Official Press Release
Chelsea FC rejects Steven Cohen, condemn his lies about Hillsborough.
New York, Wednesday 22nd July 2009 - Over 50 percent of Steven Cohen's original sponsors, including such companies as Heineken and FourFourTwo have left his show, World Soccer Daily. These sponsors have left because they cannot afford to be associated with Steven Cohen's lies and hate.

Official Press Release
New York, Wednesday 29th July 2009 – In a stunning rebuke and continuation of his isolation from the football world, Fox Soccer Channel (FSC) today announced that Steven Cohen would not be returning to host the FSC show Fox Football Fone In (FFF) which he has co-hosted for 4 years.

Let's lead with news, or at least weather. I had a couple of questions about the Steven Cohen boycott, so I e-mailed Conor Brennan, VP of LFCNY, the front man on the topic.
1. > Now that the club itself has weighed in, how has that changed the
outlook? It's one thing for the NYT and NPR to do throwaway stories on the
topic, but this takes it to a new level.

Yesterday I posted the latest press release from the LFCNY concerning their ongoing campaign against Steven Cohen.
This morning I now find myself in the middle of a shit storm.
Here is the short version, or at least as short as I can make this.
If you read the LFNCY statement, you probably noticed the name Mark Sawyer, an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UCLA, who attempted to mediate and negotiate an end to the LFCNY boycott of Steven Cohen.

One of MLS's staunchest critics of MLS has put his foot in it with remarks about the Hillsborough Disaster and lost a number of high profile, lucrative sponsors as a result. MLSR readers may remember we rain a video stream of World Soccer Daily here before pulling it down. One of the reasons we did was the amount of email we received from people supporting the boycott detailed in this article of Prost Amerika Soccer below:

Fox Football Phone-in presenter Stephen Cohen is in hot water with some Liverpool Football Club fans over remarks he made about the Hillsborough disaster.

The World Soccer Daily Petition and Fund Raising Web Pages both were heavily edited and elicited forceful reactions from groups involved.
In the weeks following Steven Cohen's statements about Hillsborough and the subsequent LFCNY boycott campaign, two web pages appeared. One on a petition website and another on a fundraiser website, both in support of World Soccer Daily and Steven Cohen.

The following article is a summary of events this summer regarding the American football radio show World Soccer Daily, which went off the air last weekend after a sustained campaign of protest by Liverpool supporters' groups. In the interests of brevity, it skips over some of the finer details of what has become an extraordinary story involving alleged death threats, anti-semitism and even the involvement of the FBI.

The sun has set on World Soccer Daily.
Who didn't see this coming. We will not editorialize as some of our views on Steve Cohen and World Soccer Daily are well known.
What we can tell you is that it should come as no surprise that a very effective boycott that was not just limited to Liverpool fans but also MLS fans who joined them in solidarity reached it's conclusion.

First, my quick opinion.
To the individual who sent this email, and to all the other people who have sent similar e-mails to Steven Cohen. STOP! You're not helping, you are morons.
UPDATE: Some have asked in the comments how the suspended corporation status might effect any legal action by LFC or former sponsors over Cohen's comments.

Quick recap: Steven Cohen is the Los Angeles based (former?) TV/radio host who in April 2009 made the controversial claim that ticketless Liverpool fans were to blame for the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster. In response, the Liverpool Supporters Club New York organized a boycott of Cohen's sponsors and attempted to have him removed from the airwaves.

His name is Antony Ananins, known to many as Tony New Mexico, a frequent poster on various Liverpool and soccer related message boards (including the World Soccer Daily boards) and the founder of a Facebook group called "Putting Steven Cohen Straight". Thanks to Tony's efforts and the efforts of many others, people have been able to express their disagreement with Steven Cohen's much publicized comments concerning the events surrounding the Hillsborough tragedy, comments that led to the LFCNY's sponsorship boycott.

For the moment it seems Steven Cohen and World Soccer Daily are done. Cohen announced today that today's show would be the final one, apparently blaming threats against his family as the determining factor. If there were legitimate threats against his family, I hope he reported them to the proper authorities and those responsible are punished.

