Four years before the opening match, the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia has already produced significant cost overruns and construction work is falling behind deadlines. Overall, it looks set to become the most expensive World Cup ever, says Martin Müller from the University of Zürich in this comment piece.

"The fixers have, at times, gone into the offices and boardrooms of the top officials who organize the sport," writes Declan Hill, who uncovers how match-fixing on high level has taken place with the connivance of top-level soccer officials.

The FIFA World Cup will influence Brazilian domestic and international politics, the ongoing crisis at FIFA and the wider future of sporting mega-events, writes author David Goldblatt in an exclusive piece for Play the Game.

There are only a few days to go before the Brazil World Cup begins. Will the streets be safe? Will there be protest and violence again? After mass demonstrations marked the Confederations Cup last year, the fragile security and violence situation means that no one knows what to expect during the biggest football event in the world.

Though the World Cup has brought some positive change to Brazil, the 14 billion USD investments fail to deliver opportunities for long-term development, American scholar and activist Christopher Gaffney writes.

"‘Omerta’ is about the Brazilian mafia and the football mafia in and outside Brazil, but it is also an attack on fellow journalists for their ignorance of the corruption inside FIFA," Selliaas writes in this review of Andrew Jennings' new book 'Omerta'.

The FIFA Independent Governance Committee (IGC), led by Swiss professor Mark Pieth, has concluded its advisory review of the governance in football’s world governing body, FIFA, and the results are now available in a final report.

Due to ‘the complexity of the matter’, FIFA has suspended the transfer ban it issued on Spanish football club FC Barcelona earlier this month for the trade of under-age players.