Gramsci's Kingdom: Football, Politics, The World

SERIOUSLY??????

2009-01-02T22:37:00.004-05:00

12 million pounds. For Wayne Bridge (pictured, left, in some bizarre alternative universe where he is considered to be of international calibre)

Jesus Wept. Someone actually managed to make Chelsea look canny in the transfer market.

Seriously?

2009-01-02T22:33:00.002-05:00

Remember the good old days of 2003? When the English FA refused to tolerate impropriety in its players, and Alan Smith (still a decent player at the time) was denied an FA call-up because of news that the police were investigating him on criminal charges after he responded to having a plastic bottle tossed at him by tossing it back into the crowd? Police never brought charges against Smith, as it happened: but no matter, even the hint of impropriety was enough for him to miss a call-up.

So what, then, are we to make of the FA’s recent declaration that under no circumstances would the England status of peace-loving Steven Gerrard’s (pictured, in a tender moment with Gary Naysmith) be affected by his recent fracas in a Southport bar.

That would be the incident in which Gerrard was arrested (not just “investigated” like Smith) and charged with assault and affray. Because he (allegedly) punched a DJ who wouldn’t play the Coldplay album he’d requested.

(A DJ who won’t play Coldplay? The man deserves a freakin' medal, not stitches in his face.)

Assault and Affray can land you with a five-year jail term, thought first time offenders if found guilty are more likely to receive community service.

The FA say they learned from the Smith case, and refuse to punish someone because they are under a police inquiry. This conveniently ignores the fact that the police are NOT making inquiries about Stevie G – they did that and decided the evidence warranted actual charges. This is something quite different.

But then again, this is Gerrard we are talking about. The self-proclaimed living personification of all those “English” footballing value; the ones that always believe 1966 is always around the corner, provided there is enough grit and determination and hard work. Without Gerrard, England would be robbed of one of its central clichés – ones which have regained importance now that a foreigner is once again in charge of the national team.

The Italian for the English term “having double standards”, by the way, is the far less pejorative “usare metri diversi”. Use it wisely – as Fabio would.

Man City - An Apotheosis of Sorts

2008-09-02T21:41:00.003-04:00

It's a good thing the emir of Abu Dhabi was born to inherit the wealth attached to one of the earth's richest pool of hydrocarbons. Because he is clearly intent on pissing away hundreds of millions of dollars at Man City.

Just so there's no mistaking my meaning: this is a disaster. There is literally no chance whatsoever that this project is going to work out.

OK, gazumping Chelsea for Robinho's signature was kind of funny. But 32.5M GBP? 160,000 GBP/week? For what amounts to Jermaine Defoe with better footwork? Don't get me wrong, Robinho's a good player. But since moving to Europe he's yet to put together a sustained run of good form for as long as even half a season. We have no idea how well he'll fare in the rough and tumble of the premiership. And, let's face it, chances are he's going to be bored shitless in Manchester and, like most young people in such situations, will end up to no good. Making him the world's best-paid player just seems guaranteed to send him down Ronaldinho Lane inside a few months.

But the Robinho business is small beans compared to the rest of the nonsense about to befall Man City. The Abu Dhabi United (a name which is going to cause all kinds of confusion, I can tell you) Group's frontman, Dr. Sulaiman Al-Fahim (pictured), says he has plans to offer Manchester United 135M GBP for Ronaldo come the winter transfer window. He also says he is interested in bringing Thierry Henry, David Villa, and - dear sweet, merciful God - Ronaldo (the larger one) to Eastlands to complement Robinho.

This is clearly a man whose knowledge of the game has been gleaned from an Xbox. There are no doubt people suffering from river blindness in the furhter reaches of Burkina Faso who might still think of Ronaldo as worthy of a punt as a top division striker, but surely to God no sighted person with an interest in football could say the same. Nor could football fans who have ever heard the words "Real Madrid" and "Barcelona" and have intellects surpassing that of cottage cheese actually think that an attack-heavy galactico strategy is likely to produce returns on the pitch.

And when Dr. al-Fahim casually stated that the team would be bringing in "18 players, minimum" next year, what effect did he think he would have on the morale of the squad for the next nine months? Will Joe Hart be extra-enthused to keep clean sheets so Gianluigi Buffon can play in the Champions League next year? Will Martin Petrov be banging in the goals so he can be replaced by Cristiano Ronaldo?

And for all his bizarre good fortune in escaping the giant financial suckhole that Thaksin Shinwatra came to represent, spare a thought for Mark Hughes. He's a decent manager but not the kind of brand name luxury good his new Arab bosses so clearly adore and is very clearly Tinker-Man Walking.

Now, to be fair, there are worse fates than that about to befall Man City. You could be part of the Toon Army, for instance. Or you could be a Liverpool fan, coming to grips with the fact that maybe, just maybe, Rafa's consistent shiteness might be (correctly) rewarded with something less than fourth place (this, it seems to me, is the principal silver lining for United fans tonight).

But my guess is that City fans secretly kind of liked being an underdog. Jimmy Grimble fit them well. Yes, that image was obviously cracked last year when Shinwatra with his vast fortune and Human Rights Watch charge sheet the length of your arm blew into town. But for the last couple of months the chaos surrounding Thaksin's financial and legal affairs still lent the team the necessary air of incompetence to appear a viable alternative to those who felt the Glazers and their Red Devils needed to be opposed.

No more. The new regime doesn't just have more money than sense; it's obscenely wealthy and agressively stupid. It will be globally hated with a ferocity unparalleled in the history of football. Supporting Man United will cease to be the act of a gloryhunter, and come to seem like an act of football patriotism. Which in turn will make City even more hated.

It's a sad, sad day all around.

TFC Asks Me for an Interest-Free Loan

2008-09-02T04:06:00.003-04:00

You'll remember, of course, the general contempt that TFC has shown for travelling fans. Well, now it's showing it to home fans as well.

My season ticket renewal form arrives in my inbox. Apparently included in this year's price is not just my 15 league games, but also an international friendly (I see they've learned their lesson and are now scheduling only one of these atrocities), two Canadian championship matches, and (drumroll please) a premliminary round CONCACAF game.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that would be the CONCACAF round we are not guaranteed to play in (and which, indeed, we did not play in this year due to Cunningham's complete inability to from a range of four feet with only air molecules to beat).

Now, the team is very nice about this. If we don't get to play in this game next August, they say they'll refund me the money.

Hmmm. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

Average ticket price: call it $45. Season ticket holders: 16,000. That's a $720,000 interest-free loan the MLSE boys are asking from us fans for the next eleven months. At prime, that works out to about $33,000, or enough to pay two and a half developmental players' salaries for a year.

I guess the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (owner of MLSE and its aggressively mediocre family of sports teams) didn't get to be the multi-billion dollar behemoth it is withour nickel-and-diming its customers along the way.

Competitveness is a Matter of Perspective

2008-08-10T14:08:00.004-04:00

A perennial topic of conversation among football fans is whether or not football has become "too predictable" and "too slanted towards the top teams", and often the blame for this is laid at the feet of greedy owners, Sky, globalization or what have you. Veteran denizens of the kingdom will likely know that I'm sceptical of such claims - I'm not sure football's playing field has ever been particularly flat.

So I read with interest Paul Wilson's recent article in the Guardian claiming that this year's odds on sorry little Hull City's winning the Premiership (10,000 to 1, since you ask) are so much worse than the odds of the weakest teams in Serie A and La Liga winning their leagues (1,000 to 1, he says) are proof that the Premiership is the least competitive league in Europe thanks to all this money.

Hmm. Hmmmmmmmmm.

Let's assume for the moment that the pre-season odds of winning are a reasonable method of gauging competitiveness. Is looking at the odds of the weakest team really the best way to look at the competitiveness of a league? That seems weak - when was the last time a promoted team won the championship? I can think of several others that might make more sense.

For instance, one could measure it by the odds given to the strongest team - that is, by asking the question: how certain is the eventual winner before the season even starts?By this measure, England is actually the most competitive major league in Europe. Man U is currently quoted (according to football-data.co.uk) at 1.8, Inter at 1.45, PSV at 1.375, Real Madrid at 1.2, Lyon at .72, Porto at .57 and Bayern at a mind-boggling low .5.

Alternatively, one could measure it by asking how likely is it that there will be as many as three teams in the hunt for the title? Here, too, England does reasonably well: Arsenal at 6-1 are not as good as Benfica at 4.5-1, Roma at 5-1, or Bordeaux at 5.5-1, but is better than Feyenoord at 7-1, Schalke at 10-1 or Atletico at an amazing 22-1 (so much for Spain being the continent's most competitve league...)

What about competitiveness for Champions League spots? How good are the odds for the team with the fifth-shorted odds in each country? Now the case for England as less competitive gets better: Villareal's 25-1 is the best of the bunch (oo! competitive again!) followed by St. Etienne at 33-1, Twente at 40-1, Fiorentina and Wolfsburg at 50-1, Spurs at 60-1 and Vit Guimares at 80-1.

But then again, there is more to football than the top five. Let's see the odds for the teams that are at or just above the median in each country; that is, the ninth-shortest odds in each league. Here again, the case against England gets stronger: France's Stade Rennais is shortest at 66-1, NEC is at 125-1, Vit. Setubal at 150-1, Hannover at 160-1, Racing Santander at 300-1 and Newcastle and Palermo at 500-1.

As for the odds of the weakest team: Portugal's Trofense gets 500-1, Heracles, Grenoble and Bologna get 1000-1, Gijon 1250, Cottbus 1500 and Hull 10,000 (though one can at least suspect that the odds on Hull have more to do with the gimmicky habits of English bookies than anything else).

So the English league is certainly unforgiving to teams in the bottom half and the top 4 so seem to be set almost in stone (of the big leagues, Spain's seems to have the most porous top 4). But by the same token, England is arguably the European league where the identity of the winner is least predictable.

Does that make them more competitive? You be the judge.

Wait, I just thought of two more

2008-08-03T19:13:00.002-04:00

After a little more thought, I’ve just come up with two more books that I want to write.

1) A History of Cheating. There are so many ways to cheat in football. Players can break the rules, players can simulate. Referees can be bought and matches can be thrown, either by teams themselves (see Italy’s recent calciopoli scandal, or the Marseille scandal of 1993) or by gambling syndicates (see innumerable scandals in China, Russia, Finland, etc.). In Africa, massive disputed have arisen over the unfair advantages brought by juju techniques, such as the burial of certain items beneath the pitch. How much of the game’s history is “real”, in the sense that it reflected the results of two teams playing on even terms, and how much has been the result of pre-arranged chicanery. Are there moral differences between different types of cheating? If, as is alleged, Juve players did not know that referees were being bought on their behalf, does that make them innocent of cheating? This book would examine all of these questions.

2) Religion and Football. Forget the clichés about football being a religion and stadia being churches; there is a serious story to tell about how religion has influenced the development of the sport around the world. In Europe and Latin America, the church’s views on the relationship between the body and the spirit had a serious influence on the development of the game. The Muslim world has had massively different reactions to football, ranging from the ecstatic to the horrified. The Buddhist world, never really one for team sports, has yet to produce a decent football squad: why? Hinduism seems to have little against football, yet the subcontinent has embraced another eleven-player game instead. The African animist sensibility (which also exists among descendents of African slaves in Brazil) has brought a whole unique culture of superstition and luck to the game – though the role of prayer and its modern equivalent of sports psychology has a long history in more developed countries, too. In a game where the outcome so often smacks of luck, the favour of a deity can in theory make all the difference; this book would show how varieties of religious belief around the world has contributed to the variation in football culture around the world.

Come on, book editors! Give me advances, dammit!

Three Books I'd Love to Write

2008-08-03T01:08:00.002-04:00

I’ve been reading a heck of a lot of footie lit recently (various reviews to follow). While doing so, it has occurred to me that there are whole forms of football literature which are rapidly approaching obsolescence. Football biographies have long ceased to be of much interest to anyone; in the past ten years, only those of Gazza and Tony Adams have provided much in the way of interest. Follow-the-money books a la David Conn are getting a bit tedious, too – pretty much everyone understands the new economics of sport. Books on football violence were never that interesting to begin with, but the explosion of hoolie lit has drained any possible remaining interest in the subject.

A few years ago, national histories of football were the most promising area of football literature. Deriving some inspiration from Simon Kuper’s cosmopolitanist manifesto Football Against the Enemy, in the past decade, this literature has given such great books as Brilliant Orange, Tor!, Morbo, and Futebol: the Brazilian Way of Life. But then, two years ago that brilliant bastard David Goldblatt came out of nowhere and produced a definitive single volume global history of the game (The Ball is Round) that more or less rendered the entire field irrelevant. National histories on a couple of major footballing countries are still to be written; Argentina and Mexico are still without decent English-language histories, there’s probably room for one on France, and the definitive African history has yet to be written. But for the most part, books in this vein will inevitably either re-hash old ground or tell the stories of increasingly irrelevant nations (Charlie Connelly’s book Stamping Grounds, the story of Liechtenstein’s 2002 World Cup qualifying campaign, is ground zero for this line of books).

But this need not mean the end of books looking at football culture: it just means we need a different lens through which to examine football. Herewith, a number of books which I think are just dying to be written.

1) Football and Dictatorships. Football is often described as a democratic game because of its simplicity. But in many places for many years, football has been played under non-democratic conditions. Generally, totalitarian dictatorships such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia preferred non-team sports; only fascist Italy gave the game a major pride of place: but even here, the glory brought to the nation by the 1934 and 1938 World Cups was offset by the increase in regional tensions brought about by the development of the club game. In Latin America, football has been accused of both weakening dictatorships (the 1982 Democracy movement at Corinthians) and of sustaining it (Argentina’s 1978 World cup victory). Even football stadia have a paradoxical relationship with dictatorships: large programs of stadium construction are often hallmarks of dictatorship as they can serve propaganda purposes, but they are also one of the few places where people can gather and talk freely in a dictatorship and often serve as nuclei for the creation of democratic opposition (the relationship between Barcelona FC and the Catalan nationalist movement is particularly tight as a result of this phenomenon). The people’s game has both resisted tyranny and been co-opted by it; this book would tell the tale of both.

2) The Latin Game. Fourteen of Eighteen world cups have been won by Latin countries. Though they did not invent the game, they have gradually come to be its masters; both on the field and in the corridors of football power. They more or less invented the concept of international tournaments both at the international and club levels. Reputed to be romantic peoples, latin countries are nonetheless often accused of cynicism and gamesmanship on the field. While English-speakers may think of football as their game because of its roots in the English public school system, the fact is that to all intents and purposes, modern football is a Latin game. This book would trace the history of the game across the Latin world and show that its superiority in many ways comes from Latin countries’ greater willingness to innovate in terms of tactics, personnel, politics and business.

3) Fans. Many trees have been destroyed talking about the development of game around the world (viz, for example, Jonathan Wilson’s latest oeuvre); but little has actually been written on how people watch the game around the world. And yet, the most striking national differences in football occur not on the field but in the stands. Singing as a form of support exists everywhere, but the styles can be very different – regimented in Italy and Japan; more spontaneous in England. Criminality among hardcore supporters is common, too, but ultras, barra bravas and hooligans have as many differences as they do similarities. Fans in some parts of the world support their teams no matter what; in other parts of the world, fans are known to physically assault their teams if results don’t go their way. In many countries, there is no particular stigma attached to supporting more than one team, and indeed where there is a “big two” or “big three” (e.g Olympiakos and Panathinaikos in Greece) everyone in the country is expected to support one or the other; in England, where there are no effectively an incredible five divisions of professional football, such behaviour is derided as “glory-hunting”. Football may be the people’s game, but the people relate to the game very differently in different parts of the world; this book would seek to explain the roots of these differences.

If there are any book publishers out there waiting with fat advances – or anyone who wants to add their own ideas, just hit the comment button.

Coming soon! The 3-6-1.

2008-07-10T09:58:00.004-04:00

So, I just finished Jonathan Wilson’s rather good new book Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics. I recommend a read to all real devotees of the sport (by some miracle, it has been released in North America at the same time as in the UK), though some of the press praise for the book is a little over the top in my opinion.

That said, Wilson ends the book with some intriguing speculation about the tactical developments of the last decade or so which I think are worth developing a bit.

Tactically speaking, the late 80s and early 90s were largely a battle between the 4-4-2 and the 3-5-2 (the latter occasionally morphing into a 5-3-2 if the wingers were deployed more deeply as wing backs. Yes, there were the odd romantics still playing 4-3-3 or even 3-4-3, but they were rare.

In a 4-4-2 vs. 3-5-2, the problem is basically that one of the centre-backs in the 3-5-2 is superfluous. What this does is open up a spot somewhere in the middle of the field for an opposing midfielder to exploit. You can make up for this if you have an exceptionally talented midfield with a couple of all-action players capable of going box-to-box and making late runs into the opposition area (as the Maradona-led Argentinan squads of the 80s, who did so much to popularize the formation, did), but if you don’t have that kind of quality, then the team using 3-5-2 is a significant disadvantage. Anyone doubting this is advised to examine last night’s TFC performance against the Whitecaps, which was embarrassing.

