Argentina’s susceptibility at the back is almost as well documented as their attacking threat. No one in Argentina has much faith in makeshift full-back Marcos Rojo, who is generally considered to be the weak link.

The solid but unspectacular central defensive pair of Federico Fernandez and Ezequiel Garay will have to be willing to provide cover should Rojo slip up. At the other end, all the evidence suggests coach Alejandro Sabella has finally found the magic formula that will bring the best out of Leo Messi at international level, even if that formula seems to be nothing more inspired than cramming his forward line with as much creative craft as he has at his disposal. Expect an open game with both sides simply looking to outscore each other, if only to keep the ball away from their unconvincing defenses.

Meanwhile, Bosnia and Herzegovina coach Safet Susic has spoken candidly about his side’s chances of living with the threat of Argentina’s stellar strike-force when the sides meet at Rio’s Maracana on Sunday at 6pm ET/3pm PT. “We know that we expose ourselves too much and there is a huge risk in the way that we play. But I do not have any choice! Look at my team.”

Putting Susic’s lack of faith in his defense to one side, the Bosnian line-up is at best unbalanced. Veteran Emir Spahic will captain the side from centre-half after a torrid season at Bayer Leverkusen where he was often exposed for his diminishing pace, particularly in the Champions League against Manchester United where his vulnerabilities were exploited by direct running and balls in behind the back four.

Argentina’s front four of Sergio Aguero, Angel Di Maria, Gonzalo Higuain and Lionel Messi are likely to have room to work in against a defense that is rarely afforded much protection from midfield, with holding anchor Sejad Salihovic’s instincts to drift out to the wings and use his pace often getting the better of him. The Hoffenheim midfielder could be forgiven for being distracted by what’s going on further up the pitch however, with Miralem Pjanic coming off of an outstanding season with Roma in Serie A where his trickery and imagination behind the strikers was a key factor in i Giallorossi’s title challenge. His goal against Milan in April was a mouth-watering example of what can happen if Pjanic is given time and space to run at the defence, and Argentina’s Marco Rojo will need to have an answer to his many critics at left-back if he is to have much of a say in Pjanic’s mastery of the right of midfield.

Up front, the leering figure of Edin Dzeko will patrol the 18-yard box with support from the deadly Vedad Ibisevic. Ibisivic looked all set to take the European game by storm in 2008 when a series of unstoppable performances for Hoffenheim put Bundesliga defences to the sword with 18 goals in 17 games, but injury curtailed his progress and the goal-scoring return has dropped off in the years since. Three fruitful seasons with Stuttgart have gone some way towards restoring Ibisevic’s confidence, so too the winning goal that secured qualification with victory in Lithuania, and his partnership with the technically brilliant Dzeko is likely to cause the Argentine defence more problems than any other front line in Group F.

SEE MORE — Everything you need to know about the World Cup.

Brazil opened the World Cup with an uneven 3-1 win over a stubborn Croatia in Sao Paulo thanks to two goals from Neymar.

Brazil’s talisman opened his account for the tournament with a long range effort to level the scores after Marcelo had put through his own goal to give Croatia a shock lead at the Arena de São Paulo.

Neymar added his second from the penalty spot after Dejan Lovren had been judged to have tripped Fred, before Oscar capped victory for the hosts with a late third.

The hosts took to the field in buoyant form in front of their home fans but the emotions on display as the 61,000 capacity crowd roared through the national anthem where tempered when Croatia made the brighter start, Ivica Olic heading wide from Ivan Perisic’s cross inside ten minutes.

Luis Felipe Scolari’s men failed to heed the warning posed by Croatia’s threat out wide, and they were made to pay when Olic’s cross was glanced on by Nikica Jelavic and Marcelo turned the ball past a stranded Julio Cesar to put the underdogs in front.

That shocked the hosts into life with Oscar crossing dangerously for Neymar whose far-post lunge narrowly failed to connect, but it was the Chelsea forward’s clever through-ball for Paulinho that marked the game’s first real moment of magic, with Stipe Pletikosa reacting well in the Croatia goal to beat the ball away.

The reprieve came for the hosts when midfield lynchpin Luis Gustavo, so often the key figure as Scolari has changed the fortunes of the Seleceao in the build up to the Copa des Copas, won the ball on the halfway line as Modric hesitated and fed Neymar, whose speculative drive beat Pletikosa and spun in off the post.

Neymar could be considered lucky to have remained on the pitch after landing a stray arm in the face of Modric moments earlier, just minutes after Jelavic had planted a tame header into the arms of Julio Cesar as Croatia threatened a second.

In the second half Croatia boss Niko Kovac withdrew the ineffective Mateo Kovacic and introduced Marcelo Brozovic in a bid to match up to Brazil’s physicality in midfield, but it was winger Perisic who looked to turn the tide of the game with a series of powerful runs from the right wing.

Perisic was the outstanding figure for Croatia as Modric and the much-fancied Ivan Rakitic were bullied into submission by the imperious Luis Gustavo, but it was centre-half Lovren who grabbed the headlines as his challenge on Fred was harshly judged to have warranted a penalty.

Neymar dispatched the kick to give the hosts the lead for the first time, and there was still time for Perisic to have a goal disallowed for an Olic challenge on the Brazil goalkeeper Julio Cesar before Oscar broke from midfield to finish off Kovac’s side and send the home fans into delirium.

Croatia had applied lots of pressure towards the later stages of the match and could feel hard done by the the penalty and the soft call against Olic. Nonetheless, the hosts collect all three points and now have a firm grip atop Group A.

Watch the official match highlights below –

It’s been a sorry start to the season for Carlisle United both on the pitch and in the stands. After three years of steady progress up the League One table, the club are struggling to dust themselves off from the tumble that left them lodged in a disappointing seventeenth last term.

There is cause for concern on the terraces too with the Cumbrians hemorrhaging fans almost as readily as they are shipping goals. Manager Gregg Abbot sees falling attendances as an inevitable product of wilting league performances, but in an increasingly corporate football landscape such a reductive outlook feels unsatisfactory, and recent trends suggest the 2013/14 season may be the trickiest yet for clubs reliant on a local following.

Abbot’s team have left a sorry mark on the table so far this season. With three games down United have registered a goal-difference of minus twelve having being stuffed in consecutive games by Leyton Orient, Bradford and Coventry, and are being kept mercifully from the foot of the table by the 10 point penalty imposed on the Sky Blues in the fallout from their own financial meltdown. At five years, Abbot’s tenure at Brunton Park is one of the longest in the Football League but after three seasons of climbing the table last year’s lower mid-table slump represented a blow – one that the current crop have struggled to bounce back from.

Abbot reflected last weekend that the players “will have to work harder to win back the fans that have gone missing” after Coventry left Brunton Park with a 4-0 win, citing average attendance figures from last season that had slumped dramatically on 2011/12. Sound reasoning from a man whose been in the job long enough to know a thing or two about spotting trends, but the days when healthy league form necessarily drew supporters en masse through the turnstiles are behind us. A glance at the record books show that Carlisle’s most industrious period of league form has coincided with a dramatic fall in attendances since 2008, with those missing fans that have been troubling Abbot numbering close to 2,000. Four years ago, the Cumbrians survived in the third tier by the skin of their teeth – a struggle that an average of 6,300 supporters turned out weekly to witness. Last season after a brief dalliance with the play-offs, those numbers never got near to 4,500.

