I'll tell you what's going through my suspicious mind currently. That the outcome is known and has been for a couple of months. I've said this before and I'm standing by that (until I'm told otherwise). There was too much noise around March time for there not to be some smoke, even if the fire didn't catch hold.
When you read that MEN piece
Link (and maybe I'm reading it wrong or with confirmation bias) there's a couple of things that stand out. The first is this phrase -
"
it has now been five without a published result". Note that word 'published'. To me that implies there has been a result but it hasn't yet been published. The other thing is Khaldoon's tone, which is "be patient, it's coming". The impression I get from that is he knows the result but things just have to take their course. But what is that course?
I'm going to speculate that this outcome is so bad for one or more parties that they are finished.
For the party most obviously at risk, his employer may have been quietly head-hunting his successor, who might have to be more experienced at crisis-management than marketing. Another party who may be at risk is involved with a club that's had, for them, a successful season by winning a trophy at the end of the season and they didn't want anything to detract from that. Maybe it suits us to wait until the CWC is done and dusted, as we don't want any distractions before then.
As I said, this is pure speculation but could explain the situation.