So, back to the story – by this decade, you could still occasionally see the 3-5-2 starting line-ups in the lower reaches of Serie A, in Croatia and in parts of Africa, but France 98 and Euro 2000 completely sealed the deal as far as the superiority of 4-4-2 was concerned. By 2002, teams playing 4-4-2 with a fast and attack-minded midfield were pretty much ruling the roost (Arsenal’s double-winning squad being perhaps the epitome of this).

But then teams started to get wise to this and realised that if the midfield could be packed a bit, it was possible to stop these free-flowing teams. Since the 4-4-2 often employed trailing strikers who played just behind the lead man (think of Bergkamp’s role vis-a-vis Henry, or Guevara’s to Dichio for that matter), it wasn’t an enormous shift to pull them back a couple of yards further and create a 4-5-1. If you were a limited side – Bolton, for instance – you could use this 4-5-1 in a fairly defensive way, with lits of long balls to a large, lone striker. If you were more fluid side with able wingers – Chelsea, for instance – the 4-5-1 could morph into a quite deadly 4-3-3 when in possession. It was flexible and it caused no end of problems for teams trying to play 4-4-2.

In the last couple of years, though, the more fluid attacking sides have come up with an even more devious solution: the 4-6-0 (which I outlined about a year ago back here). This only works if you have a lot of creative, fast, tactically aware midfielders who are capable of swapping positions and darting forwards. It’s tough to pull off because there’s literally no focus to the attack, but as both Roma and Man U showed last year, it is possible to win matches – quite a lot of them in fact – without anyone who could be described as a recognized striker.

The 4-6-0 works for the same reason that Hidegkuti and the Hungarians flummoxed England in 1953 – defenders have trouble figuring out what to do if the attacker withdraws a bit and starts with the ball from further out. Defenders who try to man-mark in a 4-6-0 are going to get pulled badly out of position and if the try to zone mark they are liable to get flooded. Its not all plain sailing for the attackers, of course – they have to learn how to play a good short-passing game in order to keep the ball moving through a more congested midfield. As long as they manage that, though, they can wreak havoc on defences.

So what’s the proper response? I would argue it is to go back to three at the back. Even against a 4-5-1, the second centre-back is somewhat superfluous. Against a 4-6-0 we’re into tits-on-a-bull territory. Get rid of the second centre back and move him into the midfield. 4-5-1s and 4-6-0s need to be smothered in midfield, not in the final third. Laying back and playing for the counter-attack is not a good move (even Arsenal have figured that one out) against a five or six-man midfield – the space simply won’t be there. A more pressing game, played further up the pitch, is necessary.

And so, I would suggest, that now that the 4-6-0 is opening up as an option, the next logical tactical counter is the 3-6-1 (or, probably more accurately, a 3-3-3-1). Against the ManUs and Romas, the key will be playing with three what amounts to three defensive midfielders and a single centre-back. Attack-minded full-backs will have to go, of course (but really, haven’t we all had enough of Ashley Cole anyway?), but some of that load can be spread to players like Daniel Alves playing in a more advanced role (indeed, one wonders if Barcelona might not start lining up this way soon, with Alves, Toure and Keita lining up right to left ahead of the defenders but behind Xavi – certainly, they are one of the few teams with the personnel to do it).

Sure, the 3-6-1 has a bad rep after the USMNT’s disastrous flirtation with it in France 98. But mark my words, you’ll see it again sooner than you think.

Book Review: Comrade Jim

2008-06-29T21:30:00.004-04:00

I'm finally getting into some summer reading, and that always means football books. So here's the first of what I'm assuming will be many book reviews, on a new book called Comrade Jim.

The subtitle of this book is The Spy who Played for Spartak. It's a lovely short book if you can get past two things: he was never really a spy and he barely played for Spartak.

As a tall, gangly child growing up in Portsmouth, he often played centre-half for his school teams. He was never of a calibre to play professionally, but he enjoyed it and continued playing into his army days when he was drafted into the national service. He had been a bright lad, and had managed to secure a place in a grammar school and stuck it out through his A-levels, to the disapproval of his working-class mum's friends who thought that all that studying would make him "one of them, not one of us".

In the army, he was considered bright enough to be sent for Russian lessons - 8 months of intensive language study which would enable him to monitor Soviet radio broadcasts. Subsequently sent to Berlin, he listened in on communications traffic at airbases in eastern germany. This, it turns out, was the sum total of his "spying".

Indeed, far from a career in spying against the communists, he became one himself. The actual circumstances in which this occurred in 1959 seem somewhat hazy. He had a love of Russia instilled in him by his admittedly non-ideological teachers in the army. His Soviet studies teachers at Birmingham University seem to have been predominantly of the view that Bolshevism was bad for Russia. And he implies that he was quite aware of Krushchev's Secret Speech and the invasion of Hungary in 1956. And yet, there he is, applying for a Party card in 1959 and little more than two years later being sent by the CPGB to attend an 18-month course of training at the Higher Party School in Moscow, where he lived with (among others) the future hero of the Prague Spring, Alexander Dubcek.

He was no pasing communist, either. Despite meetings in Moscow with many emigres who had spent years in gulags after false accusations, despite himself having been tossed out of Russia in disgrace following false allegations, despite having quite a clear view of the double standards of the nomenklatura, this is a man who held on to his party card until the CPGB itself finally collapsed in 1991 and who claims that the first time he rued having been a communist was in 2005, at the sight of the altar on which Isaac Babel was tortured to death during the Great Terror. Why it was Babel's death that made him rue this and not any of Stalin's victims - some of the 1,000 executions a day at the height of the terror in 1937-38, perhaps, or any of the seven million who died in the Ukranian forced famines - is not entirely clear.

During his time in Moscow, he played regular kickabouts with a number of people from various team's diplomatic corps. As he was gathering information for a planned PhD dissertation on Soviet sport and culture, he was often in contact with senior Moscow sports officials and football players, some of whom happened to see him at these kickabouts. Strangely under the impression that he could play at a top level (while in National Service he had played a few times with the British Army on the Rhine selects and the Russians appeared to believe that this was the equivalent to playing for the CSKA Red Amry squad), they asked him to come along to training with them whilst they were in the midst of an injury crisis. To his shock, they asked him to play two games in their colours at the massive Lenin stadium under the name Yakov Eeordahnov (foreigners still being highly suspect in 1962 Moscow). This was the extent of his Spartak career.

Doesn't sound like much of a book? Well, it has some padding, too. In one chapter he manages to toss off the entire Passovotchka story for no reason other than that he was in England at the time and later became a communist. In another he retells the Nikolai Starotsin story (although Jonathan Wilson more or less beat him to the punch on this two years ago in his book [i]Football Behind the Iron Curtain[/i]).

But mostly, it's just the curious tale of how one working class boy from Portsmouth managed to spend five years in Moscow rubbing shoulders with composers, gulag survivors, and ex-spies amidst the obvious insanities of post-Stalinist Russia. It's no less enjoyable and informative for the fact that the author seems not to question the rightness of supporting such a monstrous regime. And it has some nice little football stories thrown in - his excitement at the arrival of Alexei Smertin arriving in Pompey from Spartak is quite charming.

If you're ever wondering about the power of football to sell books, though, it's amazing to think how 180 minutes spent 45 years ago on a pitch 1500 miles from the UK can turn an old communist's memories from being unwanted and unprintable to being a reasonable publishing success. Amazing.

Culture Clash

2008-06-29T18:45:00.002-04:00

An intriguing story in today's Observer about Cristiano Ronaldo and his (alleged) seven-months-in-the-making transfer to Real Madrid.

According to journalist Duncan Castles, CR has been doing all the engineering of this move on his own, and his agent had been repeatedly counselling against a move. Even Real Madrid are apparently annoyed at how publicly he's been flaunting his desire to leave (this I find hard to believe, but I'm just relaying the story here).

Specifically, Ronaldo seems to be labouring under the impression (some might call it a delusion) that having more or less single-handedly delivered two trophies to Old Trafford this year, the Man United board would be happy to "reward" him by allowing him his dream move to Madrid.

This does sound a little wacky, but I think it's a piece of cultural misunderstanding.

In Iberian football, certainly, when either Barcelona or ManU come calling, you leave. End of story. Take Sergio Ramos (please) who literally bought out his own contract at Sevilla just hours before the transfer deadline in order to play for the merengues.

What was considered shameful about the Ramos transfer was not the fact that he went to Madrid, but rather the sneaky way he did it, just as the club was starting to develop into something of a powerhouse. He left, if you will, via the back door.

Contrast this with the Dany Alves saga of last summer. Alves felt that after helping Sevilla to five trophies in two years, he had earned the right to leave "by the front door", with his head held high. And so he was quite miffed when Sevilla failed to sell him to Chelsea; it took him about two months to get his head back in the game for the rojiblancos (although to be fair, the death of Antonio Puerta probably had an impact too) and by the time he was back to his best, Sevilla were too far behind the leaders to challenge for the title even in a year when no one seemed to want it. Ronaldo, being Iberian himself, seems to be taking the same position Alves took last year. I've earned this - you owe it to me.

The English, remarkably, don't see things the same way. Winning teams are kept together almost regardless of the cost. Patrick Vieira was mercilessly persued by Madrid after both Arsenal's 2002 and 2004 championship season. Wenger stuck to his guns and kept the midfielder only to sell him for much, much less the next season (2005).

It's partly the way the English view club loyalty. They are far more likely to view team failure as a valid excuse for departure ("oh well, he wants to go win some trophies, I guess") than they are team success ("but he's won everything with us - why does he want to go when everything is going so well?")

That's not to say that ManU won't sell, of course - the Glazers' holding company is holding far too much debt for them not to be seriously tempted by the 85 or 90 million euros his sale would bring. But letting him leave as a reward for success? Never. The fact that Ronaldo hasn't figured that out after five years in England suggests that he hasn't been paying attention during his stay there.

But then again, if he only ever thought that Manchester was a penitence to pay on the way to the Bernabeu, maybe he never felt the need to pay attention.

Watching Football in Saudi Arabia

2008-04-04T19:49:00.002-04:00

Liverpool v Arsenal three times in one week, so to avoid intra-family strife I have again fled the continent. And so to today's question: does anyone here know anything about Saudi football? Like what day they play matches here? Or what day they play in Qatar?

There's a hell of a lot of football on TV considering it's 2:30 in the morning. Right now, two channels are showing last weekend's matches from Europe (a French league roundup and Siena v. Sampdoria), one is showing Barcelona-Schalke, and one is showing a replay of what I take to be a Saudi match from earlier this week (although it's possible it;s an AFC Champions League match between two Arab teams...i really have no way of knowing). I have no idea who the teams are, though speaking to some guys on the plane, it seems that the Cup final was played earlier this week. It's a white team against a black team (possibly Al-Hilal against Al-Shabib) and it's 1-1 in the 85th minute.

There's almost no one in the stands, but the announcer is screaming as if it's the late stages of the World Cup final.

Goalkeeping styles appear to be quite interesting - let's just say that Barthez looks conservative compared to these guys. Also, some of the players' beards on display are really quite fearsome.

Well, it's just finished 1-1 and the white team seems very distraught, as if they;ve lost or something. Guess it wasn't the Cup final. I don't think I've ever seen a football match where I've understood so little about what's going on. The post match analysis looks much as I imagine Match of the Day would, if all the guests were wearing bright white thobes with headdresses and slouching a lot.

Now I've switched channels and the channel that was showing French highlights has now moved on to show Goals of the Week from the Indian league. Oh, and now they've cut to Beckham's goal yesterday in LA.

There really is far too much football in the world to keep up with.

On the Road

2008-03-29T05:56:00.002-04:00

I am upset with myself for not having worked on this blog enough. I have all sorts of half-written blog posts - on Buddhist football; Game 39; the new Canada Cup, the strange fact that George Gillett, tired of Liverpool, has decided that Montreal, of all godforsaken places, is the place to stake one's claim to football glory. All sorts of feelings of shame and guilt.

But I have decided to liberate myself of these feelings. Fuck it, life's too short for that kind of guilt. And, praise the Lord, the new MLS season starts today.

It's funny: a year ago, I would have described myself unabashedly as an Arsenal fan. TFC was new and interesting, but essentially a diversion from my relationship with Arsenal. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, that changed. There was no eureka moment, no time when I sat bolt upright in bed and said: damn, I now belong to TFC. But at some point during those 824 minutes without a goal, some afternoon at the stadium spent singing and cheering without any real prospect of recompense in the form of a win, I became completely and utterly theirs.

And so, today, L'Ecrivain and my son and I are among the2400 TFC fans making their way down to Ohio and invading that cowshed they use as a stadium in Columbus. A 14-hour car trip for the sake of an hour of tailgaiting, 90 minues of singing and some smaller period of actual football. The season begins.

I am firmly in the majority of people who think that TFC will reek this year, that the off-season was - draft apart - an unmitigated disaster. There will be long goalless spells. But I'm romantic enough to think that we'll win today and that the boyswill give us win on the road because we'll be there making it feel like home. I know this to be completely illogical on my part, but I don't care.

I am a fan. I belong to TFC. And today is going to be our day.

More when I get home.

The Abyss

2008-03-13T21:50:00.003-04:00

Remember when Gretna were a good news story?

Come on, it wasn't that long ago.

Elected to the Scottish league only in 2002, the team spent three season in Scotland's division three. From there, bankrolled by businessman Brooks Mileson, they went on a Roy of the Rovers run - two more promotions in succession plus a Cup Final against Hearts, a spot in Europe, and playing in Scotland's top division. Not bad for a club based in a town with a population of less than 3000.

But unlike, say, Chievo (another small-town team with whom they have been compared), this fairy tale has unravelled rather quickly. There is no Bentegodi nearby - home games this year have had to be played at Motherwell's Fir Park, a full 70 miles away, in order to meet SPL stadium standards. Crowds have fallen into the hundreds.

This wouldn't be fatal if Mileson hadn't fallen ill with a brain infection about a month ago. At this point, he ceased being able to sign checks for the club. Within a week, players found themselves without their paychecks. Press reports are unclear about the connection between these two events - did Mileson really leave no power of attorney so that others could discharge the club's fiscal obligations? or did his family, eager to get their hands on his millions, cut the team off as soon as possible? Either way, after just a month without his money, Gretna are not only into administration, but only a couple of hours away from being wound up entirely, with 30,000 pounds being due by Friday lunchtime being required to stave off a wind-up. even then, with no wages and no insurance, only ten players (and no keepers) have made themselves available for selection for Saturday's match against Aberdeen.

A lot of people have taken this with the usual schadenfreude. Gretna were financial dopers, they said, having bought their way up the pyramid. Conservative nonsense, I say. Unlike, say, Granada 74, Gretna played their way up the divisions. Yes, like Fulham they had a wealthy patron, but it was a wealthy patron who bought at the bottom and worked up (unlike, say, Roman Abramovich) and one who actually loved the game of football (unlike, say, the Glazers).

Unfortunately, the suddenness of his illness meant that Milseon couldn't pull a Jack Walker and try to create some kind of trust arrangement which might have given the club a more secure future after his departure. Maybe that would have been impossible in as small a community as Gretna, but at least the club might have been permitted a graceful decline instead of catastrophic extinction.

And so, after a brief and giddy run to the top, including a run in Europe (OK, it was only as far as Derry, but still), Gretna's fans are left with nothing but memories. You might not think their fans deserved all that success, but you'd be a mean bastard to think they deserve what they're getting right now.

The Premiership vs The Treaty of Westphalia

2008-03-11T17:49:00.006-04:00

So, another display of incompetence from a San Siro-based squad, and another Premiership side goes through to the quarter-finals. For the first time in the history of the tournament, four sides from one country will make it to the quarter-finals.

And let's be honest here: unless two of the English sides get drawn against each other (teams from the same country are kept apart at the round of 16, but it's an open draw from this point on), there's a damn good chance that all four sides could make it through to the semis. face it, of the four remaining non-English sides, how many would you fancy? Schalke played disastrously against Porto and were lucky to survive through to penalties. Barca are in terrible form and will be without Messi for the next round. Fenerbahce play with verve but their keeper makes David James look like Lev Yashin. Roma...well, maybe Roma on a good day could beat Chelsea, but that's about it.

(You want my opinion? For what it's worth - Arsenal and Man U will go through to the semis provided they don't face each other. Liverpool will go through provided they don't play Arsenal or ManU, in which case they will get hammered; Chelsea are through provided they face Schalke, Fener or Barca. Schalke have no chance against any of the other seven teams).

Lucky Albion? A bit, but more importantly it demonstrates that the concentration of money and talent in England is beginning to put some distance between the Premiership and the rest of Europe in terms of skill and talent. There are perhaps only a couple of teams in Europe that can hope to match England's "Big Four" for quality, depth and speed.

