I haven't exactly kept to my promise of keeping a blog going (albeit on a less regular basis) by looking more at the general Swiss and European news rather than being yet another Arsenal blog (many others do that far better than I can). I've managed to avoid talking about the Shaqiri move to Bayern Munich (despite the hilarious attempts previously by the UK media to suggest he was going to England - it was always going to be Germany). I didn't even blog about the famous FC Basel v Bayern Munich game of last week but hopefully I will return to that when the second leg comes around. However the situation in the Swiss Football world has got even sillier this week....

Imagine if you can that it was mid way through the current Premier League season and of the 20 clubs involved, 2 had been deducted 30+ points for transfer irregularities, 2 had been declared bankrupt (& kicked out of the league) and finally, in the last week, another 2 clubs had announced bankruptcy too. What do you think the media reaction would be? It would, of course, finally be justified to really say, "Football is in CRISIS".

Well, that is the current state of the Swiss AXPO Super League at the moment as the original 10 club league has had one team kicked out (Neuchatel Xamax - Bankruptcy), one club has had a 36 point deduction (FC Sion - transfer irregularities) and this week another club declared itself bankrupt (Servette FC). I did devote one earlier blog to the problems that surrounded Sion and how the Swiss FA must take some of the responsibility for their problems. Since then two clubs have been declared bankrupt, one through allowing an incredibly dodgy owner (read about it here) to buy the club (Portsmouth fans will be well aware of this) and one through poor financial management. It doesn't say much for the capability of the Swiss FA to assess and adjudicate on the financial background of clubs and owners. You would think that the Swiss FA (of all FAs)would have access to some reasonably good accountants and bankers!!!

It's not even as this is new news, Servette have collapsed before in 2005 and Lausanne were declared bankrupt eight years ago. It seems that like many leagues across Europe the effects of Champions League money (amongst other things) is exasperating the fact that the league is basically a 1-2 (or maybe 2-3) club league. FC Basel with its 42,000 capacity stadium, regular CL money and excellent youth system has become more and more dominant (they have won 6 of last 10 league titles). Even the regular challenge from FC Zurich and Young Boys of Bern seems less of a problem these days though they are still the most likely of contenders.

Meanwhile the Swiss League continues to say all is healthy within the Swiss game and here you can see the paradox because in many ways it has never been so good. Currently Basel are in the last 16 of CL (and could go further), the Swiss U17 won the 2009 WC,  the U21s reached the final of the European Championships only to lose to Spain and the youth system is filtering into a decent national side (as well as producing players that are wanted by the big European clubs) that can only get better. Not bad for a small (if very rich) country but surely they can sort out the club financial and administrative problems now....

It's pretty hard to pick up a paper (or more likely open up a newspaper website) & go to the sport pages without (this week) seeing yet another article on the demise of the FA Cup. It seems rather odd that the journalists go on and on about it because most football fans have accepted things have fundamentally changed with the English major cup competition. That doesn't mean that people are necessarily happy with it or that they would like to see things go back to "Ye Good Old Days" but they don't need to see the same articles being regurgitated over and over again.

As one of those football supporters who fits the aging average age group profile of the Premier League clubs (i.e. over 40 and a moaning old git when I want to be!) I have all those wonderful memories of the FA Cup from my childhood. Whether the distance of time has actually made them better than they actually were is a mute point but as I listen to radio 5 on third round day there is very little difference from those far flung days. The sound quality is better, there are more reporters at the games (it seems they are all covered these days) and the hyperbole whenever there is a potential shock is a little more forced. However, by choosing to just listen to it on the radio the 3rd round is pretty "old school" and it's rather good this way.

Of course now we have games spread over the weekend from Friday night to Monday evening (ensuring that when Arsenal play Leeds United they will already know their 4th round opponents) in order to fit in all the TV requests. The strange thing is that these TV games do not just end up in front of the UK audience, they are transmitted around the world. Here in Switzerland I can get numerous European TV channels and there is both a German (Sport 1) and French (France 4) channel that are showing live games all across the weekend as well as highlights.

This makes the FA Cup pretty much unique across the globe in terms of widespread coverage of a national cup competition. I know Eurosport has coverage of the French Cups, I don't know if Sky shows any Copa del Rey from Spain and here in Switzerland I can get to see the German DFB Pokal but these are isolated. The FA Cup is still seen all over the world despite the misgivings in the home country.

Thankfully I didn't get to watch the apparently rather awful game between Birmingham and Wolves but it was shown on both Sport 1 and France 4. The Macclesfield v Bolton game is currently on my TV here (France 4) with the sound muted and Radio 5 on in the background. Tomorrow I can get a better quality picture of the Manchester derby on either Sport 1 or France 4 and avoid the perennially awful ITV commentary whilst Monday evening will allow a similar viewing of the Arsenal game again on France 4. What is particularly interesting is how much buildup the French channel, in particular, gives to any of the live games. 