That there is a problem to be addressed is hard-wired, especially for a club that takes around 35% of its income at the turnstiles, but the numbers suggest Abbot is wide of the mark in thinking that he can woo fans back via results alone. Outside of the top two divisions, resources are thin on the ground and for the most precious commodity – the paying fans – competition is fierce. Carlisle Managing Director John Nixon has already expressed fears that the aggressive expansion of the top divisions is tipping the structure of domestic football towards a critical imbalance: “There’s an awful lot of cash going into the top level of the game. They have whip hand… The Premier League are trying to run English football and it could drive us towards regional or part-time football.” £60million of a £4billion media agreement is likely to filter down to the third and fourth tiers in solidarity payments over a three year period, whilst the £23million a year doled out to each relegated club threatens to create a feeder-pool of clubs inaccessible to those lower down the pyramid.

As media channels and stadia at the top expand to accommodate a greater share of the football audience, a holistic approach to building between the Abbots and Nixons of the League has never been more central to the game’s survival. A 15 game unbeaten run for the Cumbrians (an unlikely scenario given that the club haven’t managed three consecutive wins throughout the former Bradford midfielder’s 5 year tenure) is unlikely in itself to re-direct the interests of fans from the soap-operas at Newcastle and Sunderland, especially as BT and Sky trip over themselves force their product under the noses of fans during every waking, working and leisure moment. But a more creative approach to the market might. Plymouth Argyle are in the early stages of a project to turn Home Park into a family-friendly leisure outlet of which the football club will be just one facet, whilst gimmicky publicity stunts at Macclesfield and Farnborough have made up for with initiative what they lack in class or sustainability.

Not that selling off playing time to well-to-do fans is the answer to Abbot’s frustrations, but the hope that the Cumbrians might yet play their way back into the consciousness of distracted fans is anachronistic and can only hold the club back. The drop in attendances since 2008 represents a loss of around £700,000 a year, and as Nixon is keenly aware “fans can stay at home, having paid for the TV, so they watch football there. They don’t want to come to a draughty stadium to cheer on a team at the bottom of League One.” The medium term problem faced by the club is that fans seem to feel similarly about a club performing well in the third tier, and BT have based a three year business model around just that assumption. A bloated media industry is putting the squeeze on the lower leagues in ways they were never designed to be able to handle. Adaptability is key as another season ticks over and United will have to learn quickly that it’s not all about what happens during ninety minutes.

With World Cup 2022 dominating opinion columns and threatening to destabilize a competition still nine years away from us, the World Cup has never faced such an uncertain future. With the embers still warm from the fires that accompanied the Brazilian riots this summer, even the once untarnishable brand of the franchise is looking weathered, as slowly the media’s coverage associates it more and more with corruption, profiteering and civil meltdown. If the present appears overcast, the future looks downright bleak for a tournament usually so warmly anticipated for a host of sporting, cultural and economic perks.

Perhaps though, instead of all the gloom, the authorities should look at the reasons to be positive about Brazil and Qatar. At least those responsible for keeping order have a fairly accurate idea of what they’re likely to be up against and can plan accordingly. The Confederations Cup has shown FIFA a retina-scorching glimmer of what’s to come in 2014 – a bucket load of bad publicity, gross public unrest and perhaps a handful of unlucky martyrs fighting domestic injustice in Brazil — is unlikely to leave a mark on either the governing body’s good reputation or conscience, principally because there’s very little factual evidence for the existence of either. The country will likely revolt but the FIFA Executive Committee PR machine will confidently churn out just the right sound-bites to deflect the brunt of the attention to the Brazilian political and economic leaders, which is probably where it has belonged right from the start. So that’s one reason to be cheerful at FIFA HQ.

In Qatar, there will be an equally choral organized mass movement to resist in the form of the major European league bodies when the tournament is inevitably shifted into the uncharted territory of the winter months, but that battle won’t be fought with sticks, stones and barricades – more likely with an entourage of solicitors and legal loopholes as the various parties try and grind each other in to the dirt through the international courts. Neither will be causing too many sleepless nights in Zurich, where whitewashing public outcry with bellicose propaganda and shredding formal opposition with spirit-crunching legal attrition is old hat. But what of 2018, and Russia?

As Vladimir Putin continues apace, his iron fisted crusade against cultural variance — the LGBT community — have become the most conspicuous target for public humiliation. Meanwhile in the major European cities the murmurings about gay representation in professional sport are growing louder. Spot the link? As the game’s governors pat themselves on the back over limp reforms of the disciplinary process to deal with racial abuse on the pitch, the questions over why the world of professional football counts among its number only three openly gay members aren’t going to go away. With the issue a slow burner – the hesitancies that keep scores in the closet surely also holding back many would-be vocal lobbyists for change from really launching the debate – what odds it comes to the boil just as the world turns its gaze to Putin’s ferociously anti-queer autocracy in five years’ time?

For some, World Cup 2018 represents a golden opportunity for Sepp Blatter – or very likely his successor – to make a deafening statement about how FIFA sees its relationship with the LGBT community developing over the next decade. Whilst there are those that are calling for a boycott of the 2014 winter Olympics by fans and athletes over the government’s brutal execution of its anti-gay legislation, soccer’s governing body has a chance to enforce a boycott of its own with unbearable force by simply removing, or threatening to remove, Russia’s right to host the tournament. Only by excluding Russia from its working relationships can the governing body be seen to be taking steps to create a more inclusive community for its minority groups.

But this is where the whole thing gets messy. Part of the problem with withdrawing the tournament at this stage, nearly half way through the eight year preparation period as it was in 2010, is that it will hit industry and parts of the economy hard. Some of this impact will be felt high up in the corridors of power although it’s doubtful that it will send Putin or any of his extended circle of cronies – well protected from the vagaries of the market – reeling from the blow. Where this blow will be felt however is much lower down the pay-scale. Provincial industries with a local focus whom have already made big plans for 2018 – constructors, manufacturers, service providers – all far enough down the path of business blueprints that it would be impossible to turn back without saddling their organizations with crippling losses. Economic fortunes turn on a sixpence and to whip away the World Cup now – the object of major investments for some over the last three years and the heart of mid-term planning – would be to create a helter-skelter of fiscal uncertainty for those ordinary Russians who are least able to bear it. How then is the world body to take effective aim at the state hierarchy without risking the safety of the lower-middle and working classes held in its vice?

The answer to it all lies, somewhat retrospectively and more than a little defeatistly, in the thought that FIFA should have had a firmer grip on its moral compass back in 2010 when then key decisions were being made, and at a time when the situation in Russia was, if no less dire, at least less internationally conspicuous. Now the options on the table are limited. FIFA owe the stagnant Russian economy a World Cup but it cannot hope to deliver one without implicitly endorsing the Neanderthal tactics of a bullying regime and tearing up its own prospective agenda to work towards an inclusive future for the game. A glimmer of hope comes in the form of an innovative alternative circulating among the international LGBT community currently.

