Posts Tagged ‘African Cup of Nations’

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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Posted in Fifa | No Comments »

Angola Invests Billions For Upcoming African Nations Tournament

Friday, January 30th, 2009

African Cup Of Nations
The African-based Southern Times reports that the Angolan government is “pouring billions of [the equivalent of South African] rand into new stadiums, hotels and airports” in preparation for their hosting of African Cup of Nations footie tournament in January 2010. While there’s no mention of the total cost of the process, 2.7 billion million rand (a little over USD $266 billion) will alone go to improving four airports in the region.

This is great and I hope that the ACON tournament goes a long away in promoting both the homeland and pride of the Angolan people, but I REALLY hope that some of this money goes towards nailing down the particulars needed to broadcast matches outside of the continent. The 2008 tourney received a boatload of hype on word-of-mouth alone, driving demand to see the games. But political red tape in Ghana, the host country that year, prevented that. There will be more people that want to see the games from their living rooms instead of traveling to see them and I hope that the Angolan government takes that into consideration.

The official tournament site is here.

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I just learned something new about football: DON’T MESS WITH UEFA

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Along with my post yesterday about Angolan officials making sure that stadiums are ready for the 2010 ACON, I learned that punctual stadium construction is key when it comes to high-profile national or international competitions. This great article from Zerkalo Nedeli (a Russian term that loosely translates to “mirror of the world”) thoroughly lays out how there can be no screw-ups when such competitions happen on UEFA’s watch.

The 2012 Euro Cup will be jointly held in the Ukraine and Poland, for now at least. These countries are definitely not the poorest in Europe but in comparison to other countries on the continent, they’re not the most-developed. Because of this, UEFA has concerns that stadiums are on schedule to be ready to go when the tourney begins: they’re concerned about other things of course, but an abundant amount of proper pitches is at the top of the list. Factor in that most of UEFA’s budget for the next four years goes towards funding the 2010 competition, and you have a governing body that will watch you like a hawk and also has a Plan B folder somewhere if you drop the ball. And Plan B (along with Plan’s C and D) is mentioned early on in the piece.

This is a very detailed article…if you can’t read it now, bookmark it or read it at lunch.

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Posted in International Teams, Soccer Business, UEFA | No Comments »

Chad and Sudan will play an ACON game

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

This game got canceled because of politics and is thankfully back on. To be played on September 10th, any chance that it’ll get televised anywhere? Probably not…gonna look for a live internet stream.

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Great site for African football updates

Monday, August 4th, 2008

I’m really starting to dig Afrique en ligne (English translated site is here, French-translated site is here). I get an African BBC vibe from their writing team…well-written, to-the-point articles…no real bias towards one opinion or the other.

Also, these guys are providing some good footie coverage on all things football in Africa. Found a good story about what South Africa’s doing to beef up security in time for the 2010 World Cup, a major concern with many of the football pundits. The other concern is, whether or not pitches will be constructed in time for the 2010 African Cup of Nations competition in Angola. Inspectors are starting to review pitch construction.

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Posted in African Cup of Nations, Coolsites, World Cup | No Comments »