Whether they will still be televising games after the Birmingham game this lunchtime has still to be determined though...

In the UK clubs have got used to getting the usual 10 point penalty when going into administration (though Luton once received a huge 30 point penalty) and so when you see a 36 point penalty it does rather take your breath away!

For 36 points is the sanction imposed on FC Sion by the Swiss FA following the protracted battle between the club and the various administrative bodies (FIFA, UEFA & Swiss FA). Whether this is the end of the matter is another thing though. Certainly if you look at the behaviour of the club following their original expulsion from the Europa League it would certainly be a shock to seem them meekly accept it (the use of the word "cowardly" and reference to further court action in their response suggests a different path). So how did we get to this position and what has happened since the beginning of the saga....

It all began in 2008 when FC Sion were accused and found guilty of poaching Essam El-Hadary from Al Ahly. Sion were trying to use the precedent set by Hearts player Andy Webster by paying up the residual value of the contract. The goalkeeper himself had quit the Egyptian club and had hoped they would let him go but they claimed he had not given appropriate notice. It took a further two months before the transfer was ratified by both FIFA and the Swiss FA in April 2008 though FIFA used the phrase,

"This decision is without prejudice and pending the outcome of a possible contractual labour dispute between the player and Al Ahly"

However, it took FIFA a long time to decide to pursue the case any further and in June 2009 they ruled that the breaking of the contract was illegal and imposed sanctions on both the player and FC Sion. As a result the Swiss club was banned from bringing in players for the next two transfer windows. You will not be surprised to learn that FC Sion appealed this decision by the CAS (allowing a temporary suspension of any transfer ban) but the appeal failed in April 2011. This, of course, meant the 2 x transfer window ban was back in play and in the most recent of the transfer window they bought six players in contravention of this ban.

However, how come UEFA (and the Swiss FA before them) ratified the squad that FC Sion submitted for the Europa League games this season allowing the saga to begin following the Celtic game. All that has followed resulted from UEFA's inability to tell FC Sion they had ineligible  players in their squad.

What has happened since has been FC Sion trying to use judicial systems that are outside of those in FIFA, UEFA and the CAS to appeal the expulsion from the Europa League. However, whatever the legal possibilities from adopting this approach they were always going to be going up against the primary rule of FIFA banning such practices. Eventually (after numerous internal Swiss court sessions) FC Sion lost its final protest in December with the Swiss FA.

It was this final action that FIFA deemed the Swiss FA had not imposed sufficient penalties on FC Sion (in their minds, 3-0 defeats for every game in which the illegal players competed. In their normal bullying manner they then threatened the Swiss FA with all manner of sanctions (including the potential booting out of FC Basel from the CL) if they didn't comply.

So the Swiss FA folded (albeit with a different penalty than FIFA suggested) rather than fight FIFA and its ominous might. Reading comments on a swiss website it seems many show anger towards FIFA (understandable), some think the Swiss FA should have shown some balls and some blame the Swiss FA (after all they allowed the registration of the players!). As usual Blatter and Platini are universally loathed.

Personally I can see why the Swiss FA took this route but wouldn't it have been good to see them talk to the Swiss government and look at some other options. After all where are FIFA and UEFA based? Who gives them tax free status? Which country's banks looks after all their money? If anyone knows where the FIFA skeletons are hidden then surely it is here in Switzerland!

After expressing my desire and intent to return to a regular blog it might prove a little more difficult to return immediately as I'm just about to leave Switzerland and fly back to the UK for Christmas. As is usual on these trips it's all going to be a bit hectic and time may be too short to enable me to create anything more than a couple of brief paragraphs. I would really like to do a little bit more on the whole FIFA/Sion/Swiss FA saga but i fear that may have to await my return as it's a complex story that started over 2 years ago! If you want a little bit of the history (and speak French) you may find this link interesting..

 http://www.20min.ch/ro/sports/dossier/fcsion/

There has been one story of the last few days that holds particular interest to me as I'm going to be in London on 27th December after travelling back up from Plymouth. If the Arsenal game is postponed 24hrs then I may be able to go to the game and it's rescheduled as an evening game rather than 3.00pm. My train doesn't get into Paddington until 4.30 so it's a little bit of a long shot at the moment. In normal circumstances the 27th would have been a working day but with Christmas Day falling on a Sunday it's a bank holiday and so the game could still be at 3.00pm :-(

Oh well, sorry for the briefness of the post but have to go and catch a plane. Here's hoping to a good result tonight and a merry Christmas for everyone.

So why hasn't there been a blog for such a long time...