The proposal, voiced by Ari Ezra Waldman, is that the best way to defend and emancipate the queer movement in Russia is for dissenting voices from abroad to use the approaching Winter Olympics to descend upon the country and celebrate freedom of sexual expression openly and in the epicenter of the Russian mass consciousness. The idea taps into the theory that the problem in Russia is a grassroots one, rather than a plague that is being transmitted top-down, and that it is on the streets rather than in the Kremlin that the battle needs to be won. The idea is a thoughtful one, that acknowledges the reality of life as an openly gay Russian – a daily struggle to dodge the hate that zigzags its way through Russian culture – but  it offers little guidance to football’s ruling body on how to manoeuvre out of the tight corner they’ve wiggled their way into. Lending its support to a street movement that guarantees civil carnage is not an avenue of recourse open to Blatter and his policy makers.

Because FIFA is accountable for the partnerships it creates and the ethics of its practice, but that accountability requires strict definition. The governing body is responsible for developing the game such that it is inclusive, responsive and proactive about change but the limits of that responsibility are enshrined in the abstracted understanding of the sporting ethic. Soccer, in other words, must get its own house in order before it can expect to approach the lectern in the global debate on social health, and only in its capacity as an effective guardian of the game can it make a useful difference in Russia or anywhere else.

How it goes about this is a matter for fierce debate, but it’s a debate that must remain divorced from the wider questions about how a country like Russia treats its citizens. Any interactivity between the two must occur through the right channels and in the allotted space or else neither cause will find the focus and clarity it needs to fight its battles. But make no mistake, the war for social justice is being waged just as fiercely in the boardrooms of the FIFA Executive Committee as on the streets of St. Petersburg. It’s just a key part of the formula that these battle lines not be allowed to blur. The game needed a hero back in 2010 but FIFA opted for the quick buck and invested in a nation it knew to be incompatible with the game’s inclusive future. Now it’s up to a brave community of protestors and activists to take to the streets in 2018 and make the statement that Blatter couldn’t muster.

It is firmly advisable that one needn’t even attempt to come up to speed with developments in this summer’s – probably the next eight summers’ – most absurdly gripping parlance without first flushing a number of distractingly obvious thoughts out of the mind. In getting to grips with the decision – looking more likely with each bumbled and blundering press release – that the 2022 World Cup in Qatar will be moved to the winter months to avoid the wasting heat of the summer in the appointed emirate, a couple of unanswerable questions need to be served up, sniffed at and then chucked into the bin before morbid curiosity leads us to make the fatal mistake of shoveling in a noxious mouthful of Haute Blatter.

For the entree, why, after a probing bidding process during which every assurance was given that a summer tournament was possible in the region and no one at FIFA felt moved to conduct any kind of study into the feasibility of staging 90 minutes of football in 50 degrees plus conditions, are we only now fretting that Qatari officials may have promised, if not the impossible, then at least the humanly implausible? That’s your garlic bread – a predictable starter that offers no surprises but without which what follows would somehow feel unfathomable. Follow that up with a main course of logistical mind benders about how on earth the European calendar will ever be able to re-shuffle itself to allow for 2 months off in the winter and then back again, doing one’s best to eat around Blatter’s casual musings that the whole arrangement “will only affect one season” (the league employees who begin drawing up fixture schedules three years in advance will find that thought particularly indigestible). Afterwards settle the stomach with a snifter of accusatory questions on why, now that Qatar has been shown by all available medical evidence to be unable to meet the terms of the agreement that gave them their prize, are alternative locations not being seriously considered?

These thoughts were all brought to the table back in 2010 and will continue to be chewed upon until long after the tournament is done and dusted. But it would be impossible to really get to grips with the more subtle points of the issue without first picking these particularly distracting pieces of gristle out of the teeth. They all now promise to be part of the landscape for the next decade and football has well and truly tied itself in another knot in its unending quest for growth. It might even be put that the likes of the Premier League and its stars have no right to complain about FIFA putting its own corporate interests first at the expense of its contemporaries when such hegemonic domineering has been the League’s blueprint for more than twenty years. To the game’s power-brokers we might say “it’s your dime”. But what about the others from outside the barbed perimeters of corporate soccer, for whom a domestic football season pushed into the summer months would leave precious little room in which to operate?

Domestic football protects itself internally against TV coverage of big games draining attendances at lower league matches by setting restrictions on what can be broadcast and when, but no umbrella body exists that can both exercise control over the Premier League and also has vested responsibility in the health of cricket, rugby league, tennis and other sports that traditionally thrive during the football hiatus. Far from operating under the banner of a co-operative, football and the summer sports will find themselves in 2022 in a dispute over territory.

As Blatter is so keen to remind us, the change will occur for only one season. Considering that complicated yearly schedules that flow in and out of one another are unlikely to prove flexible enough to flip their focus twice in a 12 month window that claim feels over-confident, but even allowing for the minimum possible disruption the outlook is bleak for some.

Between 2011 and 2012, 16 out of 18 first-class county cricket clubs suffered falling average attendances year on year — in the case of Lancashire by as much as 45%. Quite what impact the added competition for spectators from Manchester United and City will have in the region on a sport already battling to remain current in the sandstorm of a digital revolution is difficult to judge from this distance, but the challenge is unlikely to come only from the mega rich. Blackburn, Bolton and Burnley are all likely to be playing in the top two divisions in 2022 and the likes of Bury and Rochdale, already swept up in their own struggles to keep fans passing through the turnstiles, will fight fiercely to cling to their market share on a Saturday afternoon. Even a single summer of intensified competition for fans could prove unbearable for those outfits from both sports whom don’t have the safety net of multi-million pound broadcast contracts to keep them solvent.

Don’t expect the FIFA Exec Com to lose too much sleep over the relative health of English domestic cricket, or any other industry around Europe that has its long term plans linked wilfully or by circumstance, tightly or contingently to the timings and movements of the football behemoth.

But expect plenty of sob stories coming from the Premier League over the coming years about the indignity of being shunted around by a fat-cat outfit twisting and re-shaping the game for its narrowly defined corporate ends. Who knows, maybe an enforced dip in the chill waters of irony will do the domestic game some good – certainly it would make a nice change for a World Cup to leave a positive legacy behind rather than the usual white elephant infrastructures that no longer have anything to inhabit them. But spare a thought for the real victims of this undisguised crusade of profiteering and thoughtlessness. Because the sanctuary of the summer months may soon see its boarders breached leaving little to no protection for those dwelling there.

It’s no surprise that a clash of corporate and ethical interests has finally produced a stand-off. The outcome however has a predictable feel.

When you’re as big as the Premier League, you can’t expect to maneuver delicately through every glitzy cocktail party without spilling the odd drink on some fairly expensive outfit. With so many competing A-list interests clamoring for priority in a crowded room, feet will inevitably be trodden on and a certain bitterness hangs in the air. Globalization has allowed the game and its audience to grow together to create a forward thinking industry that takes a keen interest in dynamic multiculturalism, but from time to time the project closes its eyes to the peculiarities of its ambitious task.

