Friday Linkage and Pique's Girlfriend Sings About Football

Here are some links that crossed my desk this week that I did not get to blog about. And above is Shakira's 2010 World Cup serenade ... Enjoy!

• Want to study football? FIFA is offering a research scholarship, The  João Havelange Research Scholarship (here in PDF). I am thinking aboout submitting an application to study governance reform;-)
• Here is an IMF paper that looks at cricket to assess the long-term career impacts of luck. The paper was discussed in The Economist a while back. I'll dedicate a post to it down the road.
• Brazil vs. FIFA remains contentious, see here and here and here.  Quote of the day from a Brazilian Senator: "I will not make a deal with the devil to do the work of God."
• Last month The Economist had a nice discussion of doping in sport. this too is worth a dedicated post before long, perhaps around the time of the Olympics.
• Recently, I discussed the fuzzy line between sport and society when it come to on-field violence. Here are two very different articles about violence in Eastern European football and in youth sports in the US.

Have a nice weekend, and thanks for reading!