This gap isn't likely to be bridged soon, either. Lack of money is a hindrance in Italy. Inter have almost nowhere to go but down. Milan are at the start of a long rebuilding phase. In Spain, Barcelona probably have a year or two of rebuilding to do what with Messi's future uncertain, Henry clearly in decline and Ronaldinho almost certainly out the door. Real Madrid might have a better shot at it, but Sergio Ramos apart, their defence is deeply ordinary and Diarra still isn't the replacement for Makelele that they need. Bayern look very promising, but this year's success might not be sustainable given the extent to which it is built on the superb goal-a-game performance of Luca Toni, who is no spring chicken either.

Although rule changes have left it somewhat lacking in majesty, the Champions League is arguably the best football competition in the world - better even, some might say, the World Cup (would the '06 Italy squad have beaten the '06 Barca squad? hard to say...). This makes the Premiership's dominance all the more remarkable. It is the dominant grouping within the globe's dominant competition. It is therefore no surprise that so many people in so many countries - especially in Asia and Africa - follow the Premiership more closely than they follow their domestic leagues.

It is in this context, I think, that the Game 39 proposals need to be seen. The Premiership, more than any other league, has exlpoited modern capital and communications to make itself "the world's league". It's playing squads are more cosmopolitan and it's fan base more global than any other. These two things are closely entwined - it is the Premiership's ability to raise TV revenue in countries far and wide that allows them to attract the best players (more crudely, it's my damn cable fees that permit Spurs to spend 16M on Darren Bent, for all the good that's done them).

And so it's reasonable to ask - to whom does the Premiership belong? The English? Or to all of us? As the league and its clubs get better at monetizing foreign interest in the game, the answer is increasingly "all of us". And it's only a short step from that to saying that all of us should occasionally get a chance to see our heroes in the flesh.

The game 39 idea tried to reconcile two ideas: not taking any games away from domestic fans, while atthe same time not feeding the extra-territorial fans the pablum of friendlies. The problem is that this can't actually be reconciled within the framework of a balanced schedule. And so for that reason if no other, these games abroad were never likely to work.

More instructive than the English fans' reaction - which was both predictable and selfish, given the extent to which their teams' good fortune depends on the pockets of others - was FIFA's. Blatter seemed to imply that competitve matches on foreign soil were contrary to article 2 of the FIFA statutes (really, Sepp? how 'bout the Mexicans playing their CONMEBOL qualifying tourneys in the US? Or the Italians playing the Supercoppa in Giants Stadium?) .

What Blatter's really worried about is a league and it's clubs transcending FIFA's rigidly Westphalian system, which allows FA suits to act like dictators within their own spheres (a curious echo of the pre-Westphalian doctrine of cuius region eius religio). Once a league gets big enough to transcend this, then the moral basis for the current organziation of FIFA collapses.

Where sovereign interests are at stake, it makes sense that international organiations are organized along national lines. Where sovereign interests are not at stake - and in sport there's no real reason they should be, apart from the historical accident of Baron de Coubertin having started international sport at right about the time classic 19th century nationalism was at its height - then a FIFA-like organization is less obviously necessary. The Premiership's growing dominance is, in a very real sense, an existential challenge to FIFA - a constant reminder that the Westphalian organization of sports is not immutable.

For those of you wondering where this might lead, think about the relationship between the NHL and the International Ice Hockey Federation. Now, the Premiership isn't ever going to be as powerful as the NHL because the gap between it and other leagues is never likely to grow that wide. But it goes to show that there are other possible balances of power between popular multi-national leagues and international governing bodies.

As the (nearly) always-wise Arsene Wenger has said, Game 39 may be dead at the moment, but the idea of global expansion is very unlikely to go away because there are massive gains for clubs to reap by finding ways to go global. Traditionalists won't likely. But being the World's League means you have to go meet the world occasionally. This story has a very long way to run; and should we get a pair of all-England semis, the debate will merely intensify.

Messiah Done by Easter?

2008-03-10T07:40:00.002-04:00

Could it be that Newcastle are on their way down? All the amusing signs are there. The lethal combination of inability to score and inability to defend seems to be taking its toll, and the team have exactly no wins since the Geordie Messiah^TM took over in January.

Never thought you’d be nostalgic for Graeme Souness and Freddie Shepherd, did you?

The Magpies’ record under Keegan has certainly been fodder for amusement. 2 points in 7 league games, 3 goals for, 17 goals against, Michael Owen’s missed sitter-to-conversion ratio is, approaching infinity. Keegan skills – which by his own admission lie more in man-management than tactics - have been called into question by his own players. Prior to the first of Newcastle’s torrid back-to-back hammerings by Arsenal, he is reported to have given a very brief team-talk, which I reproduce in its entirety, below.

“Right, lads. Arsenal are one of the best passing sides in the world. So we’re just going to have to pass the ball better than them.”

So, with nine games to go and Newcastle hovering a mere two points above the drop zone, is there anything standing in Newcastle’s way on the road down to the Championship? Well, yes, actually. Three things:

1) There are a lot of bad teams in the Premiership.Derby and Fulham have almost certainly tied up the first two relegation spots. So everyone else – Reading, Wigan, Boro, Birmingham and Newcastle - are really only fighting over one spot. With this much mediocrity in the neighbourhood, the odds that one of these teams is more crap than Newcastle are reasonably high, and the safety threshold this year may be as low as 38 or even 37 points.

2) The run-in. Mercifully, Newcastle have seen the last of Arsenal, Liverpool and Man U.This isn’t to say that they won’t get hammered elsewhere: merely that these three dead-cert turnings-over are done and dusted.

3) Reversion to the mean. Newcastle have been terrible this season, especially since Allardyce left (bet that long-ball stuff doesn’t look so bad anymore on Tyneside). But they aren’t that bad, even if Alan Smith and Nicky Butt should have been cashiered ages ago. Blips happen. This is a long one but it has to end soon. Eventually, someone will remember how to pass a ball to Michael Owen and eventually he will remember how to put it in the net.

So don’t despair, folks. Other teams will still have Newcastle to kick around next year.

The Unbearable Lassitude of the Neutral Fan

2008-03-07T02:26:00.005-05:00

So I found myself stranded on the volatile Dutch-German border yesterday. But thanks to the Kicker match calendar, I found a match within a 2-hour train ride. So, I hopped on a Deutschebahn train to the frighteningly boring town of Leverkusen, home of a 100-foot high tab of aspirin.

A bit OTT? Maybe, but it's been over three months since I've last seen a match - and that a bloody awful one in Mexico. Which, now that I think of it, I've never written about. Short version: Apertura quarter-finals, Cruz Azul v. Atlante, Cruz Azul had no tactics other than hoofing the ball high to Jared Borgetti, which was a shame because Borgetti was so crap he was risking a health warning and Atlante won 1-0 on a goal in the 90th second. The only plus was getting to watch a game through barbed wire, which is a lovely if perverse pleasure. So I was desperate enough to travel to watch a UEFA cup match, Leverkusen v. Hamburg.

So, Leverkusen, then. First of all, the BayArena is tiny. Basically, it's BMO field if you filled in the corners. How a team from this dinky little place consistently challenges in the Budesliga and even made it to the Champions League finals one year is beyond me.

The match: to describe the first half as soporific would be to do a serious injustice to sleep medications. Of the 22 men on the field, only Leverkusen's Gonzalo Castro looked like he was awake. The most interesting stuff was actually the fans. Turns out, German fans really do sing "roll out the barrel". I have no idea what thea actual words were, of course - if you don't understand the language well, all songs sound like - lah da da da laaaah, la da, la da la daaaaah. Although, to be fair, a lot of English songs sound like that, too.

On paper, Hamburg are the better team, even with Juan Pablo Sorin out injured. Vincent Kompany, a couple of years ago the world's most sought-after 19 year-old defender, has now moved up to central midfield in a 4-1-4-1 system with Guerrero up front. This would be a decent formation if Guerrero were a decent front-man (he isn't) or if any of the midfielders ever got up in support (which, apart from van der Vaart, they didn't). And so, despite having more skilled players and on the whole a better set of chances in front of net, Hamburg couldn't find a way through.

That was OK for as long as Leverkusen kept the woeful Sergey Barbarez, who has the turning radius of an 18-wheeler truck, in the match. The team's speed of transition from defence to offence could be mesured in weeks, and they were congenitally unable to find the right pass when pressing forward until the young Chilean Arturo Vidal was introduced as a sub in the 74th minute. In the 77th, though, Theofanis Gekas was permitted to stroll into the area unopposed on a corner and he converted with ease. A dull nil-nil was thus - barely - avoided.

Anyways, as I'm watching all this spectacle - nice pitch, a very short Rudi Voller doing commentary by the field, good fans and loud singing, but crap football, I start thinking to myself. Do I really give a toss? I have no real interest in either team, and I've just travelled two hours and spent thirty euros on a ticket to watch a bad football match. Has my football fixation actually come to this? Spending a chilly night watching a boring game between two teams I don't really care about just so I can be in a crowd, watching 22 men pass a sphere around?

And then, when they played The Scientist by Coldplay over the tannoy after the game, I thought to myself: fuck this, I really hate German football.

But I'm still going to see Dortmund-Hertha tonight.

UPDATE: No I'm not. I'm tired, It's cold and windy, I have a 5 AM train to catch and last night sucked the joy out of football for me. For 24 hours at least. Maybe I'll watch it on TV.

TFC - Boot to the Head Time

2008-03-05T18:34:00.002-05:00

OK, I've been trying really, really hard to think positive thoughts about TFC lately.

I've seen us let Pozniak go in a waiver draft while protecting bovine striker Colin Samuel. And I have said nothing.

I've seen two us make two defensive draft picks, bringing the number of defenders on the roster to 8. And I have said nothing.

I've seen us get bring in goon extraordinaire Kevin Harmse, bringing our quotient of central midfielders to 4. And I have said nothing.

I have seen us trade Ronnie O'Brien, THE ONE FUCKING PLAYER WHO MADE US EVEN VAGUELY WATCHABLE LAST YEAR, for draft picks and money. And I have said nothing.

I have watched Mo FART AROUND FOR THE ENTIRE GODDAMN OFF-SEASON without signing anyone useful, not even Kiki Musampa (although allegedly he's still a possibility), even though we have precisely zero - and I mean zero - decent wide men. And I have said nothing.

And you know why? Because no matter how lousy the product on the field, BMO is a place worth going to. The Boys, the singing, and the general match atmosphere, which is made up not just of home fans, but - in an incredibly promising development for MLS as a whole - away fans as well.

So, what, what, what, in the name of Jesus Christ and Danny Dichio were the morons at MLSE thinking when they decided to restrict travelling Chicago fans to a mere 100 seats?

This, as my esteemed colleague Tom has pointed out, is horseshit. If MLS wants to make a better product, it will encourage friendly rivalries and travelling fans. Lord knows, a lot of the appeal of TFC is the brilliant way we're able to get people out to away games. How does TFC think the Red Patch Boys will react when Chicago retaliates and tells them there's only 100 tickets available for the away supporters?

Now I know I have a lot of readers who will agree with me that this is a seriously boneheaded move on TFCs part and that someone in the front office is in serious need of a Boot to the Head. And so, I would invite all of you to write to Cesar Velasco, Manager of Community Relations and Sales, at cvelasco@mapleleafsports.com to tell him exactly how stupid a decision this is.

Think of it as your community service for the day.

photo credit: el goldstone (I think)

Kosovan Football

2008-02-19T02:11:00.008-05:00

So, another new country. And with it, some expectation of international football.

My advice to anyone looking forward to Kosovo joining Montenegro in the ranks of European football: don't hold your breath.

Yes, it's true that some pretty dodgy FAs have made it into FIFA in recent years. But these for the most part have been concentrated in Oceania and CONCACAF, who have been keen to up their numbers in order to get a regular World Cup spot (in the former case) or to bolster Jack Warner's political position (in the latter). In Asia, there has only been one slightly dodgy addition (Palestine). In Africa, where they are fairly mindful of not screwing around with post-colonial territorial settlements, nothing of the sort has happened. In South Africa, political stability has meant the issue hasn't arisen.

In Europe's case, it's been a different story. The break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have created a number of new smaller states which have been eager to take up sporting nationalism. A number of legally legitimate if geographically ludicrous micro-states (Andorra, San Marino, Lichtenstein) which have also chosen to take up membership. None of these has been particularly contentious.

The exceptional case is the Faroe Islands, which was granted FIFA membership in 1988 and UEFA membership in 1990. The Faroes have a significant degree of autonomy, but they are legally part of Denmark. Their membership has led to all sorts of claims by other sovereignistically-also-rans to get a place in UEFA and FIFA.

Of the various suitors that subsequently claimed a desire to join, Gibraltar had the best case. But Gibraltar had one major drawback - namely, that its legal status was contested by the Spanish, who had no desire to see Gibraltar's international standing confirmed by any international sporting bodies. So they threatened UEFA: if Gibraltar plays, we don't - not in any UEFA competition. Since Big Cup would look a bit strange without Real Madrid and Barcelona, UEFA caved. Gibralta have twice successfully appealed this refusal to grant them status at the Court of Aribitration for Sport, but UEFA continues to stall.

The Gibraltar case rang alarm bells at both UEFA and FIFA, with both suddenly realizing: maybe this recognizing every two-bit organization with pretenstions to sovereignty just so we can say we have more members than the UN isn't the greatest idea since sliced bread after all! At which point, they changed the rules. And it's these new rules that Kosovo has to deal with.

Let's start with FIFA's rules, the relevant sections of which in Article 10 read:

(i)Any association which is responsible for organizing and supervising football in its country may become a member of FIFA. In this context, the expression "country" shall refer to an independent country recognized as such by the international community.

(ii) Membership shall only be granted if an Association has been a member of a Confederation for over two years.

Ok, then, over to UEFA, whose Article 5 reads:

(i) Membership of UEFA is open to national football associations Members situated in the continent of Europe, based in a country which is recognised by the United Nations as an independent state, and which are responsible for the organisation and implementation of football-related matters in the territory of their country.

Note the subtleties here. The wording does not require that only one FA per country is permitted - that's how the Faroes and the four home nations get to stay. But it does require that the state in which one is based must be not just "internationally recognized" (the FIFA standard), but a member of the UN.

This is where Kosovo will take it in the neck: UN membership requires Security Council approval, and the Russian Federation - which for obvious domestic reasons is not keen on legitimizing the rights of ethnically homogenous enclaves to unilaterally declare independence - seems set to veto Kosovo's membership application. No doubt in a decade or so, a compromise will be found to allow this new country to join, but until then: no UN membership. Which means no UEFA membership, which means no FIFA membership.

There is a possible escape loophole, though I suspect Kosovo would be unlikely to use it. There is nothing stopping Kosovo from joining another confederation with looser membership qualifications. Among the likely options: CONCACAF has no geographical restrictions on membership at all while the Asian and Oceanian confederations will take members from outside their areas provided, with the only stipulations being that members cannot be in two confederations simultaneously and that their membership be in accordance with FIFA statutes. Crucially, Kosovo passes the second test, since FIFA requires not UN membership but "recognition from the international community" - which Kosovo has, at least from the US and most of the EU.

OFC and CONCACAF are probably non-starters for financial reasons. The AFC is more proximate and hence more affordable. But for obvious political reasons, Kosovo has a pretty large incentive to portray itself as "European", and an AFC membership may clash with this.

Still, participation in international football is an important demonstration of sovereignty, and the Kosovans will want to start as soon as they can. How this story plays out is anyone's guess, but early entry to UEFA is probably the least likely scenario.

Updates

2008-02-01T09:34:00.000-05:00

Yeah, yeah, I know. Lame graphic. You try to illustrate the concept of an update.

1) Canadian Soccer Association in correct-move shock! CSA has confirmed a triangular TFC-Whitecaps-Impact championship to decide Canada's entrant in the CONCACAF Champions League. Hooray!

2) Contest Winners! You will recall my Kevin Keegan photo contest below, which four of my readers entered. After much soul searching, I feel unable to decide between the two entrants who gave me four entries apiece. So, to Ursus a copy of the Damned United and to Brian, (who I know for a fact already has a copy) I will send a copy of German Football: History, Culture, Society and the 2006 World Cup, of which, for some reason, Amazon sent me two copies instead of one. I'll be in touch for your addresses, gents. Honourable mention to Roswitha who seriously creeped me out.

3) Speaking of Brian and Roswitha, they both have awesome blogs which I have yet to hat-tip. Brian's Run of Play is quite truly awesome; I admire the posting stamina, which rivals even Tom's Pitch Invasion (which got a facelift recently which I think works very well), only with a more literary and even absurdist bent. Roswitha's Treasons, Strategems and Spoils is also a very well-written blog from India which mixes a little cricket with the football, which is a nice touch. I highly recommend both.

4) Kevin Keegan's Newcastle have scored no goals in his 270 minutes in charge. Another 3 or 4 games of this and he may be ready to coach TFC. (rimshot)

TFC kicks off in 57 days.

