fifa Page 21 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The View From Inside A São Paulo World Cup Protest
SÃO PAULO—During the lead-in to the World Cup, thousands of Brazilians took to the streets to protest a range of social ills highlighted—and exacerbated—by the arrival of Swiss distressed debt shop FIFA. Protesters wanted better health care and education, higher wages, lower transit costs. They want...
What FIFA Gets Right About Nationality
In April, Manchester United midfielder Adnan Januzaj finally picked his country. The oddsmakers were right, and he selected Belgium over a palette of other national shirts: Albania, Serbia, and Kosovo (through his parents), Turkey (through his grandparents), and, if you asked the English, maybe even...
Sepp Blatter Says We're All Racist For Pointing Out FIFA's Corruption
While addressing FIFA's African and Asian confederations on Monday, FIFA president Sepp Blatter seized the opportunity to mount a defense against the most recent and damning allegations that Qatar bribed its way to the 2022 World Cup. He did this by accusing all of his critics of being racist....
John Oliver Brilliantly Lays Out All The Reasons To Hate FIFA
We spend a lot of time talking about what a cartoonishly corrupt organization FIFA is, but sometimes it feels like there's not enough time in the day to do a proper rundown of everything there is to hate about Sepp Blatter and his goons. Thankfully, John Oliver is here to give FIFA the comprehensive...
FIFA Vice President Would Support A Re-Vote On 2022 Host
On the heels of The Sunday Times report detailing Mohamed bin Hammam's successful campaign to purchase the 2022 World Cup for Qatar, FIFA vice president Jim Boyce told BBC Radio 5 he would support a re-vote for a new host. Boyce says the claims in the Times report would have to be proven, but if the...
FIFA's Match-Fixing Investigation Staff Is Just Six People
FIFA, soccer's world governing body, has long struggled to police match-fixing, either because there's not much it can do, or because there's not much it wants to do. In the first part of a two-part series, The New York Times investigated allegations of match-fixing during the 2010 World Cup in Sout...
North Korea Is Another Year Closer To Soccer World Domination
On the eve of the World Cup, North Korea's FIFA ranking is holding steady at 137, which sounds pretty bad until you remember that places the North Koreans ahead of fully 70 other countries, unincorporated territories, protectorates and, in the case of No. 177 Curaçao, even an overachieving liqueur. ...
Sepp Blatter: Giving Qatar The World Cup "Was A Mistake"
FIFA president Sepp Blatter offered up his strongest words yet regarding the scandal- and problem-plagued Qatar bid for the 2022 World Cup, admitting what nearly everyone else already has: "Of course," Blatter told a Swiss TV station, "it was a mistake."...
Barcelona Slammed With Enormous Transfer Ban For FIFA Rules Violations
Today, FIFA announced unparalleled sanctions against Barcelona for repeated and systemic violations of the international body's youth transfer rules. Barcelona has been banned from any transfer activity for the entirety of next season. This is the coup de grâce in what already has been a monumentall...
Report: Senior FIFA Members Tried To Halt Corruption Probe
Every time FIFA does something right—like forming an independent investigation into allegations of corruption surrounding the votes for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups—it manages to shoot itself in the foot. Reports out of Switzerland claim that "senior FIFA power-brokers" attempted to derail the inves...
Report: Qatar's World Cup Expected To Take More Lives Than 9/11
"Qatar is a country without a conscience," begins the International Trade Union Confederation's recent report on the working and living conditions of the 1.4 million migrant workers living in Qatar, many of whom are there to build stadiums and infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup. After reading thr...
Report: FIFA VP Paid Millions By Qatari Firm After World Cup Vote
It's a good sign a sport's governance is seriously screwed up when a report emerges that a FIFA executive received millions of dollars from a Qatari soccer official after Qatar was awarded the World Cup, and everyone's first reaction isn't anger, but more along the lines of "no shit."...
How The Transfer Window Makes Us Joyless <em>Football Manager</em> Drones
If you're still irrationally hoping, praying that one or two of those impossibly tantalizing rumors—David Luiz to Barça? Cavani to Chelsea?—comes true to legitimize the hours you spent throughout the month mashing the refresh button on The Daily Mail's transfer gossip page just as soon as you had fu...
Chart: Who Has The Hardest World Cup Draw?
With the world cup just six months away, The Guardian has put together a great set of charts comparing the relative schedules of each qualifying team, based on their opponents' FIFA rankings. As you can see above, by this measure the U.S. has the third-hardest schedule, just behind Ghana and Austral...
Here Are The Groups For The 2014 World Cup
As just drawn at a ceremony in Costa Do Sauipe, Brazil:...
What if FIFA Seeded The World Cup The Way Americans Would?
FIFA is so hopelessly corrupt that today's lottery to determine World Cup round robin groups is a necessary evil. If a committee determined the groupings behind closed doors, it would surely result in political enemies being forced to face Brazil in the first round and the country giving Sepp Blatte...
Don't Swear While Playing <em>NBA 2K14</em>; You'll Get A Technical Foul
I used to throw my controller across the room when I got frustrated. These days, with touch screens and gyroscopes and motion sensors, that's probably not such a good idea. I'm well out of the video game loop by this point, but I can tell you this: I damn sure wouldn't want my console enforcing its ...
Cristiano Ronaldo's Beef With The Head Of FIFA Is So Dumb
Widely loathed shadowy mastermind/FIFA president Sepp Blatter recently caused trouble when he made an appearance in front of England's Oxford Union, where he was asked to make a choice: Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo?...