Business

Adidas is one of many brands trying to muscle in on the attention the Copa America Centenario has brought to soccer in the USA. This is a good idea on its face, the only problem is they are not doing a very good job of it.

There is a persistent rumor that Adidas is an acronym for "All day I dream about sports." There is also a less-appropriate version that substututes "sports" for . . . well you get the idea. It doesn't matter anyway, because we alone know what Adidas actually stands for: All Day I Derp About Spelling.

Look what they did with "Colombia" and "Columbia."

Last weekend, the discovery of a serious match-fixing scandal has made Portuguese football a hot topic in crime pages in newspapers around the world.

Unfortunately this is not an isolated case, over the years, match-fixing scandals have dramatically grown.

Soccer is facing more suspicion than it ever has before, and that suspicion is driven by the possibility of a multibillion-dollar web of match-fixing that is corrupting the game.

Lionel Messi has been under investigation for tax fraud for so long that it was behinning to feel like nothing was ever going to come of it. But now, with Messi standing trial for four days, and details from that trial being released, it seems like there is a chance some s*** will hit the fan, only a slight chance but a chance none the less.

Prosecutors representing the Spanish government accuse Messi and his father of dodging €4.1 million in taxes from 2007 to 2009 via shell companies in the UK and Switzerland and tax havens in Belize and Uruguay. 

The Copa America and European Championships are the two biggest continental tournaments in football. Both have a similar structure, but the money made available for winnings by CONMEBOL and UEFA is not equal between the two.

The Copa America Centenario has $18 million with which to reward national teams, which is $8 million more than Chile 2015 had to distribute.

Interim FIFA general secretary Markus Kattner has been fired for receiving lots and lots of money in secret bonuses.

For the previous 13 years, Kattner had served as FIFA's finance director, so he was in a perfect position to give himself a little extra million or several under the table.

FIFA's announcement was, um, succinct:

Earlier this year, the Bundesliga announced that the league had recorded its second-highest Bundesliga attendance ever. A total of 6,478,680 fans attended 153 matches over the first half of the season with an average of 42,344 per game. By contrast, the Premier League averaged 36,452 over the entirety of the season. 

Leicester City lifted the Barclays Premier League trophy this past weekend. Their achievement of transforming from a bottom half side in the league to Champions of England in just one season is the stuff of magic, fairy tales, heroic feats, and any other oft-used sports and literature related cliche. However, and I don’t mean to burst the Leicester City underdog bubble already, it’s unlikely to happen in any of the tops leagues in Europe again for awhile, and the main reason is of course, money.

Forbes have released their annual list of the world’s richest clubs, and the results reveal a dramatic shift in global football. While Real Madrid occupy the top spot for the fourth consecutive year (valued at $3.645 billion), English clubs now occupy six of the top 10 spots. Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur have each seen their value increase by over 40% in one-year.

“Our country is in serious trouble. We’re having people coming in through the border that are not people that we want,” says Donald Trump in an audio clip from the Republican presidential candidate that’s being used to promote this summer’s Copa America Centenario.

The images and text that go with the audio make the speech, for the first time, seem reasonable. Marcos Rojo, Pablo Zabaleta, Lionel Messi and Javier Mascherano are seen disembarking from a plane, presumably landing on American soil for this summer’s tournament. The United States is indeed in serious trouble.