shares. Nothing to buy. If you turned up in Zurich with four billion dollars asking to purchase a slice, the correct response would be to hand you a membership form and ask whether you fancy doing the teas.
What can be sold is future revenue. The snag is whose revenue it is. Fifa holds those rights on behalf of its member federations, and the member federations are the people currently voting to boycott it. So this isn't a comms problem to be fixed with another fifteen page Instagram post. It's a question of whether the officers of a non-profit can sign away decades of the members' money to private investors while the members stand outside the door shouting no. Gwyneth at least owned the candle.
Anyway. The precedent isn't the Super League. It's ISL, which almost nobody remembers, which is convenient for everybody concerned.
International Sport and Leisure held Fifa's commercial rights from 1982. In February 2001, badly short of cash, ISL raised sixty six million dollars by selling the marketing rights to the 2002 and 2006 World Cups to a company it had set up itself. Read that again slowly. It sold the World Cup to itself. Three months later it went bankrupt in Zug owing around three hundred million, and Blatter wrote to the executive committee to say Fifa's own eventual losses would come in near three hundred and forty million, roughly ten times the number he had been offering in public.
Then the bankruptcy did the one thing Fifa could not survive. It opened the books. The Zug proceedings documented payments running through ISL to football officials right through the nineties, and it took until 2012, plus an order from the Swiss supreme court, to prise out even two of the names: a former Fifa president, and the man who went on to chair the 2014 World Cup organising committee. Everything afterwards, up to and including the dawn raids at the Baur au Lac, ran straight down that seam.
Which brings us to the actual explanation, and it isn't greed. Greed would have been cleverer than this. It's Steven Seagal syndrome. Stand close enough to a man who does things nobody else survives, for long enough, and you start to believe some of it has soaked into you through the skin. Seagal got a Russian passport and a job as a special envoy out of it. Infantino appears to have concluded he can sell the World Cup to a fund run by the brother of the president's son-in-law and then simply keep walking away from the explosion without turning round.
But he has badly misread the thing he was standing next to. Trump's power doesn't come from being right, and not really from being popular in the ordinary sense either. It comes from tens of millions of people who are not listening to the criticism, do not care about the criticism, and get most of their enjoyment from watching the criticism irritate people they already dislike. Outrage isn't a cost to him. Outrage is the product.
Infantino has none of that. There is no Infantino base. Nobody on earth has ever been delighted to see Uefa upset on his behalf. Not one person is going to a match this weekend in a shirt with his name on the back. His power rests instead on something like 211 federation votes, secured with development money, which makes his support transactional rather than tribal. And transactional support has a property that tribal support doesn't. It can be counted, and it can be reversed on a Tuesday afternoon. Worse still, the revenue that funds the grants that buy the votes is precisely the revenue Uefa has just threatened to blow up. He is asking his own electorate to set fire to their own funding as a gesture of loyalty to him.
He isn't Trump. He's a lawyer from Brig who is about to find out that 55 is a bigger number than one Instagram account.
So: the last time Fifa's World Cup revenues were routed through a purpose-built vehicle, the vehicle exploded, and the wreckage produced the biggest corruption case in the history of the sport. Anyone proposing a rerun could reasonably be asked what is different this time. Ideally in fewer pages than last time." |
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Reply | More money...more, more, give me more.... the ever increasing greed in football
at 00:09 31 Jul 2026
And now this from the Middle East:
“FIFA’s unilateral actions appear to undermine the very foundations of continental football,” the Asian Football Confederation president Sheik Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa said in a letter to its 46 members of FIFA, warning of risks to their own competitions.
Sheik Salman, an ally to Infantino since losing the FIFA presidential election to him in 2016, wrote “such an initiative will not succeed without the support of all the confederations, which is not the case now.”
So that makes, at least, three of the six International Football Federations opposed to this end run by Infantino. No big footballing powers in the AFC but an awful lot of money for sure. |
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Reply | Madsen extends contract
at 15:53 22 Jul 2026
I believe he should be our go-to dead ball man in almost every offensive situation, pens, corners and FKs. He was early on last season, and the previous one, but especially since Chair returned, he's been splitting the opportunities. That's a waste of his talent in my book. |
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Reply | The ultimate World Cup thread
at 22:31 19 Jul 2026
Argentina really are the epitome of a Trumpian football team. It's appropriate he's in attendance. |
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Reply | England Thread 🏴
at 20:28 15 Jul 2026
Ref has his work cut out. But I'm sure he knew that going in. I wonder if they'll start actually playing football soon? |
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Reply | The ultimate World Cup thread
at 23:28 14 Jul 2026
Yeah Cucarella's fun to watch and, I'm sure, a pain to play against. I'm also a real Dani Olmo fan, after watching him in his years with RB Leipzig. Nice to see him playing more offensively since he moved back to Barca. [Post edited 14 Jul 23:42]
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Reply | The ultimate World Cup thread
at 18:19 12 Jul 2026
Yeah. Kelly's not really a 'Soccer Guy' so fudges/misreads the details sometimes.
I think his overall point stands though. The big stars get the calls and the media attention plus the crowd can't help but influence the way the way the game is managed.
It's coincidental, but relevant, that Antonio Rattin passed away yesterday. That Argentina/England match in '66 was, I believe, a classic example of unconscious bias on the part of the referee, or so it seemed to me at time. It was a blistering hot day. Both teams were playing nasty and the crowd was getting really ugly. IMHO the German ref, probably unconsciously, played the odds by sending off Rattin in order lower the overall temperature. It's technically wrong but in the circumstances understandable if not forgiveable. [Post edited 12 Jul 18:23]
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Reply | England Thread 🏴
at 23:05 11 Jul 2026
Yup. They should have better bench depth than Norway, and that'll count in the heat. |
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Reply | Summer transfer rumours 2026
at 16:22 11 Jul 2026
I've wondered about a Madsen/Chair midfield combo too.
Main downsides I can see are that both of them play on the left, also a two man midfield would have to cover a lot of ground. Illy could manage that I think, but Madsen is slower than a wet week in Bridlington so I think his game would likely suffer. A third midfielder on the right could make it work though. Like Vale perhaps? |
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Reply | The ultimate World Cup thread
at 22:32 10 Jul 2026
Good game but, barring something unexpected, you always knew Spain would take it. Felt bad for Courtois and de Bruyne going off injured. The latter clearly shouldn't have been playing as he was little more than a space filler, but how could you leave him out? |
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Reply | England Thread 🏴
at 15:50 8 Jul 2026
No one gets to the QF's of the World Cup with one or two generational stars and a bunch of journeymen. Thinking that way is a recipe for disaster. |
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