The Luckiest Man in Football

2008-02-01T09:05:00.000-05:00

It's hard, offhand, to think of another manager of a major European club who has; a) spent tens of millions in the transfer market to no apparent purpose b) vastly underperfomed expectations in the league for three years running; c) failed to win any of his last five games; d) just had the club's only decent defender admit that fourth place might be a stretch this year.

But it's even harder to imagine another club at which this self-same manager would not only avoid being the object of baying crowds, but actually be defended by the club's fans against owners who - not unreasonably - would actually like the team to win a match or two.

It is simply luck that Rafa's latest spell of Houllier-fication (he still insists on playing Dirk Kuyt, for Chrissakes) has coincided with the news that Liverpool's absentee landlords have - shock, horror, this was completely unforseen, etc. - foisted a lot of debt on the club. Scouser fans, whose logic escapes me somewhat, seem to have decided that thw way to get back at their vicious American overlords is a) to demand new, kinder Arab overlords and b) back their Spanish coach come what may, even though the team clearly can't play its way out of a paper bag right now.

In this situation, through no skill of his own, Rafa can literally do no wrong. Which is good, because he ain't doing much right at the moment.

Lucky Bastard.

TFC varia

2008-01-29T10:54:00.000-05:00

Ok, now I'm so totally psyched about the new season (a condition that will presumably last until the CSA decide to make some boneheaded announcement which will result in the Serbian White Eagles representing Canada in the CONCACAF Champions League) that I can barely do anything else. So, time to catch up on some TFC news.

First, cheers to the fans, who this year purchased 16,000 season tickets. With 2,500 or so seats going in mini-packages that leaves less than 2,000 tickets for walk-up crowds. Which means tickets will be scarce and scalpers will do well. An excellent boost for the economy all around.

Second, you may have noticed that there was something called the Superdraft a week or two ago. I chose to deliberately ignore this on the grounds that there was no point getting too attached to anyone we drafted because Mo would almost certainly trade them immediately. Now, trying to figure out Mo's motives in these things is a mug's game, but I am starting to think that he might - just might - actually not want to trade anybody.

Hear me out: Prior to the draft, we had five, maybe six defenders worthy of the name. Three of them (Wynne, Brennan and Dunivant) are at least theoretically capable of playing midfield as well, though Dunivant in midfield is technically something one should avoid. The arrival of Julius James and Pat Phelan (our two first-round picks) mean that at least two of these eight (including Phelan) would now be available for midfield duty.

Now, although much was made of TFC's offensive woes last year, the real problem was actually not in attack but in midfield. TFC have three genuinely good midfielders (Edu, Robbo, and O'Brien). When all three played, TFC were very tough to beat. When one or more of them were gone, they were god-awful. So to the extent that depth in defence is going to lead to more options in midfield, life has to be getting better.

And now add to this the East Country rumours that Mo is sniffing around yet another Norwich player - Darren Huckerby (pictured) to join former Canaries Jim Brennan and Carl Robinson. Unlike a lot of the other rumours out there about TFC-bound players (the Stefano Fiore rumour being the most ludicrous), this one seems to have a lot of traction, and frankly makes more sense given how close he is to the Dichio mold. If Huckerby plays on the left of midfield, that plugs the most serious gap on the squad.

Less promising are the Josh Wagenaar rumours. It's not obvious to me why he'd prefer being the reserve keeper at TFC to being the reserve keeper at Den Haag - unless he's being brought in to be the number one. This would suggest that Sutton is considered too brain-scrambled to play any more or he's trade-bait (though suspicions of brain-scrambledness obviously won't do much for his trade value).

59 days 'til kick off.

Absolutely Fabulous

2008-01-29T08:09:00.000-05:00

I have been dying for three months. No TFC. And still 2 months until we kick off in Columbus.

My body aches every time I drive down the Gardner or Lakeshore and see Our House"; the big bubble on the field, the snow on the bright red seats, the floodlights standing guard against the metallic grey skies. I want to drink beer in the summer sun and indulge in bitchy sarcasm about our porous defence. I want to huddle with my son in the cold wind and rain coming off the lake through another abject performance and then argue with my wife about why the team's crapness can't possibly affect the number of games I attend. I want to sing and cheer and celebrate with Michael and Sonny and the gang in Section 221. I want my TFC and I want it now.

But my life - no, everyone's life - just got a little bit better with the announcement of the new CONCACAF Champions League, which will replace the Champions Cup as of this year. 24 teams will begin the competition in late August with 16 teams playing home-and-away qualifiers from which the winner will join 8 seeded teams for a group stage lasting through to the end of October. Quarter-finals in February, Semis in March, Finals in April.

But all that's as maybe: the important thing here is that Canada's been given on of the 24 spots. This is somewhat problematic because alone among CONCACAF nations, we have no real national championships. Our three professional teams all play in American leagues,and as fans of Swansea and Cardiff know, international football has tended to look askance at teams playing in one country's league and representing another country internationally.

But what does that leave? The Canadian Soccer League is semi-pro at best, and it clubs are almost entirely from Ontario - and, hilariously, has two divisions: a "national" division of regionally-based teams (one of which - the Trois-Rivieres Attak - is the Montreal Impact's reserve squad) and an "international" division of ethnic Toronto teams - Toronto Croatia, Serbian White Eagles, Italian Shooters, Canadian Lions (I believe a Caribbean team) and Portuguese Supra. If any of these teams were to represent Canada, they would get creamed.

The Canadian Soccer Association, displaying its usual lightning-quick reflexes, put up the CONCACAF announcement on its website yesterday but failed to make any announcement about how Canada's representative would be chosen. A hopeful but poorly-sourced article in the Vancouver Sun suggests that a triangular championship featuring home-and-homes between the Whitecaps, Impact and FC is in the works.

God bless. At a minimum, that means road trips to Montreal and Vancouver this year, plus two more dates on my season ticket. And...miracle of miracles...the possibility of away games in Mexcio, Costa Rica and the Caribbean.

Absolutely fabulous!

This is Too Easy

2008-01-17T03:26:00.001-05:00

Surely no modern sports figure has been photgraphed in as many bizarre and humiliating poses as Kevin Keegan. As a result, any schmo with five minutes on his hands can put together a series of photos making this man look like a complete buffoon.

Is this fair? Of course not. He wasn't the worst manager England's ever had - unlike some people we could mention, he managed to get the Three Lions to qualify for a major tournament. As a player, he was not only one of England's all-time finest, but he also - unlike today's squad - took up the challenge of playing outside England and learning about foreign cultures and playing styles. And as a club manager, his record at Toon and City may not be stellar, but few if any of his successors can claim a better one.

And had he not played during the only decade in human history where mullets and perms were not only not cause for corporal punishment but actually fashionable, I'm quite sure he'd be considered among the sagest individuals ever to grace a football pitch. Or, at least, he wouldn't suffer in comparison to Bobby Robson.

However, as we blog-writers say, "never look a gift horse in the mouth". And oh my God what a horse this is. And so, forthwith, a photo caption contest. Provide the best captions (I am the judge, my decision final, etc.) to the following four photos of Kevin Keegan and win my copy of David Peace's Damned United, to be delivered just as soon as I finish reading it.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Do your worst.

Outcasts

2008-01-16T23:38:00.000-05:00

So, this book by Steve Menary seems to be all the rage among the blogeratti at the moment. A reasonably thorough review was justed posted over on Culture of Soccer, and there's been some chatter elsewhere, too.

Generally, the book has been pretty well received. However, I'm going to have to be the contrarian on this score. I desperately wanted to like this book. The premise is brilliant the material is great and the settings are exotic. The problem is that Menary simply doesn't deliver.

The opening chapter, which lays bare the many oddities of FIFA membership rules (the Faroe Islands are allwed in but Greenland is not, depsite having roughly similar legal relationships with their parent country, Denmark) is meant to set the stage for the book that follows by demonstrating that FIFA is "forgetting" various parts of the world. But while these forst thirty pages are by far the book's best, they fail to convince that current rules are in fact terribly unjust. Previous admission rules - such as the ones that allowed the Faroes and the Palestinians in in the first place may have been dumb-ass. But present ones?

The only country I can see that has a case here is Gibraltar (about which more later). Zanzibar? Part of Tanzania. Get over it. The channel islands? Part of the UK. Get over it. Greenland? Part of Denmark and there's only two pitches on the whole damn island. Get over it. The Kurds? The Sami? They may be people but they ain't countries. North Cyprus? Tibet? Tougher call, and one which sucks for Turkish Cypriots and Tibetans, but international recognition is kind of important if you're going to play international matches.

So what's the problem here? Not much, really, but that doesn't stop Menary from doing a little hopscotching around Europe trying to find whiny local FA people who want to achieve some kind of recognition for their plight. Their cases are almost uniformly unconvincing.

The exception is Gibraltar, which has basic self-rule and whose football is not part of the UK pyramid. They are best positioned on legal grounds to make the leap to international football, but for deep-rooted historical reasons, the Spanish have dug in and threatened to withdraw their teams (i.e. Real madrid and Barcelona) from UEFA competitions if Gibraltar is allowed in. And so UEFA prevaricates on Gibraltar's application, despite having lost the case at the Court for Arbitration in Sport. It is, in fact, the Gibraltar-Spain situation which has cause both FIFA and UEFA to become choosier about admitting micro-states, albeit only after letting in a lot of farily dubious candidates over the past twenty years, thus setting the stage for whiny books like this one.

This book screams "quickie". The research and editing are both sloppy. You can mostly overlook this because of the exotic locales, but it grates after a while. Less forgiveably, it underplays what is possibly the most interesting story of all here - namely, the shambles that is the NF Board. They are an eccentric bunch, these NF Board types, and the many chancers who seem to have glommed on to it. They seem to want to re-create a lot of the pageantry associated with FIFA, only to give it a "Springtime of Nations" gloss as they represent the oppressed nations of the world (oppressed? Padania were given provisional membership last month...). But their crtieria for membership is, shall we say, flexible - and seems to consist of a lot of internet searches. Who is the Masaai FA, anyway? They don't seem to exist in actual fact - yet they are listed as a member by the NF-Board.

And, indeed, as the book progresses, the NF-Board is put to shame by the happy-go-lucky types at St. Pauli FC who managed to organize the FIFI World Cup for "nations without countries" with no bureaucracy and minimal fuss in the summer of 2006. The NF-Board has yet to organize a serious tournament. That's the real story in this netherworld of International football, and while Menary dutifully reports some of it, he doesn't follow it to it's logical conclusion (i.e. "this non-FIFA stuff is quite insubstantial") for the obvious reasons that it undermines the rationale for the book in the first place.

There is room, of course, for non-FIFA international football. There are lots of peoples out there who do not form a nation-state but who still want to express their collective identities through sport. That's legitimate. But it's ludicrous to expect that FIFA or the IOC or any other international sporting body should be under any obligation to satisfy them. In sport, the Westphalian settlement still holds; were it to crumble, the result would be anarchy, not justice.

(And that's the last time in 2008 you'll hear me defend FIFA. I feel dirty.)

Anyways, if you're a devotee of footie lit, Outcasts is probably worth a gander, if only because the rest of the 2007 crop of books was so dismal. But scale down your expectations; like its subjects, this book isn't ready for the big leagues.

Back to the Future

2008-01-16T11:54:00.000-05:00

This just in (snicker).

The New Newcastle mana(snort!)...manager is...tee hee!

KEVIN "I'm not very good at this" KEEGAN! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

This is priceless.

And yes, sorry for the gap in posting. A tough couple of months. It took something this absurd to get me going again.

HA!

Seriously, though, spare a thought for Sam Allardyce. How'd you like to be him today?

Football Romantics

2007-12-15T19:04:00.000-05:00

So. Starting to come down from a few weeks worth of work which should qualify as torture under the Geneva Convention, I have been reading a new book called Football in the Americas: Futbol, Futebol, Soccer, a collection of essays by primarily Latin American authors (plus, inevitably, a theoretical piece by Richard Giulianotti).

I'll review the book as a whole later; what I want to draw everyone's attention to one particular essay by a Mexico City-based anthropologist named Roger Magazine, entitled Football Fandom and Identity in Mexico: The Case of Pumas Football and Youth Football Club. I'll go out on a limb here and say that this is probably the most kick-ass ten pages of academic writing on football ever.

It opens with a very nice overview of the nature of the rivalry between the country's four "national" teams (i.e. teams with national followings). This is an excellent primer, and one long overdue: of all the world's major football leagues, the Mexican league probably gets the least coverage in English-language press and literature. He briefly enumerates the club identities of America (the club of modern big-business), Cruz Azul (the club of the organized urban proletariat) and Chiapas (the club of indigeneous Mexicanos, sort of a ibero-American version of Athletic Bilbao) before moving to his main subject, the youth-oriented Pumas UNAM.

If there's a slight failing to this article, it's that he doesn't dwell sufficiently on Pumas' intiguing past or that of Mexican football as a whole. The sport developed relatively late in Mexico. Unlike Argentina, Brazil, Spain and Italy where the sport took hold between 1890 and 1920, the blossoming of Mexican football really didn't take place until the 1930s. It was preceded, of all things, by American football, which still has a signifcant following in Mexico (a trip from the airport to downtown Mexico City will take you past at least two gridiron fields). The Universidad National Autonoma de Mexico's sports teams had been initially been given their blue-and-gold colours by American sports coaches from, of all places, Notre Dame.

In any case, Magazine's central insight is that football supporters' groups - known in Mexico as porra - belong ideologically to the Romantic movement. While they belong to the Age of Reason and exist to support teams which operate in the classic rationalist framework of a football league, their behaviour is driven by a love and passion which is fundamentally irrational. And he highlights the romantic nature of football support by showing what happens when a supporters' group tries to modernize itself.

In the mid-90s, the UNAM supporters' group Orgullo Azul y Oro was still old-school. Leadership rested in one man, who chose the songs, the banners, etc. As part of the overall democritization of life in Mexico last decade, the orgullo Azul y Oro also underwent a change, with new leadership asking for democratic elections and more member participation in terms of things like choice and order of songs.

This, not to put too fine a point on it, was a disaster. Elections mean formal memberships (otherwise, how do you know who can vote?) which in turn requires a bureauracy. Taking members' suggestions requires making choices among suggestons, which in turn means some people will be aggrieved and - in this case - make accusations (whether justified or not) about clientelism at the top. In short, democracy and the critical framework it provided led to the fracturing of the porra.

Intriguingly, all this occurred at the same time that the effects of sponsorship was making itself felt. Nike offered free shirts to all porra members provided they wear them to every game. Part of the porra (including the new leadership) thought this was a great idea since the "uniform" would give their tifo a more uniform look. Others felt that requiring them to wear team colours was an insult as wearing the team colours should always be seen as a choice born of devotion.

True fandom, like Romanticism, is emotional, heartfelt and passionate and stands opposed to tradtional hierarchies and to democratic and scientific rationalism. It doesn't matter if the team hasn't scored for 800 minutes - we bleed for them nonetheless.

The loyalty this romantic attitude engenders is admirable, of course, but it clearly has its dark side, too. Romanticism can lead to a lack of critical space (it emphasizes the use of the heart, not the head) and an over-relaiance on charismatic leaders (orgullo members never complained about their song suggestions not being adopted under the old hardline regime). And clearly, the attraction of being part of a supporters' group lies in a deep tribal instinct which has echoes of in some of history's less pleasant mass movements.

Fandom, like all romantic movements, lies with all its collectivist emotional baggage on a knife-edge between good and evil. And it's a very thin edge indeed.

Looking back here, I realise that as usual I haven't really done my subject justice. All I can say is - find the book and read the thought-provoking article yourself - you won't be disappointed.

China 2018

2007-12-06T18:35:00.000-05:00

Anybody who’s ever been to China knows that this is not a country that does things by half. That’s why a Chinese bid for the 2018 World Cup, should it materialize, will be need to be taken very seriously.

A Chinese bid will fundamentally be built around the country’s three obvious strengths.

First, China – as every marketer knows – is an enormous market that football’s powers-that-be would like to make more pro-football. Right now, football is not a particularly popular sport in China. Attendances at Chinese Super League matches are often MLS-sized. Basketball (and even ping-pong) get a lot more exposure at a day-to-day level in the country and the NBA at least is making serious hay of this.

But no other sporting event engages the Chinese like the World Cup final – tens of millions of them stay up through the night to watch it. The trick for the sport of football is to convert that enthusiasm for one-off events into a more lasting passion. The experience in USA 94 shows that this can happen – given enough time.

Second, the country already has a lot of very modern stadia which will require little renovation in 2018. The country has hosted two major tournaments in the last four years (the 2004 AFC championships and the 2007 Women’s World Cup) and has a great deal of infrastructure to show for it.

Shanghai’s 80,000 seat stadium (picture, above) is only ten years old; Guangdong’s 80,000 seat stadium is of even more recent vintage. Qingdao, Nanking, Wuhan, Tianjin, Chongqing and Dalian all of have stadia that are less than ten years’ old and seat over 55,000. In Beijing, the 66,000-seat Workers Stadium may be nearly sixty years old in 2018, but it had a major facelift in 2004 for the AFC Championships in 2004 and no doubt the newly-built “Birds Nest” Olympic Stadium can be pressed into service as well.

