The problem with a campaign to clean up sport's governing bodies is knowing where to start, as Steve Menary reports
Anti-corruption coalition Transparency International has put together guidelines aimed at stamping out corruption in international sport, including football.
Few countries were as desperate for a lift from the World Cup as Trinidad & Tobago, whose team provided some much needed national unity, as Mike Woitalla explains
XTrinidad & Tobago defender Marvin Andrews was 12 years old the last time his country came close to qualifying for a first World Cup. The Caribbean twin-island nation needed to draw against the United States in Port of Spain on November 19, 1989. Dwight Yorke, who had turned 18 two weeks earlier, started in midfield. Schools lifted their dress codes so the children could honour “Red Day”. The 30,000-strong crowd at Hasely Crawford Stadium looked like a scarlet blanket. Calypso bands played tunes about going to Italy. The Mighty Sparrow sang: “I never know Trini did love football so.” Lincoln Phillips, a former T&T national team goalkeeper, said: “It’s crazy. It’s the first time in the history of the country that everybody has gotten behind one thing.”
Harry Kewell's hair might be pony, but after 32 years Australia are back at the World Cup and, as Mike Ticher reports, it's not just soccer diehards who are celebrating.
Some things are hard to forgive. For example: planning a ticker-tape parade to celebrate winning one World Cup qualifier, on penalties; inviting John Travolta on to the pitch and into the dressing rooms; 80,000 people booing the visitors’ anthem; banners and chants proclaiming “U R gay”; Harry Kewell’s double ponytail; playing Men at Work at full volume after the final whistle.
Have Roman's billions bought Chelsea millions of fans? It depends what you mean by "fan", as a sceptical Adam Powley explains while calculatng which are our best-supported clubs
Of all the many eyebrow-raising comments Chelsea’s chief executive Peter Kenyon has made in his eventful career as a football mover and shaker, one of his more surprising claims barely caused a ripple. Last spring, when welcoming Chelsea’s new sponsorship deal with Samsung, Kenyon proclaimed: “In the last 12 months, our domestic fan base has increased by 300 per cent to 2.9 million.”
European success hasn't brought Liverpool a new stadium or the funds to compete for the league and, as John Williams writes, fans don't know where the club is going
Six months on from winning the greatest ever European Cup final in front of (allegedly) the world’s greatest supporters and in a fashion liable to add at least a few million to any top club’s global fan base, you might be forgiven for thinking this could have been just the time for a new lift-off at a club that had been some 15 years off the elite football pace. And yet, what should now be a buoyant Liverpool FC has looked, on occasions, a remarkably rudderless ship since that dramatic, unforgettable night in Istanbul.