Apparently there are around 100 Million blogs in existence around the world and pretty much everyone of them, I dare to suggest, have an author who struggles some days (or weeks & months) to come up with something substantial to blog about. As a result there are many blogs with little new and up to date content or just the same old plain content repeated over and over again across a variety of blogs. Certainly in my own case a combination of personal motivation, a feeling of isolation here in Switzerland and a general difficulty in writing anything that wasn't been done better or quicker by other bloggers meant that it seemed all rather pointless to sit in front of a computer and write a few meaningless paragraphs that would just disappear into the ether..

Anyhow a few things over the weekend have rekindled the faint embers of a blogging fire left in me and I'm hopeful that I can return to a relatively regular amount of writing. So what has changed my attitude or, at the very least, kick started a new positive approach? Firstly I had a rather drunken twitter three way conversation with people I've never met but somehow we had a common sense of camaraderie and opinion that showed how much just sharing opinions over the web can be an interesting and invigorating experience.

Secondly I flicked through the first few parts of the wonderfully produced Arsenal Anthology, So Paddy Got Up, that arrived last week and I saw the words of the renowned Arsenal blogger, Arseblog, regarding how & why to keep up a daily blog. It made me realize two things - one find a subject of interest but also with a little bit of an angle (Arseblog and others write far better blogs on Arsenal than I ever could) and secondly establish a routine of writing.

Finally there was the story regarding FIFA and its apparent threat to FC Basel over their dispute with the Swiss FA regarding their reaction to the Sion affair. This point established within my mind that I need to give more thoughts to football matters of interest to me (from an emotional, actual or purely moral viewpoint) that link my football world, the world where I now live (i.e. Switzerland, especially Basel and the football world has been much more aware of this little country in recent weeks!) and my love of Arsenal but maybe from a more European perspective.

Hopefully this new approach will result in the occasional blog (I'm not setting myself up to write long daily blogs but at least a couple of times a week) that is of interest, stirs a few thoughts or comments and, most importantly for me, is fun to write. Let's see how it goes....

A chance tweet from the excellent @bayareagooners made me realise how much things have changed in a little over 12 months. This time last year I was in San Francisco and quite happily getting up at 6.30am to go and watch us play Bolton in a bar in town. Now I'm also up at an early hour but this time to catch a flight back to watch the very same fixture. Last year I was expectant and this I'm hopeful. I'm hoping players who have been saying the same thing over and over again will actually do what they say.  I'M hoping that players can concentrate for 90 mins and not 60. I'm hoping the players can be confident and aggressive in the face of Kevin Davies' elbows.  Above all I'm hoping for a decent performance and three points with a supportive crowd. Let's do our bit! COYRRG

As I look out over Basel airport (we still have viewing areas as such here) in the blazing sunshine awaiting my flight back to the UK I'm struck with a strange feeling of being in a time warp. It's a feeling that I haven't experienced for quite a while and I'll try and describe it but it's a little intangible to be honest.  As I make my way back to watch the Arsenal play tomorrow I feel that I've got a little of my old love for the club back! Now to many of you that is going to sound completely mad. According to most of the media and many fans themselves we are in CRISIS (official sic) and we should all be doom and gloom or just plain angry with the club, the manager, players and the board.

And yet..... For some reason I'm not?

I'm going back to meet up with my friends and support the players who wear the red & white and what's so incomprehensible about that? The feeling I'm getting is a little like the days when GG bought players such as Carter and Hartson whilst our midfield was poor to say the least. Yet we are in a much better position now but the feeling (correct) is that we have fallen behind the likes of City, United & Chelsea whilst allowing thenLiverpool's of this world to catch up. We must spend, spend, spend ( was that Viv Nicholson's quite?) and bugger the consequences in some people's eyes.  Would that guarantee success, who knows, but it would appease many. 

However, by a combination of our own ineptness (nasri contract expiring) and the financial might of others we find ourselves looking at huge prices and wages for average players. Yet the relative lack of depth of our squad as seen against Udinese indicates an absolute necessity to buy. Somewhere there is a middle ground but our moaning, groaning, jeering and booing of the players on the pitch won't change that. 

One other odd point where are all the media congratulating us on blooding young English/British players? For a group so keen to castigate us for too many foreigners playing we are getting little comment on our current squad. City meanwhile are spending fortunes on imports but nothing is said!

We have been here many times in the past of course but tonight's game versus Udinese is the first for the club without its most recent star player following the departure of our captain and all round star performer back to his home town. I won't go into the whole load of crap that surrounded the transfer as that has been done to death by many already but I do want to take you all back to a time when my worst nightmare was realised....