Third – and this is the important one – if there’s one thing the Beijing Olympics has already proved, it is that the Chinese government will do absolutely anything to make sure that large, prestige infrastructure projects go off well. Money? No problem. Labour? No problem. Given the infrastructure worries already dogging the run-ups to 2010 and 2014, the importance of this factor shouldn’t be underestimated.

On the flip side, China doesn’t have a stellar football culture as we would understand it. When it comes to professional sports – still a relatively new concept in the People’s Republic – the Chinese are phenomenally fickle. Attendance at top flight games correlates rather sharply with the home side’s league position. The attraction is to the aura of winning rather than to the club itself. This probably won’t affect the World Cup much, but it speaks to the shallowness of the game’s roots in the country.

A more troubling issue for the country is the lack of a substantive World Cup record. Given that the host team gets a free pass to the finals, this is not an academic matter: they have to at least be able to put on a good show, and that’s not guaranteed with the squad they currently have. Indeed, in the postwar era no country has ever been awarded the World Cup without qualifying at least twice for the finals under their own steam – and China is still one short of this modest requirement.

The prevalence of local gambling syndicates will also presumable be a source of concern. Agents of these syndicates have fixed or attempted to fix games as far away as Scandinavia and England and the domestic league is still haunted by a series of refereeing scandals in 2001 known as “Black Whistle” which eroded much of the league’s credibility with fans. Given the country’s addiction to betting – all of it illegal outside of Macao – there would have to be considerable attention paid to the possibilities for outside parties to influence to flow and outcomes of games.

Then there's the perennial concerns about human rights and pollution. Given FIFA's track record of coddling to dictators and insisting that "politics and sports are separate", I doubt very much the former will be an issue. Pollution is likelier to cause problems for China, but I'm not sure that's as big an issue in football (where teams compete against each other and will be equally handicapped) as it is in athletics (where individuals are at least in part trying to break world records set in other, more pristine environments). Mexico City has nearly as miuch particulate matter floating around as do smaller Chinese cities, and the complaint of visiting teams is usually altitude, not pollution.

In any case, most of these issues are comparatively minor compared to the larger geopolitical issues involved in FIFA’s decision for 2018. By then, Europe will have gone without a World Cup for a record 12 years. It may well be that the powers that be will simply decide that the game must return to its heartland. If so, China’s chances are doomed regardless of the quality of its bid.

But if the bidding is in fact open – watch out. As long as the Chinese FA learns to play politics well over the next four years and courts its CAF counterparts properly (perhaps in conjunction with Chinese companies who are making real inroads all across Africa), a potential Chinese bid has to be seen as one of the front runners.

A version of this article was published earlier today at Pitchinvasion.net (if you don't already visit this site regularly, you're missing out) where some of my work will be appearing over the next few months.

Death at the Fonte Nova

2007-11-25T19:53:00.000-05:00

Not many details yet, but seven or eight people (accounts differ) are reported to have lost their lives at a Brazilian Serie C match at the Estadio Fonte Nova (pictured) in Salvador when a stand collapsed at the end of match between Bahia and Vila Nova.

Bahia and Vila Nova had tied 0-0, a result which meant Bahia gained promotion to the second division. Amidst the celebrations and fans jumping up and down, a section of concrete in the uppermost stands opened up and several people fell to their deaths, according to the Associated Press. Correioweb is reporting that 40 people were injured. O Globo says only 7 people were killed (4 men and 3 women) and that the dead plunged 15 metres. O Globo is also reporting that the National Association of Architects and Engineers releases a study just three weeks ago calling the stadium the country's worst, with major beams and pillars described as "compromised".

Although the stadium is Bahia's home ground, they do not own the structure, which belongs to the state government. Conflicting stories are emerging about safety conditions in the structure. The Firemen's Union is saying that they were reporting problems in the structure as early as last year. The state government has replied that it has engineering reports from earlier this year which certified that the stadium was safe up to its maximum capacity of 60,000 fans. However unconfirmed stories are circulating that the stadium was filled to overcapacity and that the turnstiles may have been left unguarded after the start of the match. Club officials are firmly denying these stories.

Although this incident highlights the kinds of infrastructure challenges Brazil faces in its task of hosting the 2014 World Cup, it doesn't bring into questions any aspects of their bid. Although Salvador is expected to be a World Cup site, it was known that the present stadium was not up to snuff and a new stadium in the city was from the start part of the 2014 plan.

More as it comes in.

Football, Development, Peace?

2007-11-25T19:40:00.000-05:00

I know that picking up the FT might be ideologically difficult for some readers, but anyone who doesn't is missing out on some of the best football writing in the world. Usually, it's from the brilliant Simon Kuper, who has a weekly column there - but this week it's from Jonathan Wilson, who has left his usual East European stomping grounds to write a moving story about football in Robben Island prison during the apartheid era.

It's a great story, of course. The prisoners formed not only teams (the Pan-African Congress and the ANC each fielding four teams) but a full FA with committees, hearings and appeals boards. The point was not bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy, but rather to create institutions that were both free of apartheid and conformed to democratic and legal norms. In short, football permitted them to create a space in which their own "rule of law" existed.

Stories like this that seem to show football's role in development and peace are manna from heaven to FIFA propagandists. And there are plenty of stories like this in Africa. Take for instance the story of Kenya's Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA), set up by Canadian Bob Munro. The MYSA is arguably one of Kenya's most important development organizations, giving impoverished children the chance to participate in organized football activities in return for community service work and an abjuration of violence both on and off the pitch. So important has it become both in football terms (its senior squad, Mathare United, made the African Cup Winners Cup in 1998, 2000 and 2002), and political terms that it has become a perceived threat to the Kenyan government, which tried (unsuccessfully) to have Mr. Munro deported as a result.

This football-as-a-space-of-laws idea was taken even further in Liberia after the end of that country's vicious civil war. Bosco United Sports Association (named after the order of of the Salesians of Don Bosco, to which the project's Scottish-born founder, the Reverend Joe Glackin, belongs) was designed specifically to give former child combatants in Monrovia a chance to play. Any recidivism into violence results in expulsion from the club and hence from the social benefits and protection the club provides. Moreover, within the lines, the existence of a set of rules enforced by an impartial referee provides formerly lawless youth with the idea of the rule of law.

The peacemaking angle of football went even further in Rwanda. Here, the attempt to use mixed football teams as a means of reconciling Hutus and Tutsis has been seen both at the local level (for example at the Esperance Football Club which has received considerable FIFA funding) and at the national level. The country's qualification for the 2004 African Cup of Nations (which came in part thanks to heavy financial support from the country's by football-mad and, reputedly, Arsenal-supporting President Paul Kagame) was widely seen as a symbol of national hope and re-generation.

Now, these are great stories - but do they mean anything? And can football possibly withstand the burden of expectations that is being placed upon it?

There is nothing intrinsic to football as a sport that makes it better suited to these kinds of projects than other sports. The fact that it is football and not - say - basketball is simply a reflection of pre-existing social preferences.

It is also arguable that it is fundamentally hypocritical for the footballing community to take credit for successes in peace-building projects, while simultaneously placing any responsibility for violent incidents around the game (e.g. this month's events in Italy) on "society at large". Either football has an effect on peace (or the lack of it) or it doesn't.

My own feeling is that this stuff is largely ephemeral. For every example one can cite about the peacemaking effects of football (e.g. Rwanda), one can cite a counter-example of football as an instigator of violence and chaos (the Soccer War of 1970, the Battle of Zagreb in 1991). Football, like all sports, is merely a vessel, and one can pour either wine or vinegar into it.

It would be nice to believe in the healing power of football, but despite great anecdotes like that of Robben Island, it's hard to sustain such belief in the cold light of day.

WC Qualifying

2007-11-25T10:45:00.000-05:00

So, I'm trying to follow this draw nonsense live on FIFA. And I'm incredibly confused because the qualifying procedures in Asia and CONCACAF get less and less comprehensible each tournament.

I'll sum up (to the extent possible):

AFC - There are only 20 teams left in qualifying because 23 teams have already been eliminated through some sort of AFC pre-qualification thing which none of us have heard about. The 20 teams are in five groups, all of which are quite straightforward except for Group 1 which contains Iraq, China and Australia. Two teams progress from each group into two further groups of five. Top two from each of these groups goes to South Africa: the two third-place teams play-off for the right to play the Oceania winner (presumably New Zealand) for the right to play in 2010.

CONCACAF - this continent always has the weirdest qualifying structure simply partly because it has too many minnows but also partly because it actually has too many WC spots for the quality of football it produces. The tournament here starts with a round of home-and-away playoffs amongst the minnows, the winners of which (plus St. Vincent and the Grenadines - the country most likely to be mistaken for a motown act - which gets a bye) get to play off against the region's decent sides. The likelihood that any of the se minnows gets through is pretty small, though if you're looking for upsets, St. Vincent over Canada is a possibility because of the latter's brutal inconsistency, as is Suriname over Guyana and Antigua over Haiti.

However, assuming no upsets in the preliminary rounds, then the field fro the first group stage looks like this. Group 1: USA, Guatemala, Trinidad and Cuba. It would be a blast if the USA-Cuba match were played in Miami, but I kind of doubt anybody's that stupid. Group 2: Mexico, Jamaica, Honduras and Canada. Group 3: Costa Rica, Guyana, Haiti and Panama.

Top 2 from each of these groups goes trhough to a final six-team group from which three teams qualify directly for South Africa and the fourth-placed team gets slaughtered by the fifth-place team from the far-superior CONMEBOL group (CONMEBOL, btw, is not included in this draw, because they already began their insane, marathon 18-game qualifyinf schedule about three months ago).

Verdict: Canada is screwed. Group 3 is an easy cruise for Costa Rica and one really weak team (probably Panama) is getting an easy ride into the final group of six.

UEFA - Europe has 13 qualifying spots and nine groups. The nine group winners go through automatically and the best eight runners-up play-off for the past four spots.

The highlights: Group 2, which will feature Greece, Israel and Switzerland slugging it out for top spot, is possibly the weakest qualifying group in UEFA history, and it represents Israel's best chance at making the show in about thirty years. In Group 6, England have hilariously drawn Croatia again, as well as unpalatable trips to the Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. one suspects Johnathan Wilson was warming the balls. If the ginger idjit were still in charge one could see England finishing third here - presumably with a decent gaffer they will make first or second.

In group 5, Spain will no doubt have some near-death experiences against Belgium and Turkey before finally qualifying. Group 7 will feature France and Romania battling for top spot. In the small (five-team) group 9, the Dutch and the Scots will face off - and we'll soon see if the Scottish revival is anything more than ephemeral. Italy should cruise through group 8 while having the pleasure of watching Ireland face off against Cyprus again. The Czechs should cruise group 3, and the Russians probably won;t trouble the Germans too much in group 4. Group 1, with Portugal, Sweden and Denmark, is one of the few groups where the top spot doesn't look like a foregone conclusion.

CAF - Three minnows have already been knocked out, leaving 48 teams to play. Since WC qualifying also counts as qualifying for the African Nations Cup of 2010, South Africa has to play these matches too even though it is guaranteed a spot in the finals.

The 48 teams will be drawn into 12 groups. The winners of the 12 groups, plus the 8 best runners-up, will go on to the next phase with five groups of four teams. Top three from each of these groups will go on to the Nations Cup; the group winners will go on to South Africa . In South Africa's group, points won or lost by Bafana Bafana will count towards Nations Cup qualifying but not WC qualifying.

There's no point going into the African draw here because the important draw will be the one that sets the five groups of four - scheduled for late next year. Similarly, I won;t be boring you with the complexities of Oceania's already-started qualifiers because who's kidding who? The kiwis will be the ones served up as fresh meat for the fifth-placed Asian team (which may well be Australia).

So there you have it. Got it? No? Good.

The short version: Canada is screwed and everyone in the English speaking world is looking forward to two more years of Slaven Bilic cruelly exposing English weaknesses in word and deed. Unless of course the English FA offer Bilic the vacant manager's position, which wouldn't be a half-bad idea.

Just 928 days to go.

UPDATE: Now that I've had a chance to look at the schedule again, I've seen that Armenia and Turkey have been drawn against each other in UEFA Group 5, which is a far more interesting matchup than Cuba-USA. Throw in a Kurdish ref and we're off to the races.

Tarred With The Same Brush

2007-11-14T21:25:00.000-05:00

Following 9/11, Muslims around the world - but particularly those in Western countries - found themselves in a very awkward position. On the one hand, a group of extremists had hijacked planes in the name of Islam and killed thousands in the name of this faith. This, most felt, had to be repudiated.

On the other hand, bigots who didn't really make the distinction between the hijackers and the vast majority of peaceful Muslims were on the attack against the faith as a whole, and security services - some with more justification than others - began paying close and in many cases intrusive attention to what was going on in Muslim communities. This, most felt, had to be resisted.

The challenge was to defend the honour and beliefs of Islam without looking like a sell-out to a culture that viewed it with suspicion if not hostility. To create trust and understanding when feelings were running high; to work to end violence and build trust when loud voices on both sides were bent on raising suspicion and hostility. The road was long and difficult, and in many ways in many countries, the test has been failed over the last six years.

If that situation worries you, then spare a thought today for Italy and its ultras. They're faced with more or less the same problem this week. Most ultras has nothing to do with Sunday's violence. But it was done in their name and in the public imagination it is they who are to blame. As a result, it is most likely they who will pay the price for it.

There's lots not to like about ultras. The connections many of them have with the ultra-right. The repeated acts of lawlessness. The shit mullets and absurd trainers (OK, that's not strictly speaking an ultra thing). But there's lots to admire, too - in particular, the passion, cameraderie and loyalty they display.

Spangly Princess - whose despatches from Rome throughout this affair have been nothing short of brilliant - has had two exceptional posts which I think everyone needs to read before coming to judgment on this affair. The first is about a note posted by a Roma ultra which describes in somewhat lyrical terms the ultra mentality. The second is a moving description of Gabriele Sandri's funeral (pictured above). She notes among other things the extraordinary presence of ultra groups across the country, who stood for hours in the rain to show their solidarity and support for the Sandri family and Laziali generally. As she puts it: you might find that barking mad. But it's hard to see that you could find it objectionable or violent.

The problem, of course, is that not everyone sees it this way. And the ultras - well-drilled in the art of seeing the world in terms of a beleaguered "us" facing a hostile or uncomprehending "them" - are unlikely to make much of an effort to bridge the gap in understanding with a public just looking for someone to blame. Indeed, it's quite possible that they will defend what they see as their turf - le curve - in ways will make people more likely to associate them with violence rather than less.

I can't imagine that ultras are much interested in taking lessons in PR and inter-cultural relations from the Muslim communities of the West. But they should do so nonetheless.

They'll need it.

Oh for Chrissakes...

2007-11-13T22:58:00.000-05:00

This is just unbelievable. So unutterably stupid it makes me cringe.

From Today's Guardian:

The Premier League is in discussions with Downing Street over ways in which it can increase the number of home-grown players appearing regularly for England's leading clubs.

Discussions have begun with senior advisers to the prime minister and James Purnell, the culture secretary, to try to develop a consensual "British solution" to the apparent decline in the number of British and Irish players in the nation's top sides. The Premier League is acutely aware of the criticism that will flow its way over the issue if England fail to qualify for Euro 2008.

(Takes deep breath. Attempts to calm down).

Ok, apart from the fact that there is not a whit of evidence that having more mediocre domestic players in the Premier League will increase the national side's fortunes, there is the tiny problem that in footballing terms, a "British solution" to an English problem MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE AT ALL.

I know Brown thinks of "Britain" and "Britishness" as a source of unity. But can it truly have escaped his notice that Britain encompasses four distinct and - let's be honest - mutually antagonistic national football squads?

There's a part of me which does want this to go through. Because I would *love* to see the backlash once everybody sees the result of this half-baked policy: an inevitable deluge of Scottish players heading south. Hey - they're cheap, and they're not evidently worse than the fringe members of McClaren's travelling freak show (Jermaine Jenas! Come on down!).

But of course, it isn't going to go through because the European Commission flat out won't allow discrimination based on nationality. The best anyone is going to be able to do is create rules about "home-grown" players. All this means is that the Arsenal model of taking in kids from around the world at the age of 16 so you can say you trained them as minors is going to spread far and wide.

UEFA knows that. The Premier League knows that. I guarantee you that Ten Downing Street knows it, too. This is just a pathetic piece of symbolism and showmanship from a Scots prime minister who will do almost anything to look as English as possible.

Nauseating.

UPDATE: The final, absolute reason to oppose quotas has arrived: crease-headed idjit Steven Gerrard supports them.

As usual, it's the kids-won't-get-better-if-we-don't-give-them-a-game argument. True enough, but there's nothing stopping kids from going abroad to get a game. That's what everyone else does. Indeed, arguably, that's why everyone else is getting better and England isn't.

