2) football/soccer is considered as public news and not as "private entertainment". As journalists, we have the duty to inform, not to cover such events as the sponsors would like us to. Because sport is news, sport rights owners have limited possibilities to impose restrictions  on the events' coverage. Without being schematic, every limitation can be considered as censorship, but until now commercial interests were successful to multiply restrictions (see the football Premier League story in the UK).

3) The FIFA-WAN agreement will have great consequences on some European national agreements (restrictions on stories, photos, scores until the end of the match, sponsors' logos imposed in some pictures...)and maybe the NBA in the US. The WAN-FIFA agrrement is a great encouragement for all news organisations that are struggling against huge commercial interests: now there is a precedent and these organisations can say to sponsors and sport rights owners "why don't do act as FIFA?"

4) last conclusion is that the FIFA-WAN agreement can be seen as a successful European process (even if the stakes are worldwide). FIFA is based in Zurich, Geneva, with very strong European members and WAN is based in Paris, also with  strong European members. The two organisations evolve in an environment where news values are still stronger than commercial interests and any lawsuit to a European court would have been very difficult for sport rights owners. I am not sure that if the negociation had occured in an American context the conclusion would have been the same.

And now, what is the next challenge for news organisations? To get for the mobile phone coverage what was obtained for the web-online coverage. In the future, there will be no difference for any user, but at the moment mobile phone users will access to the FIFA World Cup real time coverage only through FIFA sponsors or licensed networks!  

Source: WAN-FIFA press release

As a result of the negociation with FIFA, the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) has created a Sports Media Working Group to examine the issue as numerous other sports bodies focus on selling internet and broadcast rights and place increasing restrictions on newspaper coverage of events. The committee is comprised of directors of national newspaper associations that are members of WAN.