In Brazil, the sports minister Orlando Silva has resigned from his government post after the country's Supreme Court decided to investigate serious accusations of corruption that have been levelled against him in different media over the past few weeks. Silva says he is leaving government in order to defend his honour.

FIFA promised reforms, but has so far delivered illusions: It will take months and years before any change can materialise. The only obvious reform aims at repairing the image of President Blatter himself.

A new committee on good governance supplemented by four task forces is going to propose reforms in FIFA, FIFA-president Sepp Blatter said at a press conference on Friday. He also announced that the so-called ISL case will be reopened. But it is still uncertain how far-reaching the reforms will be.

The BBC reported on Tuesday that FIFA president Sepp Blatter could be preparing to release court documents that FIFA previously refused to make public – documents which could reveal that senior officials at the world governing body for football took bribes.

The 2011 Play the Game conference concluded with a call to the International Olympic Committee to organise a world conference before the end of 2012 in order to draft a code and international standards for good governance in sport.

The “most extraordinary story I ever worked on” is how sports writer James Corbett described the bidding procedure for the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups. Corbett followed the process closely through his involvement with World Football Insider, an independent organisation which shadowed FIFA’s inspection process with its own rankings of the respective national bids.

The next football World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games threaten to produce a catalogue of white elephants for Brazil, while restricting benefits to the business community, a panel of academics warned at today’s Play the Game.

The governing body of aquatic sports is getting richer and becoming less unaccountable, a former Olympic swimmer told Play the Game.