But apparently we need English Teams for English Players. For reasons that remain shrouded in mystery, Foreign Teams for English Players is considered to be completely unacceptable.

Insert your own Ian Rush joke here.

Logical Falsehood

2007-11-12T23:57:00.000-05:00

I am so utterly, utterly tired of the cant about the need to restrict foreign players in England. It's nauseating when the Grand Dame of Free Trade has to resort to protectionism - worse still when it's absolutely bleedin' obvious that protectionist policies will not improve matters one whit.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that the English national team is dreadful. Truly awful. No teamwork, no imagination, no tactical nous, and - let's face it - no goalkeeper either. National teams being national teams, you can't just buy new players when the old ones aren't doing the job. You have to play the hand you are dealt.

Well, obviously, say the protectionists - there's the problem! We have too many foreigners taking up places in the Premiership, not enough spaces for good English boys. Send Johnny Foreigner packing, and the Three Lions will bring back a trophy faster than you can say "European Labour Legislation".

Eh?

At face value, this is utter nonsense. It suggests that Premiership coaches (let's not say English ones) are deliberately choosing underqualified foreigners in place of better qualified domestic players. Now, given the rewards of Premiership football, it's hard to see what would tempt a coach to tempt relegation by benching good locals and playing inferior foreigners.

Could it simply be that English players aren't as good as these imports? Hmmm?

But you're missing the point, say the protectionists. If only we could get more English players some top-level playing time, they'd improve, and then they'd be better than Johnny Foreigner and we could win back a trophy. So let's legislate a minimum number of good English boys per team!

Well, quite. But presumably any half-way forward thinking coach can make a rational choice between an experienced foreign international and an up-and-coming English player and choose accordingly. The fact that there are so many foreigners suggests that perhaps England's up-and-comers aren't really all that good either.

I mean, if young English players are so almost-flipping-good why aren't they going abroad to get first division experience in foreign leagues? After all, each time a foreigner leave the Dutch or French leagues, there's a spot opening up in that league that an ambitious English player could take.

But few if any take that route. Because most English footballers would prefer making big money and sitting on the bench than playing in the big show on lower wages on the continent. Because most English footballers can't deal with leagues where vicious kickings are punished by red cards, not a quiet word from the ref.

Because deep-down, most English footballers - despite their coddled existence - possess just enough self-awareness to know that they couldn't make it anywhere else, either.

They just aren't good enough. It's because of their coaching and training and mentality, all of which are miles from world-class.

Railing against Johnny Foreigner or imposing player quotas isn't going to change that.

Nemici in campo, amici per strada

2007-11-11T18:29:00.000-05:00

So runs the message left, along with a bouquet of flowers, by Roma fans outside the house of Laziali Gabriele Sandri, who was shot dead by a highway cop with an itchy trigger-finger near Arezzo while on his way from Rome to Milan to watch the Inter-Lazio match.

I won't get into the hows and wherefores of the shooting, nor of the riots that have followed in at least a half-dozen cities, both inside and outside stadia: for that, let me strongly recommend you look at either La Repubblica, or the Corriere Della Sera, and most of all, Spangly Princess, who, as usual, provides the best coverage of calcio and its discontents (and to whom a hat-tip for the title of this entry).

What's truly fascinating here is the speed and breadth of the reaction to Sandri's death. Back in Rome, a police station was attacked by a mob - and it's by no means clear that it was just Laziali in the mob. In Bergamo, ultras attacked police and fights also broke out in Milan in the north and Taranto in the south.

I can't think of another country where the death of a fan at the hands of police would unite ultras from different squads in such a vast wave of hatred for the authorities. While there is a certain logic in the ultras slogan: "Per Raciti (n.b the policeman killed in Catania last year) fermate il campionato. Il morto di un tifoso non ha significato" (For Raciti you halted the championship, the death of a fan doesn't matter), that's not any kind of excuse for the kind of national exposion of mob violence that has followed - nor would it even make logical sense anywhere other than Italy. Ultras - no matter how much they hate each other hate the police and the state much, much more.

Some might say this all has something to do with the heavy-handedness of Giuliano Amato's anti-hooligan legislation, passed earlier this year in the wake of the Raciti murder. But while some of legislation was boneheaded and some of it was badly implemented, the ultra culture desperately needed challenging, and the clubs themselves were never going to do it (too many of them, indeed, winked at it). The Italian practice of having helicopters circle over stadiums and riot police inside them, while all the while acknowledging that under no circumstances would these police enter the curve because they were "no-go" areas, gave Italian football the worst of all possible worlds. It created an atmosphere of paranoia within the stadium without actually increasing security one whit. Indeed, by acknowledging that certain areas were no-go, the security forces implicitly strengthened the hooligan element and undermined the very authority they meant to project.

Today's events, fundamentally, are not about football. They are about a society in deep, deep trouble. No one trusts authority. No one believes that any guilty party will be punished. And, without the reassurance that justice will be done, they take matters into their own hands. Break-downs in law and order aren't exactly new in the West. Watts in 1965, New York for most of the 1970s, Brixton in 1981, Los Angeles in 1992. Rome in 2007 is just a minor variation on these. Though this outbreak lacks a racial edge, it's still fundamentally about respect between the governors and the governed.

It is above all evidence of a massive failure of the Italian state. The repercussions from it will be felt for years, and not just inside the stadiums.

The Urs Linsi Mystery

2007-11-10T23:29:00.000-05:00

Sigh. Why exactly do journalists allow FIFA to spout verifiable untruths with so little challenge?

I'm speaking here of the Urs Linsi (pictured) story, which I've been poking around the edges of for awhile now. Linsi was FIFA's finance director from 1999-2002. From 2002 to 2007, Linsi was FIFA's Secretary-General - a post once held by Blatter himself and often thought to be a launching pad for the top spot.

But Blatter's no fool. He'd already had one stroppy deputy (Michael Zen-Ruffinen) guillotined for having spoken out against the corruption within the Zurich-based organization. He therefore protected himself by saddling Linsi with a deputy by the name of Jerome Champagne who was much more in Blatter's image- a political smoothie who could ge the job done with either money or force.

Linsi's relationship with Blatter became strained as the former quarelled with Champagne. Andrew Jennings, in his book Foul! relates that Linsi, backed by six FIFA depratment heads, asked Blatter to fire Champagne on the grounds of his attitude and conduct towards FIFA staff and because the European and African confederations had complained of his interference of their affairs. Those would of course be the European and African confederations which accounted for well over 90% of the anti-Blatter votes at the last FIFA elections in 2002. Blatter backed Champagne, of course.

Linsi also made the mistake of butting heads with Blatter favourite Jack Warner over the World Cup ticket scandal in 2006 (an issue I touched on back here). Linsi put too many documents on the table for Blatter to exonerate Warner completely, but he did manage to avoid dealing Warner any punishment. Strike two against Linsi.

Now, Linsi is no saint - he has been caught up in some very nasty shit at FIFA, with police raiding his office in 2005 as part of their investigation into the collapse of sports marketing firm ISL. That case - in which cantonal prosectors in Zug are strongly believed to have evidence that ISL paid very large bribes to senior FIFA officials - goes to court next March. Since Linsi was finance director of FIFA at the time of the alleged bribery, it's quite likely he knows where some bodies are buried, and hence he has become a dangerous potential enemy.

It's not entirely clear why he was axed from FIFA back in June 2007. The FIFA press release talked about him "coming to the end of a five-year mandate", but this is clearly horseshit because there is no "term" to this position in the FIFA statutes. Moreover, if he was coming to the end of a natural "term" in June 2007, how was it that he was able to secure for himself a new contract in April 2007 in which he was guaranteed a major cash payout if his contract was terminated early. His severance pay two months later came to 3.6M GBP (about $7.5 Million US).

A payoff to make sure he plays nice at the trial next March? We can't be sure - but one would think that this would have to be the working assumption of any investigative journalist looking at the case.

Sadly, the Guardian's Paul Kelso proved himself to be as far from an investigative journalist as it is possible to be without actually leaving Earth orbit. This story intimates that Linsi pulled one over on FIFA Veep Julio Grondona, who negotiated the contract on Blatter's behalf while blithely unaware of the Blatter-Linsi feud and the latter's imminent demise. In the various stories being leaked to credulous journalists, Blatter and the executive committee are just sick - sick! - about this waste of money and are attempting legal means to get the money back even though they note with a heavy heart that this may be impossible.

Bullshit. Grondona is closer to Blatter than anyone at FIFA other than perhaps Jack Warner. The idea that he could sign such a deal without Blatter's sign-off stretches credulity. The idea that he didn't know about the Linsi-Blatter bust-up is even more preposterous: if Andrew Jennings could devote a sizeable chunk of his book's final chapter to the subject, it can't possibly have been a secret in Zurich. Whether consciously or not, Kelso's acting as a front for Blatter, and that is simply reprehensible.

I wish I could find out more, but I can't. Jennings, unfortunately, has allowed his intriguing website Transparency in Sport to lapse, meaning we've been deprived of a key eye on this issue. The good folks at Play the Game have had a bit of an eye on the issue, but their mandate is too broad to focus on a single issue like this.

Looks like we're going to have to wait for the Swiss courts to sort things out come next March.

Unless, Andrew, if you're still dropping by from time-to-time, you could enlighten us a bit...?

An Interesting Hypothetical Problem

2007-11-10T02:45:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to post on a bunch of things lately, but every time I come up with an idea, Tom over at Pitch Invasion beats me to it, which is really bringing out my jealous side because I can't match him for output. OK, be honest, I can't really match him for quality, either. It's like he's on speed or something. Any of my regulars not reading Tom's stuff is missing out, so do check in with him regularly.

Any-hoo, I've finally found a topic he hasn't quite covered yet so here goes:

What with the success of TFC, the Wizards seemingly secure in Kansas City (albeit in the dinkiest of stadiums), the Earthquakes coming back to San Jose via expansion in '08 and the announcement of a franchise in Seattle starting in '09, MLS is starting to resemble a real league with real prospects. A 16-team league by '09 means a real 30-game schedule with home and away across the whole league and possibly (dare I say it?) the end of this two division nonsense.

Now there are of course some possible drawbacks to this expansion stuff, most notably, a thinning of an already somewhat stretched talent pool. One needs only to take a look at the Toronto bench to come to the conclusion that the Seattle expansion draft has the potential to be exceedingly gruesome even if their coach's draft strategy is as wily as Mo Johnston's.

I'm not sure this is such a big deal. If talent becomes a problem, it's always possible for the league to relax its ludicrously complicated Roster Rules (caution: clicking on that link may make your head explode) to allow more foreigners in to keep standards up. If the league is genuinely healthy and teams are making money at the gate, that shouldn't be a problem.

So let's take it as read that this expansion thing is a success and that MLS goes from strength to strength. There's no shortage of possible sites for expansion. In Canada, both Vancouver and Montreal could probably sustaing teams. In the US, Portland is often mentioned (a great potential foil for Seattle) and of course there's Philadelphia where, famously, the Sons of Ben supporters club is just waiting for someone - anyone - to set up shop and give them someone to cheer for.

All great, of course, but is there a limit?

Well, the NASL made it up to 24 teams for a few years (a great NASL page is available here - it contains the intriguing stat that the Minnesota Kicks managed an average gate of over 30,000 in 1977 and 1978, which is frankly amazing). OK, so history records that didn't go so well, but arguably that was because so much of the marketing centred around one team - the Cosmos - and a number of their superstars such as Pele, Beckenbauer, and Claudio Caniggia (pictured, above).

(The Cosmos, I have realized, are to MLS what Voldemort is to Hogwarts: something of a bad memory, an ancient story of a dark lord who destroyed himself through overweening ambition. Above all, it is a Team Which Shall Not be Named)

Anyways, say - just say - that MLS could sustain its current NHL-sized crowds in more than 20 markets. Could it expand even more? And what would be the consequence?

Climate makes a schedule with more than 30 games a bit dicey - which would seem to give the league a natural upper limit of 16. That said, just as we have unbalanced schedules with extra games to get us up to 30 matches in a 13-team league, we oculd have unbalanced schedules with fewer games in a 20 or 22-team league. The NASL made a go of a 30-game schedule and a 24 team league for a number of years. But more than 20 teams probably puts paid to a unified league - we'd be back to divisions again.

And what if - mirabile dictu - football just keeps moving from strength to strength. and the demand for franchises grows and grows? Is there a point where MLS would just tell new potential franchises to bugger off? Or - say it softly - might there be a possibility for a second league with relegation and promotion?

Admittedly, that would be a really hard sell. But as soon as the league hits the 20 teams mark - and it's not utterly farfetched to suggest that this might happen within a decade - it's hard to argue that football can only exist in a single-league format. And if MLS were to reject franchises, we'd be back into the wonderful world of USFL-style rival start-up leagues and anti-trust cases. They'd have to at least consider a pyramid as an alternative.

As things stand, that's a problem Don Garber et. al would love to have. But it might not be so funny around 2015 - in fact, it could get quite ugly.

I'd say "stay tuned" but the likelihood of me continuing to blog for another decade is pretty low, so on the off-chance this actually happens, just reminisce and think well of me.

Agenda Items

2007-11-07T12:37:00.000-05:00

Two interesting stories coming out of last week’s FIFA executive meetings which you may have missed in all the Brazil hoopla.

The executive committee has announced a ban on the “third-party ownership of players”. You will all no doubt recall this issue from the last season’s interminable Carlos Tevez saga. The issue, briefly, was that West Ham had broken premiership rules by permitting an individual other than the club (in this case, the mysterious Kia Joorabchian) to have control over a player’s “economic rights”. Much tut-tutting about how terrible it was that these shady Latin American practices were being brought to Europe, blah blah.

Much of the “concern” about this was highly hypocritical. Some of the unease came from the idea of a player being “owned” by an individual such as an agent – though the legal relationship between player and owner was in fact legally no different than the relationship between player and club – and arrangement which seems to suit everybody just fine. People also seem to have no problem with the Italian variation on this phenomenon – namely, the idea that player can be “co-owned” by more than one team simultaneously.

Anyways, the FIFA Executive Committee, in a not-unusual fit of righteousness, have banned the practice. This is good for the self-proclaimed modern-day Wilberforces, but it’s terrible news for Latin American clubs. Whatever one thinks of these arrangements, the bald fact of the matter is that without these kinds of deals, an awful lot of Latin American clubs – Argentinan ones in particular - would have gone to the wall over the past decade. In financial terms, these arrangements were effectively ways of securitizing team assets – of getting money for players in advance of their actual sale and departure to (usually) Europe. They came at a steep discount, of course, but they permitted clubs to cash in on sales while still retaining the players for a time. Which, when you think about it, is pretty ingenious and not to be lightly dismissed as a financial model.

Also, we can be relatively sure that FIFA have left some bone-headed loophole in te regulations which people will rush to exploit, thereby serving to make the murky finances of Argentinian and Brazilian clubs even more opaque than before. Expect this story to run for awhile.

FIFA bans Spain’s Franchise FC (well, future iterations, anyway). A FIFA decision which will generate a surprising amount of goodwill among real football fans! The Executive Committee announced that it will try to force its member associations to eliminate the practice of clubs buying places in higher divisions. We’re not talking here of Genoa-style bribes to win promotion here – we’re talking about actually purchasing playing licenses of teams higher up the pyramid. This, believe it or not, actually happened this year when Spanish fourth division side Granada 74 which succeeded in effectively purchased a place in the country's second division from struggling Ciudad de Murcia. The Spanish federation permitted the move after the Court of Arbitration for Sport OK’d the move.

Now among the no al calico moderno and AFC Wimbledon crowds, this move will be a big hit. They believe – probably rightly given their historical contexts, that the proper way to move up and down divisions is through relegation and promotion. Indeed, when Blatter made the announcements, he said: "We are not happy with that (the CAS) decision which goes against the principles of our game where promotion and relegation is the essence."

Well, quite. Except…uh, Sepp…MLS? How Don Garber and the USSA will take that statement is an interesting question. Does it mean that, in principle, FIFA could force MLS to adopt relegation and promotion? It seems unlikely that he would ever try, but that he would even suggest that he has the right to do it suggests a man who is very comfortable on the throne.

As for me, I’m all in favour of this one – provided that equal treatment is given to all. However, I seem to recall a complete absence of protest from FIFA when Fiorentina were arbitrarily allowed to jump a level (skipping straight from C2 to B) a few years ago when they were on their way back from bankruptcy. The difference seems to be that Fiorentina are football aristocracy whereas Granada 74 are just parvenus. However, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: if Granada have to go back down, so too should the viola. No doubt this is why FIFA are not making their decision retroactive...

Marco Polo in Reverse

2007-11-04T13:58:00.000-05:00

After nine days in China, I leave tomorrow. Turns out that there is some football here after all, but you have to be an insomniac to see it. Saturday and Sunday nights on CCTV 5 (that’s right, folks – state-owned sports channels! It’s an interesting concept) both feature triple-headers from midnight to six AM and there’s a couple of Wednesday matches shown, too. The lineup is a Premiership-free mix of German, Spanish and Italian leagues, which means I got to see my frustratingly erratic Sevilla side spank the meringues 2-0 yesterday. Fantastic.