Papiss Cisse has pulled down the thin barrier that separated a pig-headed media industry from a stubborn set of cultural practices this week by resisting Newcastle’s attempts to make him play in a shirt sponsored by pay-day loan firm Wonga, leaving two factions staring each other uneasily in the eye and unsure about how to proceed. Predictably enough, neither devout Muslim Cisse nor the men holding the contracts that bind his club to the controversial high street lender are keen to make the first move, leaving a tense stalemate that almost threatens to shake the Premier League’s decision makers out of their fickle indifference towards things that can’t be quantified on their monthly statement.

The authorities have so far done exactly what they do best when thorny issues that could undermined the foundation of indiscriminate growth present themselves – sat on their hands and waited for the thing to solve itself. There were some mutterings at Premier League HQ that “a solution will have to be found that will work for all parties” but the most likely solution it seems will be for Cisse to walk away, quietly or otherwise, from the club and be re-housed in a location where he will be less likely to bring the spotlight down on the controversial points of contact between football and the real world – a world where usurious predators pounce upon disenfranchised and vulnerable families as they reel from the effects of withering welfare provisions. But as long as Papiss is kitted out in the tame branding of a Cardiff or a West Ham, that can remain a natter for another day.

Spare a thought though for Richard Scudamore and his cohort who find themselves well and truly up the creek. The Premier League have always been all about the bigger picture, even if that means climbing so high above the landscape that they can’t see the detail on the ground below. Certainly the Wonga fall-out is a symptom of this disconnection from the lives of large parts of their audience, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that the optimum time for a workable solution that shows even a thread of empathy has long passed. Because whatever action the League choose to take now, it will open up the war on a new front.

If Cisse is allowed to wear an unbranded shirt, as was the case when Freddy Kanoute spoke out against a sponsor at odds with his personal beliefs during his Sevilla days, then implicitly the club will be driving a wedge between itself and football’s Islamic supporter base. The policy would amount to an admission that Newcastle’s ethical code is at loggerheads with the personal and cultural values of a growing community and the bear-fronted Cisse would be a conspicuous weekly reminder that the club is in public and permanent disagreement with the Islamic community.

The club could go a step further and renege on the deal with Wonga, leaving them without a sponsor for the season and somewhere in the region of £8million worse off – a non-starter for obvious reasons, unless of course the club’s hands were to be tied by the League authorities. Putting in a place a test to determine what is ‘fit and proper’ in regards to a commercial sponsor would be a game changer and would take the matter out of Newcastle’s, Cisse’s and everybody else’s hands – such is the hallmark of firm leadership. But the Premier League has one or two hallmarks of its own, and thundering boastfully about its role as a sporting and cultural flag-bearer seems higher up its list of priorities than drafting the blueprints for a mutually beneficial fiscal doctrine.

It’s also important to remember just what it is we’re all arguing about here. Invoking religious creed as Cisse has done always creates a hypersensitive atmosphere and it’s not always easy to see clearly in and amongst the smoke and mirrors laid out by an excitable media set for whom poking fun at institutions of faith appears to be rivetingly in vogue. One needn’t be a subscriber to Islamic dogma to be repulsed by interest rates of up to 4000% being saddled onto families pinned into a corner by an economic crisis they played no part in making, and this particular ethical question has been facing the football authorities for years. One by one as more and more pay-day loan firms, online betting sites and brewing companies stitch their brands onto the chests of star players, the thinking-aloud grows louder. Passing the game on to a younger generation is a popular epitaph in football PR – leaving that inheritance in a state fit for purpose appears less of a priority.

In Cisse, the football landscape has a rare landmark representing integrity on a materially driven bedrock – that his fight is un-winnable shouldn’t distract us from what is a sincere and laudable protest. But time, and the cynical process of capital investment, will surely yet show it to be in vain. There may only be one Papiss Cisse but there are a hundred and one football clubs who would readily welcome Wonga into their bosom for a share of a healthy payout.

With the Premier League title sewn up last season before there was snow on the ground and doomed QPR sucking all relegation fodder towards them like an expensive black hole for most of the season, there was a conspicuous dearth of competition at the top and bottom to get the pulse racing in last season’s league.

The self-anointed ‘best league in the world’ struggled to bear witness to that tag on any other front than allowing its members to break records on gut-splitting wage bills and in closing deals on broadcasting contracts that could annihilate the national debts of most Third World countries. Football as a spectator business, it’s been clear for a while, is on fire and the race to placate the Premier League public in the United Kingdom into lactating its rich rewards into the waiting bucket of the media circuit has been dominated by Sky for as long as anyone can remember. The fear now as the details of BT’s challenge become clear is that the competition, though hotly anticipated, may mirror Manchester City’s recent title defense – expensively assembled and intimidating on paper but conspicuously ill-equipped to contend with twenty years of dominance by the established order.

With both broadcaster’s announcing their early season picks last week, Sky have struck the first blow against the new pretenders and the breakdown looks bleak for BT. The newcomers will be pleased to have secured the first Merseyside Derby of the Martinez era and Jose Mourinho’s renewal of relations with Spurs will draw big numbers but beyond that the schedule looks likely to attract only a fan-ship core. With only a fraction of the live programming of their rivals, it was always going to be vital for BT to make those hours count, especially in what is likely to be a nervous opening few months. Now there’s a risk that the big investment, smaller than Sky’s, may yield disproportionately small returns. That’s because one quarter of the match share doesn’t in this case equate to a quarter of the punch in market terms, since the showcase games draw disproportionately large takings. Premier League matches reached 643million homes last season but the numbers tuning in for games involving Manchester United typically dwarf the respective figures for Wigan, Reading and a further handful of also-rans, and with a stellar line-up of the biggest games, Sky can expect to cream off not only more games but vastly bloated audience returns.

All this of course means that the scale may not be tipping as seismically as BT’s recent advertising onslaught would like us to believe, and questions present themselves over exactly how far the BT Vision project expects it might be able to grow. With the majority of Premier League viewers watching from home rather than the terraces, these are important questions for the future of football consumption. If the competition for broadcasting rights is set to become truly competitive then we as a TV audience can expect to experience a number of positive changes.

On the one hand, levels of service will likely rise, most conspicuously in regards to consumer costs. As the only player in its field, Sky have traditionally enjoyed the comfort of being able to quite literally name their price, knowing that no other football product on the market was ever likely to draw away dissatisfied customers in number. Suddenly there is cause to check the rear mirror, however distantly the BT challenge may be following, and any object to distract from the tedious monopoly that domestic football coverage has become has to be cause for optimism. Before a ball has been kicked, the early season program has already found room for a first ever free-to-air live game from the top flight as Sky respond to a mass saturation of advertising space by their new rival. No noises are being made as yet that a trend is brewing, but free-view audiences will wake up on August 17 feeling more enfranchised that at any other point over the last two decades.

