The 1950 world cup began on this day, and as you can read in the summary below, it was a total farce. One might have hoped that after this fiasco Fifa could have started to get things sorted out, but it seems not. At the moment of writing today’s anniversary page we find that Infantino, the head of Fifa is under investigation for corruption, along with the head of the Swiss judiciary with whom he had meetings, there are questions raised about Fifa’s team that audits the expenses paid to senior Fifa officials, and an Israeli bank has recently been fined nearly £1bn for allowing money that was being laundered by Fifa officials to pass through its doors. Meanwhile the USA has threatened to ban all American based companies from participating in the 2022 world cup (which would include Amex, Visa and Mastercard – so no credit card purchases at the finals) because of the rigged votes that took the finals to Qatar and not the USA, and it has been revealed that the stadia in Qatar are being built by slave labour.
Not much changes. Here are the Arsenal anniversaries.
24 June 1905: Arsenal’s AGM reported the annual income from the rent of the bars in the Manor Ground as £110 5s 0d. (£110.25 – about £13,000 today)/
24 June 1949: Bryn Jones transferred to Norwich as player coach. He remained there for just two years before returning to north London as a newsagent.
24 June 1950: The 1950 World Cup began on this day. England and Scotland qualified by being first and second in the Home Championship, which was considered a qualifying group. Scotland however declined the invitation, and England were eventually knocked out by the USA. Argentina and Czechoslovakia also declined their places and France left when their demand for venues that were closer together was turned down. Germany was rejected as being unsuitable, and India who had qualified legitimately were turned down as they didn’t wear boots to play – despite winning their qualifying group playing without boots.
24 June 1962: Brian Sparrow born in Bethnal Green. He played for Arsenal twice and went on loan to Wimbledon, Millwall, and Gillingham before settling with Crystal Palace.
24 June 1987: Arturo Lupoli born. He started out with Parma and as an under 21 scored an unbelievable 45 goals in 22 games. In 2004 he moved to Arsenal as a scholar with Parma getting £200,000 compensation. However he never managed to settle and at the last count had played for 17 different clubs the latest being Virtus Verona of the 3rd division in Italy.
24 June 1998: Petit and Vieira played in the World Cup match for France against Denmark. Petit scored the winning goal as it finished France 2 Denmark 1.
24 June 1999: Stefan Malz signed from 1860 Munich for £650,000. He went on to play six times in the league in the next two years, before moving on to 1. FC Kaiserslautern.
24 June 2001: Two years to the day after signing from Munich, Stefan Malz was transferred to Kaiserslautern for £580,000. After finishing his playing career at FSV Oggersheim he went into management from 2005 to 2008 but seemingly not since.
24 June 2014: Arsenal sold their rights in Carlos Vela (secured under a buy-back option) to Real Sociedad for around £12m. He had played 29 times for Arsenal and had had five different loan deals before the transfer was agreed in 2012. This move ended the saga. In 2018/19 he played for Los Angeles having also played 72 times for Mexico.
24 June 2015: Arsenal bought Vlad Dragomir from Poli Timișoara. He did not make it at Arsenal and in 2019/20 he was playing for Perugia.
