Sion Saga Resolved

The long-running saga over FC Sion's expulsion from the Europa League - as detailed in our 'Glory nights return to Scottish football' article - has finally met a resolution at CAS, the upshot being that their spurious appeal was chucked out.

It's quite apt that it's taken exactly the same amount of time as the group stage to reach this conclusion, with a series of pointless exchanges in far-flung parts of Europe with little to no interest paid by the vast majority.
In some ways, it's something of a shame that they've lost as the Europa League is a farce anyway and trying to parachute Sion back in - and Celtic back out, presumably - would add a level of nonsense that would be hard to satirise. UEFA, should they have felt a rare need to be consistent, could have dropped them straight into the knockout phase without having earned the right to be there, just like they do with the unhappy losers from the Champions League.

But sense has, probably, reigned. Back in the day, Stuttgart were turfed out for a breach of player eligibility rules after knocking out Leeds, so UEFA are doing the right thing. Sion's action through the courts first and CAS second must have cost them a fair wedge and for what? It's said that any publicity is good publicity and we certainly know more about FC Sion than we did previously. While the whole sorry episode gave us a chance for a laugh at Scotland's expense earlier in the season, we find it difficult to see what else the Swiss club have achieved.

PSG join legion of Europe's biggest dick swingers

It's taken a while for the Qatari investment in Paris St Germain to really bear fruit, but today the club announced that with their new backers, they're finally ready to swing their dicks like the continents established big spenders.

The capture of Javier Pastore for a dick-swingingly large €45m puts PSG firmly in the big dick-swinging leagues and they look set to remain there for a while. "As the only club in Europe's sexiest capital", said PSG dick-swinging spokesman Richard Swingeur, "it's about time we started swinging our dicks with best from elsewhere. This move cements us as the biggest dick-swingers in La République and over the next few years, we aim to swing our dicks against the best the rest of the continent".

Of course, Qatari money is also helping Barcelona to continue swinging their dicks while investment from neighbouring Abu Dhabi has been the source of large amounts of dick swinging at Manchester City. Both those club showed their dick-swinging abilities remain undiminished in light of the new arrival on the dick-swinging scene with the big dick-swinging captures of Alexis Sanchez and Segio Agüero respectively.

But previous holders of the European dick-swinging record refuse to take the new arrival from France lightly. Real Madrid vowed to carry on swinging their dicks in a statement released to the press. "The world knows how prepared we are to swing our dicks and when it comes to dick-swinging competitions, we bow to no-one". Meanwhile in London, Chelsea seemed more reticent to rest on their laurels when a spokesman said "We've swung our dicks plenty since the current chairman arrived and everybody knows that if we wanted to swing our dicks we could do. We're just choosing not to."

A word of warning over excessive dick-swinging did come from UEFA through Dutch dick-swinging supremo Kok Waggler. "We warn clubs against excessive dick-swinging. It's shown to be unsustainable and that is why we have introduced our Dick-swinging Fair Play rules to prevent any club gaining an advantage by having a bigger dick and being willing to swing it harder and longer".

Seeds of annoyance

In a classic case of moving the goalposts that comes a close second to the exploits of IFK Gothenburg's Kim Christensen, UEFA have gone ahead with their last-minute plan to seed the World Cup qualifying play-offs. Had this been the plan all along, then nobody would have had a problem, but this idea was only raised a month ago at a time when some of the big names in world football were having a tough time making it through to South Africa.

As it turned out, most of the big, sponsor-friendly names made it through, but France and Portugal have to go through these play-offs and the prospect of them facing each other may have denuded the finals of some top talent. They're among the seeds, unsurprisingly, along with Russia and Greece and they'll face Ukraine, Ireland, Bosnia and Slovenia.

Never will the neutral root more for the underdog.