There’s also the quality of a product that can no longer afford to stagnate in its production values. The insatiable demand for the Premier League has meant that for twenty years viewers have tolerated the trite and facile verbal volleyball that passes for comment and analysis at Sky with little outlet for meaningful protest, leaving a generation of production teams restful in the absence of any sustained pressure to improve standards. Not that the early signs from BT are cause for renewed optimism that a new breed of pundit is about to take to our screens – the announcement of Rio Ferdinand as ‘football expert and programme maker’ will have sent faces crashing into palms throughout the sane world and anchor Jake Humphries was schooled at the knee of some of the BBC’s most prized and culpable radishes. But from August there will be what there has rarely previously been – another channel to turn to, and nothing is so good for innovation as the fear that defenses are vulnerable to being breached.

So reasons to be cheerful for the watching masses certainly, but none so compelling as to quell the nagging feeling that we could be about witness a false dawn. Another player in the arena doesn’t always mean increased competition, especially if the gulf in fire power is millions of pounds wide – how successful were Wigan in toppling Manchester United from their perch in all their eight years in the Premier League? If BT’s Vision is truly to build an object capable of standing up to the irresistible force of Sky a drastic levelling of the field is still necessary, which may yet require further regulation from broadcasting watchdogs and the state. Only once has a major change in the distribution of the rights to air cause a major revolution in the way football is produced and consumed and the ripples from that shockwave are still forming and reforming new landscapes, twenty years after the FA sold its ownership of the game to Rupert Murdoch and friends. Only once the tremors have subsided and the damage can be assessed can we be truly optimistic about sustainable change taking root.

Anyone who wants to make a conveniently sweeping judgment about the relative growth of any given industry in the domestic and, increasingly, global market need not look very much further than the names and logos ironed across the front of Premier League replica shirts. Soccer, it seems, is the new sex. It sells. It also looks tacky when touted around by a remorselessly cheap pop culture, courts controversy like it’s going out of fashion and often leaves one feeling unfulfilled. All three phenomena are a common theme of the modern alliance between the game and 21st century advertising practices. The cosy relationship between online betting firms and the Premier League’s colors and crests feels particularly uncomfortable.

Between 2011 and 2014, there will have been a total of 10 online gambling agencies splashed across the fronts of top-flight shirts spreading a creeping and insidious dye throughout the game’s fabric. The Premier League talks a lot about corporate responsibility – applied lightly with a delicate sprinkling of just £3.1million from the £5billion windfall that comes from global broadcast contracts alone – but responsibility comes in many forms and the image that the League has increasingly been transmitting of itself since the first online betting brand appeared on Fulham’s shirts in 2002 is in crisis.

The question on the lips of every executive decision maker at organizations spanning the full spectrum of ambition and reach will always be ‘what kind of business do we wish to operate?’ The answer from Richard Scudamore and friends, if the question is being asked at all, seems to be that an institution that fails to respond to be a pandemic within its ranks and transmits a destructive example to a vulnerable subset of its core support is a-ok as long the coffers continue to swell.

Gambler addicts (and footballers) Dominic Matteo, Matthew Etherington and Didi Hamman have suffered the most high profile falls of the last few years whilst Keith Gillespie and Michael Chopra also confronted their addictions publicly, but testimony from a catalog of Premier League managers and staff bears witness to a habit that drains millions from the pockets of players, many of whom have financial and emotional commitments to young families. Jose Mourinho remarked in 2007 that gambling was etched into the DNA of professional football culture and the message coming from the very top is that the authorities see this as an opportunity rather than a problem to be addressed.

The Premier League’s explicit endorsement of the gambling industry as it makes its relocation from the high street into family homes via increasingly ubiquitous online platforms is having the effect of normalizing, if not the financial and emotional insolvency that is bought on by the full force of the addiction, than at least the risk behavior that leads to it. The blessing is coming across loud, clear and cleanly packaged that easy-access betting is at the heart of what makes the Premier League the best in the world and that the point at which player-fan interaction is at its fullest isn’t any longer on the terraces but on tablets, mobiles and laptops.

And so just what kind of institution does Scudamore hope to leave the Premier League as? Certainly one that keeps up with the changing pace of business and has a keen finger on the throbbing pulse of a dynamic technological market – indeed no other sporting body has shown itself to be as responsive to new ideas in communications and the omnipresent points of contact between the League and its colossal fan base are what keep it current. But form isn’t everything. The League is peddling a dangerous message in its ‘at-all-costs’ approach to growth and brand that fails to take responsibility for its more vulnerable clients leaves a tarnished legacy.

Competition for the prize for last season’s biggest crisis club was one of the most hotly contested and morbidly gripping tussles up and down the divisions. Portsmouth provided the latest, and hopefully final, volume in their beginners guide to self-destruction whilst Aldershot Town tore up two decades worth of progress following liquidation to leave themselves with a sinking feeling of deja vu. Both offered a credible challenge to Harry Redknapp’s QPR as they wrote themselves a tragic-comedy about highly paid superstars on the road to ruin, but Coventry City surely offered up the most absorbing page-turner. With the new season’s fixtures still warm from the presses and the club yet to confirm a home ground for next year, the Sky Blues are looking a good bet to be the critics’ choice once again.

With the opening weekend barely a month away, the Football League announced this week that Coventry will play their home games over thirty miles outside of the city in Northampton, an arrangement that has already drawn an angry reaction from fans unwilling to pay for the privilege of spending an hour on the M1 every other weekend in addition to the usual rising match day costs. The demands being made by the club of its fans have the feel of an outfit with its back to the wall – its hands tied by circumstance, the next inevitable victim of an unforgiving and blisteringly harsh financial winter. But whilst the fans may be victims, the club’s problems are the product of a flawed design stretching back over the last decade and the blame rests not with the uppity fancies of a fickle financial climate but deep within the annals of power at the club and at Football League HQ.

When the season gets under way in mid-August, not only will the Ricoh Arena stand empty in the heart of the city like a lost shoe as thousands of fans pass by on the long trip to Northampton, the great majority of those fans will remember the other stadium that was left abandoned in the name of a vision of the club’s future that has stubbornly failed to materialize. When Highfield Road was sold off to developers in 2005, the directors were in good voice, speculating loudly about prospects for the Ricoh Arena that included a key role in England’s 2006 World Cup bid and competing in finances and facilities with clubs like Leicester and Southampton, whom hindsight has taught us have taken a more realistic perspective on their prospects from the start. Even the old ground’s parking facilities were held up as a reason for forcing a move to more illustrious digs. Dodgy parking and a long walk to the ground on match days will seem a longed-for memory now to those fans who face a sixty mile round trip on home weekends.

Avaricious short termism and a phobia of parallel parking aren’t the only thorns in the side of a club that have regressed spectacularly in recent seasons. And the decision makers at Coventry aren’t the only ones who deserve a share of the blame. The relationship with the de facto owners of the Ricoh, Arena Coventry Limited (ACL), has been tense for years, largely due to disagreements over the divvying up of match day takings, which is ultimately at the core of the current dispute. City, having already reneged on their tenancy agreement and been offered a generous golden handshake that would see them play out at least a season at the Arena for gratis, have stubbornly refused to budge on ACL’s demands that the owners retain the bulk of match day takings, and the working arrangement between the two parties has become, at least for now, unpalatable.

