According to the Official Regulations of the football competition everyone except turkmenistan is watching:
A Fair Play contest will be held during the competition, for which FIFA will draw up special regulations. The FIFA Fair Play Trophy, a fair play medal for each player and official, a diploma and a voucher for USD 50,000 worth of football equipment (to be used for youth development) will go to the team finishing first in the Fair Play
contest.
However, nowhere on the FIFA website can these regulations be found.
According to an article about last year’s Mickey Mouse Confederations Cup:
The FIFA Fair Play trophy is awarded after FIFA’s Technical Study Group calculates a Fair Play assessment score after each match based on an appraisal of the teams’ conduct, positive play, respect towards the opposing team and match officials, behaviour of the team officials, etc, with a deduction resulting from any yellow or red cards received during the match.
But there are no Fair Play assessment scores on the otherwise comprehensive offical match reports and a list of the tasks undertaken by the technical study group (ah, that’s where Roger Milla got to) only mentions “specified criteria” when refering to the Fair Play Trophy, rather than actually, y’know, specifying the criteria.
WHAT IS FIFA TRYING TO HIDE???
(obviously I’m only mentioning this as it is the only thing England might win. According to the stats, only Germany and Spain of the teams in the second round have fewer yellows than us, but we’ve committed fewer fouls… Oh yeah and mainly because of MJ Hibbett and his song ;))