In the 70s Arsenal descended from a team that won the double into a fairly dire side and the only ray of hope as the decade progressed was the emergence of a couple of young Irish lads in Liam Brady & Frank Stapleton. There were other kids too but these were the two who we, as fans, pinned all our hopes on in terms of seeing Arsenal play some good football again (trophies were another matter as then Liverpool were just assumed to win everything then just as United are now). By the end of that decade under Terry Neill the club did achieve a fair bit with three successive cup finals and a European Final too. The fact we only won one of them is irrelevant as we were finally actually playing some football, winning a few games and getting to finals. Then that was seen as a very good thing indeed.

However, at the end of the 1980 season Brady moved on to Serie A (then the best league in the world especially in terms of money) with Juventus and we were devastated but there was no antagonism from Arsenal fans as it was felt he could do so much more at a club like that. He had gone because of the lure of Italian football and one of the great European teams unlike the following season when a certain Mr Stapleton upped and went to United because of the money (I still remember the chants when he returned) it was a different story.

Does that remind you of anything going on at the moment? Whatever we feel about Cesc and Nasri the most important thing is to support who ever remains in the red and white shirts representing our club. We will move on and the club will still be here long after any of the stars have come and gone. Let's hope we just get a bit of positive feeling from tonight's game.

I've spent the weekend back in the UK but far from the world of the returning Premier League season in both a geographical and electronic sense. Being in Cumbria (just by the coast in Whitehaven) has meant that I've had little access to any sort of electronic media until I managed to get a little PC time today. Not only that but I have been with relatives enjoying a little beer & wine as my wife's godfather celebrated his 70th birthday.

As a result I have seen no images, watched no highlights and only seen brief reports on the game yesterday. I guess, from what little I know, I haven't missed much and cannot deduce much from the performance or result other than the obvious fact that Joey Barton is a CNUT. That though would be like saying beer is good and the Swiss make chocolate. For all his esoteric tweets and supposed intellectual outpourings, he is and will remain forever a thug and a coward. It's the very reason that despite being a decent footballer (which he is) and being offered on a free transfer by Newcastle nobody has taken him on. He's just too much of a gamble and yet with a couple of weeks left in the transfer window it would not surprise me to see him land a new club - football forgives everything if somone thinks you can help them win games.

With other results (despite the normal flukey last minute winner for United) not really telling us much it seems that fans may well be in a better place to decide their fickleness at the end of this next week. Two home games, two big matches, two decent opponents and a proportion of fans ready to turn on the club (support doesn't seem to register as a word), this could be a very long seven days. I can't predict it nor would I dare to but I will be there next Saturday to support whatever XI is put out on the pitch. They may need all the support we can give them.

Last summer I kept on blogging pretty much all through July and August and it was, to be totally frank, a right pain in the Arse and rather depressing. I decided that to remove that negative aspect of my summer this year and, quite frankly, I am absolutely glad I made that decision for so many reasons. Aside from the general bile and negativity coming from all Arsenal related sites/blogs/tweets and the general media "Arsenal are F##ked next season" attitude I REALLY enjoyed the things I love doing/following/watching in the Summer months.

I cycled around, I enjoyed a fabulous two ten day tours across Switzerland with my new job (with one more to go in September), I watched a stupendously exciting Tour de France and have been sat watching the current England cricket team demolish (an admittedly abject and thoroughly bored) India as they look to be the world's best test team. I realised that this is what the summer is all about and I should not be worrying about transfer rumours, players' tweets or agents' bullshit EVER again. For whatever happens in the 12 weeks or so where there is no football I know that I will be back to support my team no matter what.

Of course it is impossible not to hear all the stories of who we may/may not be linked with us and who is or isn't desperate to leave my club. But I will say it again and again - I cannot change anything that is going on and neither can all the people blogging and tweeting with their moans and groans. We can have opinions, we can get frustrated, we can kick the cat or whatever we want but it ain't going to amount to anything. Maybe if we were a club like Exeter that has been on the brink of disappearing and was left to the supporters to salvage the situation by becoming a trust owned by the fans we could make a difference but us - no way.

There is only one thing that matters to the owners of any club in the Premier League and that is the money - so if 30,000 ST Holders all fail to renew then maybe something might change but let's face it that ain't gonna happen. So I have booked flights back for four games before Xmas (hoping we don't cock it up in the CL qualifier and end up playing on Thursday nights so games are switched!) and I will be back on August 20th to SUPPORT the team.

I can't be arsed to comment on much that has happened this summer except for one thing and that is the booing at the end of a F##KING pre-season friendly!! What message does that send to any player thinking of coming to the club? Would any centre half arriving here not just think, "if I make a mistake this crowd won't be very supportive"? How about a young kid thrust into a game against Udinese for example? I might hate the media and their crap about our club, I may hate other fans and their jibes but it's so worse that I hate some of our so called fans even more.

CROS I'll be there.....