91Èȱ¬

Public concern at the way footballers behave has been around since long before the Premier League came into existence.

Whether on the pitch or off it, football's highly paid players and managers attract controversy and criticism unrivalled by any other sport in Britain.

This season has been no exception. From Ashley Cole firing an air rifle at a Chelsea trainee to Manchester United and Liverpool players getting involved in mass confrontations, the problem never seems to get any better despite the intense levels of scrutiny.

It is against this backdrop that the 20 Premier League clubs have decided to draw a line in the sand.

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No one is likely to remember the increasingly acrimonious financial dispute between the and the by the time the Games are under way next summer.

The has no bearing on the funding of the British Olympic team. It will not effect the sale of tickets, the route of the torch relay or the planned opening of the aquatics centre.

But there is potential for this stand-off to do serious damage to the BOA and Olympic sport in the years after the Games. More presciently it is chipping away at London's hard earned image as a slick and united host city.

Next week the International Olympic Committee arrive for the first co-ordination commission visit of 2011. The following week the president Jacques Rogge and his executive board will meet in London.

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Ever since the exposed the controversial practice of third party ownership, English football has taken a zero tolerance approach to ensure no player in this country can be owned by anyone other than their club.

Although still prevalent on the continent, the Premier League and Football League require clubs to buy out any third parties which claim to own the economic rights in a player before their transfers are permitted here.

To prove the point the Football League for failing to notify the authorities of third party agreements involving midfielder .

The charges relate to the "alleged existence of an agreement between the club and a third party in respect of Faurlin's economic rights, and the alleged failure to notify the FA of that agreement before the player was transferred to play in England in 2009". If found guilty, QPR could be deducted points.

So it is a surprise, perhaps, to discover that a new investment fund has just been set up by the former Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon and Ronaldo's and Jose Mourinho's agent Jorge Mendes to invest in the economic rights of players.

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Sepp Blatter used the forum of the Uefa Congress here in La Grand Palais in Paris to make the first big move of his Fifa presidential contest with Mohamed Bin Hammam.

Speaking to the 53 member countries of Uefa - and in particular to its French president Michel Platini - Blatter said for the first time that if re-elected as the head of the world governing body in June, .

At the age of 75 that may be unsurprising but Bin Hammam claims Blatter originally said he would only stand for two terms back in 1998 and now, after 13 years in the job, he is bidding for his fourth.

Bin Hammam also said on Monday that after such a long time, "enough is enough". At 61 the Qatari businessman has indicated he wants to be president until 2019 and, if elected,

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to become the new Fifa president as no more than "50-50". 

There will be plenty of people who will think that's a tad optimistic. 

Blatter is a formidable sports politician. And while he may not carry the full support of his excecutive committee, he enjoys deep and loyal support from the 208 member countries who will decide this contest on 1 June in Zurich. 

The last time Blatter faced a challenge was back in 2002 from the head of African football Issa Hayatou. - a remarkable margin of victory considering the campaign was overshadowed by a series of allegations of corruption and mismanagement of Fifa's finances.

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It was an appalling piece of timing.

On the day launched their great Olympic tickets sale, the shiny new clock counting down the days to the start of the Games in Trafalgar Square stopped.

It was an uncanny echo of the main plot line in the first episode of the 91Èȱ¬'s new comedy spoof on the Games, Twenty Twelve, which aired last night on 91Èȱ¬4.

The big fear was that the tickets website would crash as people logged on for the first time this morning to start buying some of the 6.6million on offer to the British public.

Instead it was the clock, unveiled last night, which provided the day's major glitch. Well, so far anyway.

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For London 2012, the row with the British Olympic Association is an unwanted distraction at a crucial time.

Next Tuesday is 500 days to go to the start of the Games and all the attention should have been on the first public offering of tickets.

Instead, (Locog) found themselves embroiled in an unseemly public spat with the BOA after the .

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It took an Irishman - former Arsenal and Manchester City striker Niall Quinn - to point out English football's failings in its humiliating 2018 World Cup bid.

Giving evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee's inquiry into football governance on Tuesday, Quinn, now chairman of Premier League club Sunderland, said "arrogance" had "drowned out all the good stuff".

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And while there is nothing surprising or illicit, perhaps, in the revelation that the bid team were trying to get the to use his royal connections with the Emir of Qatar to help them win votes, it is intriguing to see that England were trying to secure a voting alliance with the eventual winners of the race for 2022.

This, of course, is supposed to be against rules and were investigated and eventually let off for forging their own deal with Qatar.

It was the biggest open secret of the simultaneous elections and even Fifa president Sepp Blatter admitted he was powerless to stop executive committee members doing reciprocal voting deals.

It actually did Spain and Portugal little good in the end but the outcome of all this is that Fifa will never run dual bidding contests again.

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Match fixing is now a bigger threat to the Olympic movement than drugs, according to International Olympic Committee president .

"Doping effects one individual athlete," Rogge told me in a wide-ranging interview. "But the impact of match fixing effects the whole competition. It is much bigger."

With the countdown to gathering pace, Rogge has moved now to try and tackle the problem.

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