As a result of this line-up, I’ve seen more of Roma in a week here than I have all season. That Mirko Vucinic is pretty tasty, isn’t he? It turns out that Roma’s boss, Signor Spalletti, has been serious about implementing the 4-6-0 plan I advocated this summer (prego, Luciano) and the results have been – interesting. This month’s issue of Champions described the formation as defensive in outlook, but this is nonsense. Loyalty to in-laws forbid me from supporting anyone but my adopted Palermo, but to my mind Roma play an enjoyable and attacking brand of football and are a pleasure to watch.

It may well be, though, that Spalletti doesn’t quite have the players to make the most of 4-6-0, which demands above all else that players be able to make quick and intelligent off-the-ball runs. This squad is intelligent, but I’m not sure they’ve got the pace to really make the most of the formation. There’s probably a couple of English squads that do have the right players for this kind of set-up, but either don’t have the inclination (Man U and Arsenal) or the tactical discipline (West Ham) to pull it off.

Still, there’s no arguing with results: Roma could be serious contenders this year if they could just sharpen up at the back a bit. And overall the quality of play in Serie A seems to have picked up somewhat. Some teams still have the incredibly annoying habit of ceding midfield after losing possession so they can run back and pack the defensive third (that’s an Italian trait that will be incredibly hard to break) but generally this stuff is a little easier on the eye than it used to be.

The fans don’t seem to be coming back yet, though. I’m watching Cagliari-Sampdoria right now and there’s almost nobody there. Granted, Cagliari’s sheer fucking awfulness may have something to do with it (they are 3-0 down in the first half and look less organized than a riot defensively), but I think this is a league-wide problem. I’m pretty sure that if you took out all the games at the San Siro, average Serie A attendance figures would be lower than those for MLS. Il piu bello campionato del mondo? There’s still a ways to go…

Shenhua!

2007-10-31T16:49:00.001-04:00

So, with the invaluable assistance and good company of Shanghai Ultra, I actually made it to a Shanghai Shenhua match last night: a tense, top-of-the-table thriller between 4th place Shenhua and surprise table-toppers Changchun Yatai.

As we approached the stadium from the Shiji Avenue metro station it became apparent to me that the structure I was walking towards was not Hongkou stadium. SU said that Shenhua hadn't actually played at Hongkou all year because of renovation work and the women's World Cup and that most games had been played at this stadium in Pudon. Sinosoc hadn't even got that bit right! That said, apparently the weekend game had been cancelled (the Chinese Super League apparently having the kind of fixture consistency of the Brazilian league), so I hadn't missed anything.

Buying tickets was a fascinating experience as Shenhua don't bother with mere trifles such as box offices, ticket agents or even fixed prices. They simply hand over tickets to an army of touts who swarm around the stadium making whatever deals they can with punters. Eventually, after much dickering about price with a half-dozen touts, we simply paid money to a fellow at the gate and were escorted in without ever receiving a ticket. Despite the presence of uniformed army officers, the security was so slack it made BMO look like Alcatraz.

Inside, the atmosphere was a little weak. It's an athletics stadium (never good), with maybe 15,000 seats, only two-thirds of which were full. However, a reasonably large proportion of the crowd were members of one of two big supporters groups, which meant there was a fair bit of noise despite the cavernousness. SU assured me that the larger of the two groups (with whom we stood for the second half), known as the Blue Devils, are China's best known ultras.

I use the term "ultras" advisedly, for it's not British-style singing which predominates as a form of support, but rather a lot of energetic displays of flag-waving. The flags, in keeping with global cultural norms, are primarily written in English - my particular favourite being the one bearing the Galatasaray-inspired but locally re-interpreted slogan "Welcome to The Hell".

The singing, which I would describe as reasonably steady but neither especially loud nor passionate, was based mainly on recognizable English or Italian tunes (e.g. "Go West"), with the word "Shenhua" inserted at the appropriate moment. The only unique song I head was actually a version of "Popeye the Sailor-man", again with "Shenua" inserted at the final beat.

SU suggested that Chinese fan culture tended to want to model itself on Korean and Japanese fan culture, but there's none of the discipline you see in those leagues. The Shanghainese, a laid-back lot, probably simply can't be arsed to do all the intense work required to get that spectacular co-ordination effect. China does have one important element of a real football culture in place though: travelling fans. Roughly 100 people made the trip down from Channgchun (and that's a full 2300 km away - roughly London to Damascus) and made a lot of noise.

Anyways, the match: Shenhua had the better of a really tedious first-half but the score at the interval was 1-1 due to completely shambolic defending. It got worse just after the break when Shenhua went down 2-1 after another daft goal. Things looked dire as Changchun started playing with five at the back. With twenty minutes to go, though, Shenhua withdrew a defender and put on fan favourite Xie Hui to play as a third striker. The switch to a 3-4-3 completely changed the tempo of the game and straight through to the final whistle this game was exciting, with Shenhua setting up wave after wave of attacks. Needing a win to retain even the slightest hope of a championship, the blues poured forward and were rewarded with an equalizer with a Hamilton Ricard equalizer five minutes from time.

A third goal threatened, but with Changchun indulging in some truly disgraceful time-wasting techniques, the referee controversially blew full-time just as Shenhua had won a corner. This prompted the Blue Devils to send a volley of coke bottles onto the field. I was standing next to Frank, one of the Blue Devils' leaders, at the time. He just shook his head and said: "This is China".

He meant to indicate corruption in the game, of course, which was certainly endemic a few years ago during the "Black Whistle" gambling scandals of 2001 which did lasting harm to the game's image in China. But the game was actually clean, and though a few fouls were missed, the referee (who, in a nod to propriety, was not Chinese but foreign) was pretty consistent.

While the quality of the football on offer left a lot to be desired (I don't think either team would trouble a good MLS side), it did belie some of the stereotypes about Chinese football. East Asian squads are sometimes caricatured as being overly cautious, lacking in spontaneity and imagination, and concerned more with team discipline than attacking football. I didn't see that at all: in fact, positional and tactical discipline was notable by its near-total absence. Lack of imagination? Sometimes that's difficult to distinguish from lack of talent. Unlike some MLS squads I could mention, Shenhua did not seem to have any trouble shifting between long balls, crosses, and short balls to feet when on the attack. The second half was full of naive, attacking football and regardless of the quality of the flow of play, that's always heartening to watch.

Chinese football isn't going to light the world on fire any time soon, but it has some of the fundamentals right. What is desperately needed is some decent coaching - anyone who could field a team with a modicum of positional sense wold have a big advantage here. But for a mere $4 "entry fee", last night's game was certainly value for money.

Brazil 2014

2007-10-31T01:01:00.000-04:00

So, as I’m sure you’ve all heard, Sepp Blatter announced yesterday that Brazil won the rights to the 2014 competition. Their bid was unopposed.

(By the way, I have come to the conclusion that the least controversial thing that can possibly be uttered by any football fan, in any pub conversation, anywhere in the world – even between the bitterest of rival ultras – are the words “Sepp Blatter must go”).

It is supremely odd that a major world sporting event is awarded by acclamation, so let's dig into the genesis of this little state of affairs.

When, in early 2000, Blatter failed to secure the 06 World Cup for South Africa, he had a political problem on his hands; in trouble politically for a host of scandals (and for a refresher course on these, I highly recommend the book “Foul!” by erstwhile Kingdom denizen Andrew Jennings), he needed African votes in order to defend his Presidency from the challenge of the CAF's Issa Hayatou. To do this, he had to make absolutely sure that

Africa

would not again be denied the tournament. In short, he had to rig the result.

Standing in the way of this ingenious scheme was Brazil, which had its own designes on the 2010 Cup. For Blatter’s plan to work, the CBF (whose President, Pedro Teixeira is, by a marvelous co-incidence, is the son-in-law of Blatter’s mentor, patron and predecessor, Joao Havelange), needed to be bought off. Blatter, who is nothing if not ingenious, basically decided that he needed a plan that would rig allow him to rig both the 2010 and 2014 Cups in order to keep both groups happy.

Now, this was a tall order, because the attempted rigging of the 02 and 06 cups bids had gone very badly for Zurich. Havelange had desperately wanted 02 to go to Japan. The only reason that a joint cup resulted was because Korea hustled its ass off and was threatening to scrounge enough votes to win the tournament outright. Havelange, desperate to avoid loss of face, imposed a joint tournament on both parties. In 2006, Blatter had confidently expected to cast the deciding vote for South Africa when it was believed that South Africa and Germany were going to head for a 12-12 tie in the final round of voting. But then New Zealander Charlie Dempsey upset those plans by refusing to show up for the final vote, thus allowing Germany to win by a 12-11 margin (and a good thing, too – 2006 was a marvelously-staged event).

Ingeniously, Blatter hit upon the policy of “continental rotation” – an egalitarian-sounding way of distributing sporting-event wealth around the world. Under this policy, Africa was awarded the rights for the 2010 event (Egypt and Morocco submitted bids, but these were never seriously entertained) and South America was awarded the 2010. That done, Brazil won the 2014 gong by acclamation after a combination of Brazilian bullying and fiscal prudence in the rest of the continent prevented others from submitting bids.

So, mission accomplished for Blatter? Maybe, but there’s a couple of loose ends to this tale. First, there’s the issue of what to do with CONCACAF. Under the original deal, 2018 was going to go to North or Central America. This was integral to selling the deal originally. We may be crap at football over in this confederation, but we have 38 votes at FIFA, and Blatter needs those to get his way. However, clearly, there was a lot of commercial pressure being applied not to go 16 years without holding a world cup in football’s European financial heartland. Bowing to this, Blatter decided to screw CONCACAF, end the rotation policy and open up the bidding to all comers (Holland and Belgium have already launched a joint bid and England is certain to do so as well).

Cue outrage from the bizarrely-maned, endomorphic Chuck Blazer, the number 2 man at CONCACAF. “On the basis of equity I would have liked to have seen the rotation followed through by completing the process in the CONCACAF region in 2018. The United States, Canada and Mexico are all absolutely eligible to host the World Cup so we have no lack of candidates. I have already been assured that we will have several bids.”

(By "several", I think Chuck means "two". Canada has nothing like the stadium infrastructure required to host a World Cup. We can do a U-20, but the Big Show is completely beyond the country’s reach).

Why did Blatter screw CONCACAF? Bluntly, because he could. CONCACAF’s glorious President, Jack Warner, isn’t about to turn on Blatter for the very simple reason that he was caught setting up a scheme with his son to divert thousands of tickets from Trinidad’s 2006 World Cup allocation in a manner that brought his family substantial financial gain. In a spectacular, behind-closed-doors non-disciplinary hearing, Warner was let off the hook – although asked to pay back the money, he was allowed to remain sitting on all FIFA committees. This is in contrast to the treatment meted out to Botswana’s former FIFA rep, Ismail Bhamjee, who was summarily booted from FIFA for having passed on twelve (count 'em!) tickets from his personal allocation to touts in Germany.

One can only assume that Blatter’s decision to dispense mercy to Warner was not simply a mater of rewarding past loyalty, but a means of guaranteeing it in future, too. For those of you whose taste runs to the Sopranos, Warner is in many ways in the position of Bobby Bacala, all the more loyal to the Boss for having had an offence forgiven. He has therefore been careful not to criticize Blatter directly on this issue – it was Blazer, not Warner, who issued the condemnation. The closest Warner has come to saying anything about the rotation policy is to deliver a frankly weird rant about how Britain shouldn’t be allowed to host 2018 because, as the terrace chant goes, “nobody likes them”. That was about as direct as he could get without offending il capo.

(Note to Jack: buddy, just remember that when the shooting started, Bobby was the first to go.)

But all may not be lost for CONCACAFers looking for a World Cup bid, because there’s a fair chance that Brazil 2014 won’t come off. There has been a lot of feverish speculation about 2010 being yanked from South Africa on grounds of poor security and late stadium construction. While all things are possible, it is highly unlikely at this late date, that South Africa will lose the Cup because preparations are reasonably well advanced and the political fall-out of yanking the event at this point (remember, Africa contains almost a quarter of all FIFA members) would be tremendous.

Not so, Brazil. The country’s transportation infrastructure is chaotic, their stadiums are in lousy condition, and, as Brain Homewood reported in last month’s World Soccer, they have a terrible record at running large events. The recent pan-American games in Rio were a financial fiasco, with stadium construction and renovation costs running 8 times over budget. In organizational terms, Brazil makes South Africa look like Switzerland. And the confederation they dominate – CONMEBOL – only has ten votes at FIFA, which provides them with less political protection if FIFA gets twitchy.

This gives one some reason to believe that we haven’t heard the last about the venue for the 2014, and that either Mexico or the United States (more likely, both) may in about four years time be asked to step in as “emergency hosts” for the Cup, just as Mexico did in 1986 when Colombia lost the staging rights due to security concerns.

Stay tuned...

Death to Sinosoc

2007-10-28T09:37:00.000-04:00

4:00 PM - check email. Notice that Shanghai Ultra is not in town and so not able to advise on the game. Too bad. (Note: Shanghai Ultra's site has a series of football match reports which possibly constitute an entirely new literary genre. Check them out.)

4:10 PM - Check Sinosoc for match details. Yes, tonight, 7:45, Shanghai Shenhua - Shaanxi Baorong Chanba. Where? Hope it's at Shanghai Stadium just down the road, walking distance. Nope. Apparently, it's at the Hongkou Stadium on the other side of town. Check Lonely Planet for address - 715 Dongtiyuhui Rd.

7:00 PM - Head down to conference reception and try to entice my friend R, possibly the only OECD employee ever to support Gillingham, to come with me to the match. Nothing doing.

7:30 PM - Get front desk employee to translate Stadium address into Chinese so I can communicate with taxi driver. I'm ready to go!

7:50 PM - I'm a little late, but what the hell. In off-peak hours at least, the freeways here are incredibly fast.

7:55 PM - Arrive at 715 Dongtinyuhui. Lonely Planet is full of shit. There is no stadium here - just a gym. Hasty conference with driver to figure out how to tell him where to go.

8:00 PM - We find the stadium. Hurrah!

8:05 PM - Stadium closed. No game. Maybe Sinosoc was wrong and it is at the Shanghai Stadium after all. Grab another cab and hightail it back to south Shanghai.

8:25 PM. Nope. Some cheezy concert called "A Wonderful World" instead. Glumly walk home up the surprisingly glitzy North Caohi Rd.

8:45 PM. Consider the possibility that the Chinese do not use the European convention of home team first. This would be idiotic, but it opens the possibility that I might be able to watch a game in Wuhan next weekend.

9:20 PM. Arrive back at hotel. No, the Chinese *do* use the home-team first convention, and Sinosoc is just a lying dirtbag of a website.

Not a good night. Consolation prize: CCTV 5 is showing Milan-Roma live. Maybe they'll show Arsenal-Liverpool afterwards?

Sleeping Dragon

2007-10-28T05:09:00.000-04:00

Shanghai is a kick-ass city. I don’t care if the dense particulate haze does make its skyline look like a dystopian sci-fi film: I love this place. For starters, all beers come in 600ml bottles, which is excellent. I don’t even mind paying more for Starbucks coffee than I do at home (yeah, I’m not sure how that’s possible, either, but there you go) – it’s that cool here.

It is seriously missing one thing, though. Football.

I know I should probably reserve judgment until after I go to tonight’s game, but the footballlessness is really striking.

Visually: No replica shirts, nothing in the papers. In convenience stores, pop bottles and chip packs are marked by a complete absence of Ronaldinho, no galacticos, no

Brazil

, no nothing. Even Beckham manages only a lonely Motorola advert, and even there, he’s in civvies. There’s more F1 and tennis - Federer in particular - on the streets than there is football.

(Let me interrupt this blog entry to just say that the fish appetizer I am eating right now is absolutely delicious. Really top notch. An eagerly awaiting my crispy beef)

Faced with this visual lacuna, I decided to go book-shopping to see if I could at least get a handle on how the game is consumed in print. Shanghai, like many Asian cities, is helpfully laid out according into retail clusters: eighteen stationary stores next to each other, followed by thirty-five musical instrument stores all next to each other, etc (Hanoi even has a replica football shirt district, but clearly that’s absent here). So I went to the book district, which was packed on account of today’s the launch day for the Mandarin edition of the final Harry Potter novel, and found the largest bookstore I could find: The Shanghai Book Mall. Seven massive stories of literature, books, DVDs, etc – as modern a bookstore as you’re going to find anywhere in the world.

(Crispy beef has arrived. It’s a monumental disappointment after the fish because it appears to be – and I wish I were kidding about this - covered in mayonnaise).