With the season drawing in, the city of Coventry finds itself with a fine stadium standing empty but no professional club playing within its boundaries, whilst thirty thousand plus fans go without (if the official attendance at the recent Johnston’s Paint Trophy match against Crewe Alexandra is anything to go by). Finger pointing abounds, but the Football League have remained conspicuously tight-lipped in their judgements, and the guidance offered to all parties has been thin on the ground. The rule book was dropped on the team’s hopes of a promotion push when 10 points were swiftly deducted upon owners Sisu putting the club into administration over the stadium fiasco.

It’s hard to look past the football authorities when it comes to placing responsibility for what has happened at Coventry. Readily reactive but rarely proactive, the League has rumbled along for too long now with loose regulations that fail to properly define the levels of responsibility shared between its members and their commercial partners. Meticulous calculations over divisions of assets and income from the sales of meat pies may not court the kind of glamorous attention the Football League craves as it enviously clings to the coat tails of the Premier League but it’s the kind of heavy lifting that underscores everything the organization is trying to achieve, and without due diligence there can be few complaints when more and more corporate relationships sour and leave a stain on the football landscape.

Because nine thousand fans packing into Sixfields Stadium whilst potentially double that number invest their money and support elsewhere makes little commercial or sporting sense, and in encouraging a club to move such a significant distance from its core support undermines the grassroots spirit of the game. Echoes of Wimbledon and Milton Keynes create an ominous soundscape for authorities and fans moving forward.

And so a lot rests on how much of a success League One side Coventry are able to make of the next twelve months. It’s not inconceivable that this could all yet turn into a sterling example of a small club kicking out against corporate interference and holding their own in the shark pool of investment capital. But the authorities have failed to fulfill the terms of their guardianship too many times in the past for us to pin our hopes too firmly on a positive outcome.

As the Premier League was kicking and screaming its way into the world in 1992 amidst talk of a revolution in the way football was played and watched, there was a less seismic but equally historic development unfolding much further down the pyramid. As the First Division clubs packed up their things and left to take up lucrative new contracts in the revamped top flight, Aldershot of the Fourth Division became only the second club in League history, and the last to date, to crash out of business without fulfilling its obligations for the season, crippling debts sending the club to the wall with two months of fixtures outstanding.

The doomed Shots could have been remembered as the first casualty of a new footballing conflict – the mega-rich of the new digitized elite versus the old order of locally focused clubs reliant on loyal community support. That history tells it differently is a testament to the bloody minded stubbornness of fan movements that have shown they are capable of resisting the extra pressure placed on their clubs by a bloated aristocracy. Aldershot were re-born under the tutelage of a small band of supporters and within 16 years had battled their way back to the Football League. This proud young legacy however looks to be coming all too prematurely to an end.

The second coming of Aldershot will be wound up this week unless a deal can be struck with the club’s creditors over outstanding debts. The receivers are making pessimistic noises. With three of the club’s former directors reluctant to come to terms on a reduced payment plan, a happy ending looks unlikely, and the £600,000 raised by a consortium led by chairman Shahid Azeem to buy the club looks increasingly to have been in vain. At last count, the group is still some £50,000 short of the figure necessary for a CVA (Company Voluntary Agreement) to take effect, leaving the club facing a future that may not extend beyond the weekend. With the Conference Premier announcing a new set of fixtures this week the affair has become, amongst other things, a question of timing.

The question mark over the club’s future has been hanging since long before the end of last season, and whilst the Shots only became the responsibility of the Conference authorities upon their relegation in May, in sanctioning their entry to the league the board have failed in their duty to their other members. The non-League’s top flight comprises 21 clubs who have been able to offer guarantees of solvency to begin the season, and one who may not be around come kick-off in August. A deadline or two before the fixture list was drawn up and published could have offered a more stable set of prospects for all concerned.

Because there’s an unfriendly truth about Aldershot’s fall, that applies to almost any club that fails to get things right when balancing the books. The journey that took the club from their lowest point back into the League may be dripping in romance and resolve but it’s also the story of a business that operated beyond its means to pull in rewards that should have been out of its reach. It’s the story of a club that failed to appraise their changing circumstances as they pushed through the divisions and have ultimately paid the price for not making the necessary sacrifices to a playing budget that has proved unsustainable.

Critics are always ready to apply the idea of living beyond one’s means to the big hitters that make avaricious gambles that backfire but the same sentiments resonate lower down the pyramid. In Aldershot, the world of professional football has a community capable of supporting a club to a competitive standard at a definite level but for a second time in twenty years the people pulling the purse strings have aimed high and missed. Football League wages demand Football League gate receipts, merchandise sales and sponsorship contracts and deficit spending can only support an outfit for so long. Aldershot’s number, it seems, is up.

The situation comes with an added kick if we consider the knock-on effect on the clubs in the local vicinity. In allowing the Aldershot fiasco to rumble on until the schedule for the new season is drawn up and released, the Conference have backed themselves into a corner, risking a league table that threatens to be a weekly reminder of the loose financial regulations applied to its members. There may yet be a handful of ambitious outfits a division down gazing up at the hole left by Aldershot and wondering why admission to the league was granted to a club barely a month away from liquidation. With a space laying vacant until August, the feeling is likely to be that the position could have been taken by a well-run side from a step down who have planned, budgeted and grown in a way that the Shots have so spectacularly failed to.

And so we tick closer to D-day for a club that was given a second chance to blossom and now stands on the edge of blowing it. For those who stand to lose out the most, it’s impossible not to feel sympathetic. The community that will lose its flag-bearer for a second time will suffer, though not as much as the families whose income will be hammered by the inevitable redundancies. If the Aldershot demise teaches us anything, it’s that it’s important not to blur the lines between big-time Charlies who fall victim to their own greed and smaller outfits who stretch limited resources just too far. All the warning signs were there for the Shots that flying too close to the sun, however dimly it burns, promises a bumpy landing. Ambition and resources alike, it seems, are relative.

A generation from now, naughty children around the world will be hushed into submission by whispers of a hideous and sinister figure from the darkest corner of history. Disobedient little ones will tremble at the mention of his name, balk at stories of his villainous deeds and offer prayers that wherever he is now it’s a place far, far away. “Eat your greens,” parents will plead, “Or Sepp Blatter will come for you in your sleep.” The global youth will enter a golden age of nutrition.

He-who-must-not-be-named took a further step towards enshrining himself forever in history as the thing that goes bump in the night with more clumsy sound-bites on the Brazilian crisis earlier this week.