Countless Tottenham Hotspur fans have furiously bombarded radio stations this morning, as the rumours start to fly that their biggest figure of hate is about to rejoin the North London side. Many have stated that they are already organising a boycott of the club if manager Harry Redknapp moves to take Sol Campbell to White Hart [.

Conor Brennan, VP of the LFCNY, has done an interview with The Empire of the Kop website. If you've been following the campaign and my stories concerning Cohen and World Soccer Daily, I suggest you head over and check it out.

Conor, the Anti-Cohen campaign seems to be quiet right now?

Since Thierry Henry's handball on Wednesday, the former Arsenal striker's reaction has gone from arrogance, to indifference to being contrite. From where I sit, this simply proves that Henry is a Public Relations driven phony. He's cultivated an image for over a decade in conjunction with his handlers and now sees the possibility it can all come undone.

Many have read and/or heard that Steven Cohen & Nick Geber's Soccer Weekly Inc. is listed as a suspended corporation by the California Secretary of State on their website.
Click on Image to Enlarge
What has been less clear is what exactly this means, so in an attempt to better understand the situation, I've investigated and attempted to explain what a suspended business license means.

Here we are again, another week on, and the transfer market has hardly broken its moorings as yet. Yes, we've seen Man Utd buy two players, Liverpool one, but really, you're left with the suspicion that there's a lot more to come.

We've got the whole of July before the real pre-season stuff begins, and another month after that for transfers to be done, so clearly, these really are the early stages of squad rebuilding.

Frequent readers of this blog will know that I am not particularly fond of our red cousins. However rivalry is rivalry but blood is thicker than water. When it comes to things like Hillsborough and The Sun boycott then Stanley Park is barely as wide as a blade of grass. I took my scarf down to Anfield on Sunday and tied it to their gates, it was quite a strange goosepimple moment but I'm very glad I did.

Kenya's coach Antoine Hey boycotted the team's trip to Abuja, Nigeria for Sunday's World Cup qualifying match against the Super Eagles, a day after Kenya's players protested over non-payment of their allowances.
Hey arrived at the airport 30 minutes after the plane had taken off, saying he'd been held up in the traffic.

It seems the hits just keep on coming for Cohen and World Soccer Daily...
From Boycott Steven Cohen:

Heineken has joined the growing ranks of sponsors unwilling to be associated with Cohen's hateful speech.
Heineken's Director of Corporate Communications made the following statement:
"I would like to say that Heineken USA takes this matter seriously and in no way endorses the views of Mr Cohen.

Fox Sports have covered the Gold Coast boycott. Really this can not be allowed to stand. The financially strongest team in the A-League is threatening the viability of one of the less strong clubs. This is not good for the sport. How will the FFA respond?

"I won't be going to the game for sure, I don't think it's worth it," said Palmer.

Steven Cohen contacted me via e-mail yesterday afternoon and requested I post the entire e-mail chain between he and Tony that included the comment about his wife's birthday. I'm going to post it, per Steven's request, because however you feel about Cohen and even if you don't feel he deserves it, everyone should be able defend themselves and tell their side of the story.

I just had to post this picture.
Just had to.
So funny.
Links me:

• Fans fight police. 150 arrested. [The Offside]
  
• Peru soccer avoids a boycott. [Living in Peru]
  
• USMNT coaching salaries. [Goff]
  
• Epic Kaka video. Epic. [The Offside Rules]
  
• Greek wildfire (wtf?

When Morell Maison arrived at Southern League club Halesowen Town in 2007, he had high hopes for the club. Few, however, would have guessed that rather than being merely the manager of the club he was actually the owner, and fewer still would have even hazarded a guess at the absolute chaos that has engulfed the Midlands club over the last six months or so, a story which is now involving administration, a boycott of the club by supporters and even the involvement of the specialist fraud officers of the West Midlands Police's Economic Crime Unit.

Sure, World Cup qualifying hasn't been a breeze for El Tri in the first half of the hexagonal.
But having your soccer federation plead to the media for kind words to avoid a boycott from the fans is pretty sad*.

"To hear the press encourage the fans not to go to the stadium, I do not believe that is the proper thing to do," Nestor de la Torre, head of the federation's national teams commission, said at a news conference in Mexico City.

