Archive for the ‘Fifa’ Category

FIFA Releases African Football Retrospective Online…THIS IS BIG

Friday, February 6th, 2009

FIFA - 50 Years OF African Football
A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!!!!!!!

To promote Africa’s increasingly important role in world football and to hype up the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, footie governing body FIFA has released “50 Years Of African Football”, a five-DVD retrospective of, you guessed it, football in Africa. It contains videos, photographs, text…AND IS FOR FREE ONLINE!!!!! and are offering a free online preview.

Soccer-wise, Africa has a lot going on during the next two years. Along with the World Cup, there’s also the increasingly-popular-but-never-televised African Cup Of Nations tourney, also in 2010. There are a few other big competitions going on there as well.

Watching this requires, at least, the most up-to-date versions of the Adobe Flash and Windows Media Players. I say “at least” because I’ve only been jumping around the site a little bit and that’s all I’ve found as far as techy stuff for this site goes. As a heads-up, I had trouble launching the video. On the whole, you will DEFINITELY need a fast computer for this site.

But no matter how old your computer is, you need to at least TRY and watch this because I have hunch it’s good….really good. WATCH PREVIEW IT NOW!!!!!!

My wife is out of town this weekend so in between footie matches, I’ll be on this site BIG TIME!!!! This is a good day!!!

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Random News 8/6/08 (FIFA, Platini, Setanta, Eto’o, Bundesliga)

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

Because or their strong showing in this year’s Euro Cup, Russia’s back in Fifa after 11 years. Good for them!!!

Spekaing of FIFA, I just found this great bio on FIFA grand puba Michel Platini.

Kind of a wierd article here. Shane O’Rourke, head of Setanta North America, feels that the 50,000 Setanta subscribers in Canada will watch EPL games that the channel broadcasts instead of the Olympics. “My feeling is anybody who’s buying our channel is watching our channel. After all, they’re paying for it”, he says. Well, yeah they’re paying for it but the article makes no mention of polling data on this subject. And let’s not for get that this is a Tivo/DVR/time-shifted world where people can actually record games and watch them later.

FC Barcelona claims that Samuel Eto’o wants out of the club. I tend to ignore transfer rumours (all the Cristiano Ronaldo stuff annoyed me) but since the article lists Chelsea as one of the front runners to get him, I care about this one.

Sponsorship cash continues to flow into the Bundesliga, and at an increasing rate. Hopefully, teams other than Bayern Munich can use it to snag good players to win a league trophy.

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Two cool Olympic-related posts (and I just learned something new)

Monday, August 4th, 2008

After all the drama that happened around Lionel Messi wanting to play for Argentina in the Olympics instead of staying with Barcelona for that time period, Fifa is now reviewing the U-23 law for football clubs. They’re doing it now so the issues that came about with the whole Messi situation don’t come up during the next Summer Olympics, held in London on 2010. Also, Chris Rivers over at EPLTalk has a great article on how the U-23 law is affecting Premier League clubs already.

I had no idea about the U-23 law until I thoroughly read these two articles. The way it works under current Fifa law is this: all clubs must release all of their players that are 23 or younger to international play when the time comes. Each international team can also draft a maximum three players that are over 23. I totally didn’t know this and I’m happy to have learned something new today.

This issue has popped up before during my short life as a footie fan: in late 2007, there was a big row over the amount of players that clubs were going to lose to the upcoming African Cup of Nations tourney…Fifa didn’t get involved in this. I’m not sure if they’ll actually do anything this time but since this complaint has come up before, they’ll need to actively confront it at some time. That time may be now.

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