A couple of gems glimmer: “This is not our problem, it is a Brazilian problem.” To be fair to Blatter he is at least practicing what he preaches, fleeing the country last week to attend the U-20 World Championships in Turkey and leaving the Brazilian’s to ‘their problem.’ Equally headline-worthy was the President’s assertion that “FIFA has come out of this stronger, with [its] image enhanced.” There’s a flicker of truth to this if we consider what the governing body has been up to over the last 12 months –if FIFA’s image is that of a self-serving boys’ club engineered to further the business interests of its Executive Committee then the last two weeks in South America have enhanced it in glorious high definition. So you have to say, really, fair game Sepp.

In fact maybe it’s about time we all started being a little fairer in our judgments of the Brazilian uprising. Or at least broadening our horizons when thinking about the country’s immediate future and its relationships with its government, with FIFA and with the game it loves. Brazil is a country with a mess on its hands and with the World Cup still a year away it’s difficult to see how the situation won’t worsen before signs of improvement can be seen. The Brazilian voters are engulfed in a fury that is unlikely to temper until after FIFA have packed up and left but through the riots, the tear gas and the damning press reports, has the time come for a real discussion about what’s next for football’s most successful nation? Broaden the debate and we might even find that FIFA aren’t quite the noxious presence we’re so ready to believe.

Much has been made of the $13billion of public investments made in preparations for the big event next summer whilst basic education, transport and welfare provisions fail to grow and FIFA cream off a healthy $4billion in tax-free profit from the tournament. The people, disenfranchised and suffering, need someone to blame and the football authorities are the most conspicuous target for a reaction, but FIFA’s role in the World Cup is in effect little more than the glorified head of a franchise. The money that Blatter and co will collect as profits is really just the money that the host nation pay to hold the franchise for a finite time – to use one of the most recognised brands in the world to attract visitors, attention and investment to their shores. After that, the whole thing becomes a distinctly domestic affair.

The dissenting tune being sung at a hundred cities across the country is that money should be invested into a failing state infrastructure before it is poured into vanity showpiece sporting events, especially in a part of the world where millions live below the poverty line. But a statistical appraisal of the situation paints an improving picture. The Gini coefficient, which measures distribution of wealth, shows that since 1995 the population has become less disparate in its standard of living, unlike in parts of the developed world where the gap between rich and poor is widening. Notwithstanding that, a change of government since 2009 has seen accusations of financial corruption against the leadership soar. Brazil is a country slowly getting its house in order in terms of how it provides for its people. The minimum wage has risen almost four-fold in two decades, attainment in primary education almost doubled and long-term trends point to a nation steadily getting it right.

These numbers will be of little consolation to the tens of thousands who have taken to the street in protest against a government that is failing on so many social fronts to engage with its people, less still to the direct victims of state corruption and police brutality, but there is enough evidence to suggest that handled properly the massive investments made in the World Cup can still pay off for ordinary Brazilians. The London Olympics were followed by quarterly growth of 1% in the British economy and the event has been lauded for delivering a spiking moment in a flat-lining economy, offering a moment of hope in the midst of a stubborn recession. South Africa saw its advertising industry explode in 2010, a legacy which has been sustained once the world had averted its gaze, and the country has been totally rebranded as a tourist destination and investment prospect in the three years since.

FIFA are often criticised for failing to leave a lasting legacy for its host nations but the question here is one of placing responsibility. The World Cup offers a springboard for growth and investment opportunities, both domestic and international, but it’s never been part of the deal that the football authorities should hang around to supervise later on. Too often the Exec Com are a convenient scapegoat when industry at home fails to capitalize on a short term boom.

None of this is to suggest that the Brazilian riots aren’t a legitimate reaction to a relationship between rulers and ruled that simply isn’t working but before solutions can be found a fairer appraisal of the situation needs to be made. Who are the bad guys here, really? The problems were there long before the cohort from Zurich touched down for the Confederations Cup and nothing interferes with the pursuit of progress like an easy scapegoat.

Change is needed in Brazil and if 2014 is to go off peacefully, it is needed fast. But a message to the bearers of the FIFA GO HOME banners – check your pace. An opportunity is about to present itself in Brazil to build on an encouraging twenty years of growth and any dialogue moving forward must be focused on repairing a relationship between the elected leaders and their people. Just for once Blatter might not have all the answers.

Anyone following the FIFA PR machine as it trips and skids its way through its response to the chaos unfolding in Brazil could be forgiven for thinking we’re in pantomime season. As the Confederations Cup quickly turns from close-season money spinner into a full frontal exposure of a nation in crisis, the villainous outline of Sepp Blatter looms large over the country. Meanwhile self-appointed spokesman for the occasion Jerome Valcke staggers around like the back end of a tandem horse, pulled this way and that as a nationwide protest movement threatens to boil over. With the World Cup still to come in 2014, an extended run looks likely.

That FIFA have failed to really appraise their own role in the meltdown shouldn’t really come as a surprise. In a year that has seen an ethics committee, set-up to guide the Executive Committee towards a semblance of order, fall on its sword in despair at being unable to make itself heard by a grandiose and self-serving autocracy, it’s hardly surprising that the bigwigs in Zurich see themselves as the victims whilst a country creaks and groans under the unbearable pressure of two tournaments hopelessly beyond their means to pull off.

The issues that have brought tens of thousands to the streets in protest are a complex product of a failed relationship between a country and its leaders but the part that concerns FIFA is reducible to an easy to understand formula. The people are keen to know why they are being forced to invest $13bn from the public purse in a product that is projected to earn $4bn for the world governing body, whilst domestic transport, health and welfare structures suffer through chronic under-investment. It’s an arrangement, just like all World Cups, whereby the host nation puts up the capital for the leadership to cream off the returns. The real wonder here is how it’s taken until 2013 for a mass consciousness to develop that the books don’t balance.

FIFA have been quick to quash any suggestion that their presence has in any way stoked the flames. General Secretary Valcke’s protestations that “this is not the fault of FIFA. This is a Brazilian problem” are lacking in humility, but compensating with all the bombastic pomp that so often follows these moments of finger-pointing from the world’s media. All the PR in the world though can’t save the Exec Com from what is becoming an increasingly transparent truth – football’s role as the great social pacifier is looking shaky and without it FIFA’s role as an institution beyond reproach cannot any longer be guaranteed.

Head coach Felipe Scolari is just as culpable of sticking his head in the sand. His remarks that a Brazilian victory over Uruguay could go a long way towards settling the public displeasure fail to factor in that football, so often a social tonic, can only be so when it offers a common escape from the day to day of public grievance. The problem now is that the game with which Brazilians share such a romantic history is at the very heart of the upset.

Because until now the vocal criticisms of FIFA have tended to stop there. They are the institution about which no-one seems to have a good word to say but by whom nobody is troubled deeply enough by to take corrective action. Their approach to international competitions is enough to keep broadcasters and construction firms smiling around the world and whenever the public conscience is troubled by horror stories about chronic mis-management and corruption, there will inevitably be institutions at home more deserving of the domestic scorn simply because they impact more closely on day to day life. The FIFA autocrats bed down in their bunker and wait for football’s irrepressible message of unity and hope to save the day.

