Footballbits and pieces

On 17 July 1994, Italy lost the World Cup Final in a penalty shootout to Brazil when their top scorer of the tournament, Roberto Baggio, sent his attempt over the bar. Simply making it to the Final was a minor miracle for Italy, who opened their tournament campaign with a first-round loss to Ireland. And, [...]

FIFA’s decision to award the 2022 World Cup hosting rights to a tiny, Sheffield-sized, almost completely disinterested, sun-scorched, oil-rich desert atoll in the middle of the Persian Gulf was a sham – you know it, I know it, Sepp Blatter knows it. Since the Sunday Times brought to light that, shock horror, the Qatar bid team [...]

On 4 January 1909, representatives of several clubs met in Madrid to form the Spanish football federation. The meeting was held at the offices of Real Madrid, with club president Adolfo Meléndez serving as the federation’s first secretary. Originally named the Federación Española de Clubs de Football, the new organization followed the model of England’s [...]

The time will soon be upon us when it will be discovered whether the England 2018 World Cup bid team (as well as their Russian, Spanish/Portuguese and Dutch/Belgian counterparts) will discover whether the last year or so of flesh-pressing, lobbying, rule-flaunting, power-brokering, politicking, back-slapping, bribery, petty sniping, short-sighted optimism and the abject hemorrhaging of several [...]

In a development that reveals just how low they now deem themselves to have sunk in FIFA’s estimations (and how far back they have fallen back in terms of the impending vote), England 2018 have written to every voting member on the organisation’s executive committee (EC), pleading with them to not to punish the bid [...]