FIFA
Death and glory: the politics of the World Cup
The choice of ‘tiny boiling Qatar’ as a venue in 2022 – where thousands of construction workers lost their lives – typifies Fifa’s cynical favour-auctioning, says Simon Kuper
Two football books examine where money is taking the modern game
‘Football holds a mirror to ourselves,’ Michael Calvin asserts in State of Play. Modern football is angrier, more brutal, more…
Fifa may be corrupt but it has done wonders for football
In 1930, Jules Rimet, the creator of the Football World Cup, crossed the Atlantic in a steamship to attend the…
For Putin, the World Cup is not about football but global respect
Authoritarian regimes love grand international sporting events. There’s something about the mass regimentation, the set-piece spectacle, the old-fashioned idea of…
Game over
If sport loses the public’s faith – and it’s starting to – then all its power and glory will fade
The human element: highs, lows and loose ends of 2015
Last year was a bumper year for mergers and acquisitions. Recovering prospects and relatively low price-earnings ratios made the takeover…
Portrait of the year
January David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that only electing the Conservatives could ‘save Britain’s economic recovery’. Labour unveiled a…
Of course there’s no morality in top-level sport
Why do transgendered people need separate toilets? I thought, according to the prevalent orthodoxy, that the new gender they had…
The ugly game
I’ve spent years defending football from middle-class disdain. But I can’t do it any more
Champions of hypocrisy
Why sport and sham morality go so well together
The game of survival
Apparently Fifa emperor Sepp Blatter received a ten-minute standing ovation from his 400 staff when he addressed them after his…
Letters
The long arm of the FBI Sir: The White House may be less willing than it was to play the…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, toured Europe trying to gain support for reforms to favour Britain’s position in the…
Pliny the Younger on Fifa
In any huge enterprise (like Fifa), where does the rot begin? Pliny the Younger mused on this question in a…
The Spectator’s Notes
We in the West all hate Sepp Blatter, so we pay too little attention to the manner in which the…
Football’s elite deserve the foulness of Fifa
My favourite moment in the crisis engulfing football’s governing body, Fifa, came with the intervention of a man called Manuel…
The Fifa case: American justice at work as the world’s CCTV system
‘In matters of criminal justice,’ said NatWest Three defendant David Bermingham after a London court extradited him and his co-defendants…
Fifa and the Olympians
Those nice people at Fifa seem to be having a terrible time from the British press, which never stops accusing…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said: ‘Red warning lights are once again flashing on the dashboard of the global…
Now even Fifa’s dinosaurs have learned to cry racism
Are all white women really prostitutes who should be avoided, as some children at those schools in Birmingham were apparently…
Portrait of the week
Home The government scrabbled together material for the Queen’s Speech, which promised measures to allow money to be put into…
Did anyone really think that Qatar won the World Cup fairly?
I suppose the appalling shock to the soul that was occasioned by the allegation that Qatar bribed its way to…
High life
Gstaad Why are hacks scared to state the obvious? In Britain the excuse is the strict libel laws. But in…