In Brazil this summer, we’re seeing a new breed of mass protest. Never before has the world’s most popular game incited such a conspicuous and apparently organized reaction from a resistance movement, and never before has the notion of being unified by football carried such a destructive undertone. And never, not throughout its tumultuous history as a body riddled with self-interest and wince-making corruption, has FIFA been so firmly in the sights of a movement so ready to get up and shout about it. If a wedge really has been driven between the Brazilian people and the game with which they have become so synonymous, and that relationship has been soured as irreparably as the images beaming around the world suggest, how can this spell anything other than the beginning of the end for the hegemony of the Blatter years?

The governing body might stand half a chance if its mouthpieces showed an ounce of acknowledgement, in the light of mounting evidence, that they aren’t the benevolent presence in Brazil that all their sermonized dogma attests to. Perhaps if they left one of their host nations with more of a legacy than the herd of white elephants that lie peppered across South Africa like space age grave stones, making more transparent use of the galactic investments their government partners make in the name of FIFA’s big four-yearly pay day, they might go some way towards reassuring domestic audiences that their taxes are being invested for the public good.

The year 2013 has offered FIFA its most concrete chances to show that it is serious about reform and yet its reputation has never been more tarnished, confidence in its ability to grasp the nettle of social and corporate responsibility never shakier. The message coming out of Brazil is that people will gladly turn a blind eye to brazen mis-management as long as it doesn’t clash with the national interest. Football’s governors are learning for the first time that their brand isn’t fool proof – or riot proof – and the days of plundering a nation to its depths for the sake of easy returns may be coming, rather violently, to their end.

I’ll leave you, the reader, with the following statement from Eduardo Galeano, author of the book Soccer in Sun and Shadow, about the riots in Brazil:

“As far as I’m concerned, the explosion of indignation in Brazil is justified. In its thirst for justice, it is similar to other demonstrations that in recent years have shaken many countries in many parts of the world.

“Brazilians, who are the most soccer-mad of all, have decided not to allow their sport to be used any more as an excuse for humiliating the many and enriching the few. The fiesta of soccer, a feast for the legs that play and the eyes that watch, is much more than a big business run by overlords from Switzerland. The most popular sport in the world wants to serve the people who embrace it. That is a fire police violence will never put out.”

Poor old Gus Poyet. The former Brighton boss must feel like somebody’s been sneaking into his world and pulling threads with the way his career has been unravelling lately. Since his side blew their favorites tag to go crashing out of the Championship play-offs to a Crystal Palace team in wretched form on May 13, the Uruguayan has been the football media’s number one fall guy, suspended from his job and panned by his club for failing to attend a disciplinary hearing into the undisclosed charges hanging over him. So when the BBC elected to broadcast Gus’s sacking as part of their coverage of Spain’s Confederations Cup match against Nigeria, it’s fair to concede that the look of child-like bewilderment that swept across his face as presenter Mark Chapman’s questions rained down on him was well warranted.

It’s an interesting new direction for the BBC, spearheading their summer schedule with live and exclusive prime-time sackings of people who presumably have bills to pay and would just as presumably rather receive such news without the glare of a nation bearing down on them. But who are we to question the producers at the Beeb when there are viewing figures at stake, especially at a time of year when big stories are thin on the ground. And let’s not forget the first rule of reality TV – the suffering of the star is only relative to the entertainment value generated.

At the game’s apex, there has always been a certain contract that demands access to private lives, and the reach of public curiosity, as well as the media’s capacity to satisfy it, is growing fast. But the BBC’s handling of the Poyet sacking marks a watershed in the changing landscape of football coverage. What until recently could be laughed off as a voyeuristic peep-show is beginning to feel more like a thinly veiled rendering of vulnerable people into slap-stick figures of fun.

Football audiences are greedy – inevitably really when you stop to consider the deluge of coverage that has poured out of our screens since the Sky revolution, but the dramatization of the game has seen us arrive at a place where the sport itself no longer satiates our demand. There is a craving to understand the game in its micro form and since Andy Gray’s stop-start machine with all its colored lines and thick-rimmed circles allowed us to pick apart every detail on the pitch from 1993 onwards, fans and media alike have plumbed deeper and deeper to locate the beating heart of the game off it.

Whether that’s what we found during the BBC’s coverage on Sunday is a matter for the conscience rather than the critic. Whether a man deserves more than 45 minutes to digest the news of his termination notice having had it delivered by a virtual stranger before being grilled for his reaction in front of a live TV audience all depends on how personally you respect the right to quiet introspection in times of crisis. But then football doesn’t do much quietly these days. And as the game’s movers and shakers take a more influential role in the moulding of a national culture there’s a school of thought that says personal space is a luxury left behind in a forgotten age.

So goes the theory. And yet Gus Poyet was, at the most basic level, a working man carrying out his duties as defined by a confidential contract – a condition of which must surely have been that changes to that contract be carried out by the involved parties before the world is invited in to poke its nose around.

There’s room for a wry smile here, not at the expense of Poyet but at the spirit-crushingly two-dimensional approach taken by the BBC these days towards its journalism. Poyet’s face is a study in incredulity as the same questions roll again and again off Chapman’s vidi-printer and glance limply off the tired Uruguayan’s increasingly lifeless brow. If Poyet states his intention to appeal the decision once he states it a thousand times, before Chapman rather curtly informs him with barely a hint of sympathy that it will be very difficult for him to manage Brighton again after this. One would hope that Poyet is keeping his options open when it comes to seeking legal advice.

It’s difficult to know exactly where the presenter expects his policy of circular questioning will lead him and his audience, but it seems a fair bet that there is a certain level of frustration as his guest stubbornly refuses to break his composure and submit to the kind of histrionics that would kick this back-breaking anti-interview up a notch. Not known for displays of stoicism, it’s tricky to say whether Poyet is humoring his tormentor or just plain exhausted by his banality.

The real nonsense here of course is that there isn’t even a story to tell in the first place. Somewhere within the creaking bureaucracy of the relationship between a club and its manager there has been a breakdown in communications, the memo that was to inform the outgoing manager of his fate presumably lost somewhere in the thick, greasy membrane of lawyers, agents and the people who deliver quill-written messages on horseback pressed with a wax seal. Or something. But in its relentlessly desperate scrambling to find something to fill the close season emptiness (presumably the match we were all supposed to be watching at the time wasn’t considered worth the production costs alone), the BBC have taken a pot-shot at a ‘real life story’ and struck Poyet squarely between the eyes.

But then maybe that’s the problem. The football media has seen the success of the reality genre and is rushing to fill a perceived gap in the market, but in doing so it is careering straight into a brick wall, with Poyet as its passenger an early casualty. A situation that could have been settled with a minimum of embarrassment and publicity by the relevant parties has been whipped into a tabloid frenzy by producers who want real life stories but without sticking around to deal with the human consequences.

And poor old Gus? The two-times Championship manager of the month is left to pick up the needle and begin the fiddly process of preserving a career that is suddenly becoming unpicked, only now there will be the complications of Sunday’s publicity night knotting the yarn. He never was a great one for controversy in his playing days. That may not be the case for much longer if his misfortunes continue to be treated as fodder for a lazy and opportunistic media circuit.