Before you read this post, you might want to go through the first post in this now series of post.
Then again, you might be tired of this and don't want to read about it anymore and that's alright too I guess. Still, in the interest of offering the full story, I've posted below the fold the full version of one of Mark Sawyer's emails, seems he left off a portion of it when he sent it to me the first time.

A club like Boca is one that is always susceptible to igniting passions from fans and enemies. Their return from Europe has been upstaged by the current situation in Argentine football.
Now with everything "back to normal" the biggest scandal in the world that is Boca was all the controversy with their jersey.

(This is a long one, gang. Say I warned you not, do not.)
A few weeks ago, I said that Steven Cohen's claims of intimidation were completely frivolous and fanciful. I said he was only making those claims in order to engender sympathy from the misinformed and/or gullible. I said if there really were this kind of threats, anything resembling this kind of horrible behavior, it would be a matter for law enforcement.

Great picture find by The Original Winger.
Beauty.
To the links:

• VIDEO: Kenny Cooper scores. [SBI]
  
• Grown man punches a child. [Sports Rubbish]
  
• Tevez thinks Fergie is scared of City. [ESPN]
  
• A soccer brawl in India? [Dirty Tackle]
  
• Veron done with Argentina after W.

Stuff to read while you envelope yourself in the world of baldness...... Usain Bolt will teach Cristiano Ronaldo to dive faster. (Unprofessional Foul) The Top 10 games from the 2008-09 Prem. (The Spoiler) 18yo Aussie star charged for sex with a 13yo. (The Australian) Sponsors boycott FSC due to Steve Cohen's Liverpool remarks.

The fans have had enough of this. They're not going to stand for what the Polish FA is doing and how the national team is performing. They decided to take action and show how influential they can be. They want changes and they want them now. They want a professionally managed FA where it matters what you know and not who you know.

This may be the Bialo Czerowni's most important game of the year. Sadly, not because we still have a chance to qualify for the next year's World Cup, but because of the "Empty Stands" initiative, a fans' boycott of the national team game. The protest is not aimed at the players, but at the Polish FA who are held responsible for all that's bad in Polish football.

LFCNY Press Release
Ruffneck Scarves pulls all sponsorship from Steven Cohen and WSD.
New York, Thursday, 18th June, 2009 - The LFCNY is pleased to announce that another major advertiser has pulled its advertising from Steven Cohen's show World Soccer Daily. Ruffneck Scarves a mainstay of WSD and Fox Football Fone In has ended its sponsorship with immediate effect.

I've received a screen shot of a deleted comment on the The Fundable.com Help World Soccer Daily Page that has Nick Iannone apparently admitting that Steven Cohen wrote the first two edits of the text seen on the fund raising page.
Here once again in the text that Nick Iannone claims in the comment below Steven Cohen wrote:

We are the only football show in America, that we expressed an opinion and that people (Liverpool supporters group and Liverpool Football Club) have decided that they have the right to suppress freedom of expression, intimidate and bully 3rd party companies and suppress our ability to make a living.

The FFA's expansion plans are looking ever more messy, and the quite justified grumbles from the nation's capital are becoming louder. It is quite clear by now that the bidding process was an elaborate charade.
Although the "boycott" mooted in the opening paragraph of this piece would be a petty and counter-productive reaction, Ben Buckley's comments about the turnout at the Central Coast v.

I have had a long-standing love affair with many, but not all, things Australian for quite a bit. They're kind of like the Texans of the Commonwealth; in my experience they're generally a happy lot that possess something of a pioneer spirit, can run a mean ranch, they can BBQ and they've produced some of the finest specimens of the female form ever to grace God's creation.

The following article is something that I read last week at http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/opinion/columnists/david-maddock/Liverpool-should-beware-of-calling-Rafael-Benitez-s-bluff-over-transfer-policy-article109173.html.

Now, of course most fans around the world wouldn't want Rafa to ditch us.

It is with immense sadness that we mourn the passing of Dennis Brutus, African activist and award-winning poet. The South African sport boycott owed much to his fierce commitment and relentless organizing, from his founding of the Coordinating Committee for International Recognition in Sport (1955) to the South African Sports Association (1958) and its successor, the South African Nonracial Olympic Committee.