Anyways, this is a bookstore with literature in translation from all over the world. The business section in particular is filled with books by Peter Drucker, Peter Lynch, et. al. The Maoism-Marxism-Leninism section seems to be part of “management”, so the Mao treatises are actually right next to the Drucker tomes. I find this shelving arrangement particularly amusing, though I can’t imagine either of them would.

(Yup. Mayonnaise. Or something hideously close to it.)

All of which made the football section of the bookstore a particularly weird place. With all the vast repertoire of different football books out there in all those languages available for translation, the football section contained a relatively slim 37 different monographs. Thirty-six of them were “how-to” books on training, tactics and conditioning; mostly, these were by local authors, with the exception for Charlie “Route One” Hughes’ book on football tactics, published by the English FA (which is either ominous or hilarious depending on your point of view). The other was a pictorial history of AC Milan.

A less intriguing line-up of books would be impossible to conceive. Even the most tedious and pedestrian of Beckham biographies would at least have brought Chinese readers some insight into some of the passion and culture associated with the game, but there was nothing, nada. This is Lobanovsky-ism run amok: the complete atomization of the game, an attempt at mastering of an art without appreciating its soul. There is probably an analogy here with the country’s approach to capitalism, but it’s a little beyond me at the moment as I’m well into my second Tsingtao to counteract the effects of the mayonnaise. I’m guessing, though, that Chinese authorities might look askance at passion and culture a l’anglaise.

All of which begs the question: just what do Real Madrid, Barca and ManU really think they are achieving with their visits here? I know they keep banging on about “reaping the Chinese market”…but to be blunt, what market? This ground is positively barren.

More after tonight’s zuqiu bisai (football match).

Huitou jian!

Off Again

2007-10-25T05:33:00.000-04:00

To avoid being in the same house as my unfortunate, scouser-loving son when Arsenal romps to an inevitable triumph over bewilderingly mediocre Liverpool this weekend - with all the attendant family heart-ache that would cause - I have decided to pack up and go as far away as possible. Shanghai, in fact, where on Sunday I hope to take in Shanghai Shenhua's penultimate home match against Shaanxi Baorong Chanba in the Chinese Super League. Perhaps I will wear my TFC jersey just to confuse people.

Shenhua are perennial runners up in the Chinese super-league and they don't look up to a final title challenge this year either, being 4 points off the pace with three games to go and leaders Changchun having a game in hand. The signing of former Middlesborough star (if that isn't an oxymoron) Hamilton Ricard has done little for the club this season, and one suspects that his current time in China is nothing more than an attempt to avoid the limelight after that nasty 12-month ban for attacking a ref in Ecuador and the small matter of a three-year jail term hanging over his head in connection with a 2002 fatal road collision in Colombia.

As usual, I'll be looking for good football stories - in particular, I'm interested to see whether or not Ronaldinho retains the title of being all-purpose poster boy for football in Asia he clearly had last year (I'm betting Kaka has stolen some fire since then). But if anyone can recommend some avenues of inquiry or provide tips on Chinese football - or simply where to get a decent drink in the Bund - I'd sure appreciate it.

Two Book Reviews

2007-10-25T05:19:00.001-04:00

Two books I've read lately to tell you about.

The first is the newly-released A Cultured Left Foot by Musa Okwonga. You've never heard of him - his bio describes him as a 28-year-old London lawyer and award-winning poet, which makes him yet another of those Kuper-like football writers for whom admiration must be mixed with some annoyance and jealousy for having written such an obviously good football book at a young age.

The premise here is pretty simple: Okwonga sets out to pin down the eleven footballers' attributes which contribute most to "greatness" (for the record, they are: feet, balance, fun, endurance, graft, toughness, guts, madness, aura, luck and vision). Basically, it's a pub conversation - albeit a very literate one - though Okwonga decorates the book with a number of interviews with people like Hugh McIlvaney and Steve McManaman to avoid the impression that it's a monologue.

The result is a little bit uneven. Designed as it is to examine the phenomenon of individual greatness, it necessarily underplays the fact that football is a team sport in favour of glorifying individual efforts. As a result, it has a kind of Brazilian sensibility to it which I find irritating. Moreover, it's clear Okwonga is no journalist - a couple of his interviews are embarrassingly thin. But he has marshalled his research well, and there is no doubt that his writing style and taste in metaphors soar above the level of the mere journalist. All in all, if you like thinking about the game through the lens of individual players, this is an excellent book; even if you don't, it's more enjoyable than other books that have tried the same approach (most notably, Richard Williams' Perfect 10).

The other book I've read recently is Does Anybody Have a Whistle by Peter Auf Der Hyde. Auf der Hyde, a South African, has been a football journalist for something like 25 years now, and the book recounts his many experiences covering football across the continent.

Whistle is a frustrating book, because while there is clearly a lot to be written on this topic, Auf der Hyde's first-person narrative style gets in the way of doing justice to the material. To take only the most irritating example, since a lot of the book is told through his eyes as a reporter covering major events over the years, a mindboggling amount of time is spent describing his searches for lost luggage in African airports or his run-ins with officious bureaucrats. The first time, it's amusing. By the third time, you want to punch the author and ask him what the hell he's done with all the football.

In the end, he does cover a lot of ground - albeit somewhat thinly and with fewer theoretical insights about the causes of sporting underdevelopment on the continent than one might hope for. He is - unsurprisingly - particularly good on the subject of the politics and criminal activity in South African football (and for all Danny Jordaan's good work, the South African FA may still be headed for the cess-pitt, as a recent confrontation between the Government and the FA shows). His chapter on juju in football is competent, but doesn't break any ground not covered by the famous African Soccer article on the same phenomenon. Perhaps the most intriguing chapter is on what he calls "Kings of Africa" - itinerant European coaches who make their way across the continent, drifting from one national coaching job to another.

But, overall, the book was a bit of a disappointment: the definitive book on African football remains to be written.

The Rag Trade

2007-10-24T06:36:00.001-04:00

Reading back over the past few posts, I realize I may have exaggerated the extent to which the Premiership dominates Tanzanian football life. There's UEFA Champions League football as well. The Arab Fort in Stonetown, for instance, which is possibly the oldest building in the country (built by the Omani Sultanate in the 18th century according to an earlier Portuguese design) is used as an outdoor amphitheatre on alternate Tuesdays and Wednesdays to show the big UEFA matchups. So much for national heritage.

But what is most striking visually, on the street or road is the number of "replica" jerseys out there. These are not all English - in fact, English jerseys might be a minority. Herewith, the totally unscientific results of my random shirt-spotting activities.

1) Arsenal
2 (tie) Milan, Real Madrid, Barca, ManU and Liverpool.
7) Inter
8 (tie) Juve, Bayern, Chelsea
11 (tie) PSG, Feyenoord, Ajax, Roma, Newcastle (no, really)

In terms of national teams, England was the most popular (yes, I know...) followed by Brazil, Holland and Italy. Nobody seemed to wear Tanzanian colours (possibly because they are a god-awful melange of black, blue, yellow and green), but few other African teams were in evidence either (just Nigeria, actually). But all of these were rarer than club shirts.

What does this random and totally unscientific poll mean? Well, it's interesting to note that the top 10 in my shirt sightings also happen to be the 10 richest clubs in the world according to the annual Deloitte survey. G-14 strutting aside, those big teams do certainly come close to constituting a sort of global super-league in terms of fan bases if nothing else.

A better question of course is: how is it that so many replica shirts are being worn in a country with a per capita GDP of less than $1,000? And believe me, there were a lot - in Zanzibar, probably one in every twenty males I saw was wearing kit - at least as high as anywhere else I've ever been.

There seems to be a variety of explanations at work here:

1) Some of the shirts are really pathetic fakes. And I don't just mean those crappy silky things you can get for 10 euros at any stall in Italy or Eastern Europe. I mean shirts that bear only the vaguest possible resemblance to any strip ever worn by the club it purports to represent. Like a Liverpool jersey with the word "Liverpool" on the front, where the Carlsberg logo should be, in the Carlsberg logo. This seems to account for maybe 10% of the jerseys I saw.

2) Some of the jerseys are cheap knock-offs. Some crappy silky things, some cheap cotton t-shirts - the colours and logos are right but the material is definitely off. Accounted for at least between a third and a half of all jerseys seen.

3) Some of the jerseys are charity hand-me-downs from richer countries. These are noticeable because of their age and slight raggedness. Between a third and a half of all the jerseys I saw were of this type. Which makes you wonder about whether or not the shirt actually says anything about the allegiances of the person wearing it. Maybe they chose it, maybe they were give it. Who knows? To that extent, shirt numbers in Tanzania may reflect supply (i.e. the recycling habits of wealthy club supporters in the north) rather than demand. A New York Times article on used clothes in Africa is available here, though it deals more with the effects on trade and domestic garment production.

4) Some of the jerseys are "real". Or, at least, indisinguishable from what you'd buy in the shops. That doesn't mean anyone's paying full price for them - they only cost about $5 to make and it would probably still be profitable for high-quality Asian counterfeiters to sell them at low cost in Africa. (For those wanting more detail on the quality of Asian counterfeit shirt producers, I recommend the next-to-last chapter of John Sugden's Scum Airways, which is an excellent book on football's grey economy).

This is absolutely textbook capitalism. An aspirational product (G-14 football) is produced, and the market comes up with various ways for people to associate with it, with different products priced differently in different markets according to local purchasing power. One has to sit back and marvel sometimes...

Oh yeah, about the picture (top). I couldn't find a decent one that illustrated second hand clothes, so I just used Arsenal. Because, you know, today is a particularly good day to be a Gooner...

Much Better Serengeti Photos

2007-10-23T06:33:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of the lovely and insanely talented Francesca Gramsci, two much better photos of the Serengeti football pitch.

Tears

2007-10-23T06:19:00.001-04:00

When is it permissible for an athlete to cry?

Off the top of my head, I can think of 5 serious episodes of blubbing in professional sports in the past 25 years (I’m sure that Kingdom denizens will add some in the comments section), which is admittedly a pretty small sample from which to generalize, but here goes:

The middle-distance runner Mary Decker in 1984 and Gazza in 1990 both blubbered in response to personal set-backs - Decker because Zola Budd’s clumsiness cost her a shot at a medal and Gazza because a yellow card precluded any further participation in the World Cup. Photos of both generated great sympathy – Gazza’s tears (“Tears of a Clown” in Simon Kuper’s unkind phrase) are even credited with the revival of football in England generally after Heysel, Hillsborough, Bradford, etc.

Compare this with the reaction to Wade Boggs’ sobbing in the dugout at the end of the ’86 World Series (verdict = muppet) or Cristiano Ronaldo’s tears at the end of Euro 2004 (verdict = even bigger muppet, though this verdict no doubt has something to do with those ridiculous earrings he was scandalously allowed to wear throughout the tournament).

From this it might be concluded the public believes that individual tragedy makes tears acceptable but the public requires athletes to bear collective loss with stoicism. But I can think of a fifth example which queers this somewhat: the image of Sammy Kuffour lying prostrate and sobbing on the field of the Camp Nou after ManU’s miracle comeback in May 1999, which - I think - usually conjures up sympathy.

Here's my take on this: if an athlete - whether as an individual or a collective - gets beat fair and square, then they are required to suck it up. Tears will be mocked. What Kuffour, Gazza and Decker have in common is the sense that they were robbed. For Decker and Gazza, this robbery took the form of not being able to compete; for Kuffour, it took the form of two insanely late goals which, based on the run of play, were wholly undeserved. Had Bill Buckner's error occurred in game 7 instead of game 6, Boggs' tears would have been seen as being more acceptable.

I kick Nigel Reed's ass

2007-10-20T13:01:00.000-04:00

So, here I am, laid up at home and dosed to the gills with cortisone and antihistamines, unable to go to BMO to see the last game of the season. Actually, I was supposed to miss this game anyways because I'm really supposed to be in Montreal at a conference, but that trip went out the window during my second trip to the hospital a few days ago.

Anyways, this leaves me watching TFC vs the Revolution on TV, feeling very sad. And it's not because I can't be in the stands, singing (I can hear the strains of the Dichio song coming over right now: it's the 24th minute), or because I can't go clad in the new Maasai shuka in TFC colours which I picked up near Ngorongoro. It's mainly because CBC's commentary is so piss-poor.

I know, Arsenalist is always going on about this, but I always assumed he was exaggerating somewhat. He's not. Nigel Reed (pictured) is truly awful. Apart from simply being bland, he has difficulty performing even the basics of commentating. For instance, distinguishing between Jeff Cunningham and Colin Samuel, which he has failed to do at least three times so far this half.

(tangent: Samuel somehow actually scored last week against the Galaxy...no stronger indictment of that team's defensive abilities could possibly be devised).

That's it, can't take this nonsense anymore. Doing my own MBM.

40th min: So far, so good, though. All even in the 40th minute which isn't bad considering we've lost 4-0 to NE twice already and I was pretty sure this one would be even worse. But let's see.

43rd min. Oh wait, now Reed's confused Carl Robinson with Jeff Cunningham. That's much tougher to do. That took skill.

45th min + 1. TFC 0-1 NE. Wow. Michael Parkhurst lobs Stamatopoulos from 60 yards. That was fucking awful.

46th min: Cunningham off, Dichio on. Could there be any more depressing words at the end of a season than "top scorer, with five goals..."?

47th min: TFC 0-2 NE. Twellman scores from a corner. Pathetic defending as usual.

52nd min: Lombardo out, Pozniak on. Bizzarre behaviour from Mo. Surely this should have been done at half-time, no?

58th min: TFC 1-2 NE. Wynne almost blows a chance by tripping over the ball but somehow gets a shot off. He hits the post, but bovine forward Colin Samuel puts in the re-bound for his second goal in as many weeks. A plague of frogs is seen hopping up towards the stadium from Lake Ontario.

63rd min: Frogs catch wind of Pizza Pizza concessions at BMO and head back to the lakeshore

65th min: From a corner, Pozniak gets a free header from about 8 yards. Skies it.

67th min: Aforementioned header returns to earth somewhere in the south stands.

68th min: A variety of TFC chances squandered due to complete inability of anyone in a red shirt to even pretend to do an off-the-ball run.

72nd min: Reed hits top form. "There's Steve Nicol, coach of the Revolution....if you know anything about Scotsmen, you'll know they hate to lose." These are Canadian tax dollars at work...

75th min: You know, Tyler Hemming is doing a very competent job at right back. Makes you wonder why we've had to suffer through a season full of performances from Adam Braz and Marco Reda.

79th min: Hemming slips the ball to Wynne, who scuffs the ball wide, leaving Pozniak an empty net, but he can't quite connect with a slide. Best chance of the last ten minutes.

80th min: Reed and Forrest begin a long suck-fest about how great it would be if Savo Milosevic signs for TFC. An even slightly critical journalist might have mentoned the fact that Savo is now 34 years old, for Christ's sake.

82 min: From a corner, a lot of banging the ball around inside the New England area, but nothing resembling an actual shot. A lot of impossibly high arcs on headed balls, though.

87 min: Same again.

90 min: Craig Forrest now giving Reed a run for his money by demonstrating everything which is wrong with Canadian football in a single sentence. "Not a lot of time now, they just have to go Route 1". 3 minutes of extra time.

90 min + 2: TFC 2-2 NE. DICHIO!!! From 20 yards, with his back to goal, he turns and lobs Matt Reis. I have no idea how he hit that, but goddamn do I wish I were there. That's football!

Final Whistle. Brilliant, storybook end to a game and to a season. Can't wait for April.

Ta-ra, all

Goal -posts of the Serengeti

2007-10-15T02:36:00.000-04:00

The photo at left was taken in Serengeti National Park, just outside one of the park's research stations. Yes, there is a pitch there. How the hell they actually manage to play amongst all the tsetse flies is another question, but the pitch exists.

I was going to use this image as an emblem of the universal nature of football, but the more I thought about it, the less sure I became that football hasn't really just become a new form of imperialism.

The game's spread, of course, was the product of Empire, and it was imperialists and colonists who founded many of the clubs that are still great today. For example, Tanzanian giants Simba were at one point known by the name of "Dar Sunderland" because of the presence of some eager Wearsiders in Dar Es Salaam. This fact, plus the fact that the game has almost completely wiped out indigenous games and sports in the continent, is one reason some people level the charge of the imperialism, at the game, but that's not the point I want to make

Others level a more 1970s "dependency theory" version of the imperialism charge at the game - citing "leg drain" from the periphery to the centre as the reason why football is the new imperialism (see this earlier post for details). I'm definitely not making this argument because it is fundamentally an argument used to restrict the free movement of labour, which I am not in the least in favour of.

There is a real imperialism, here, but it lies in the export of eyes, not legs. People watching foreign games on satellite TV.

As I noted in my previous post, Tanzanians are obsessed by the Premiership, absolutely obsessed. And yet, they actually have their own functioning league which has been existence for over 40 years. Attendances have been declining for the past few years, a development which many people associate with the arrival via satellite television (which comes, incidentally, from South Africa - one of the most amazing things about the end of apartheid is extent to which primarily white South Africans now have a grip on the continent's mass culture and real estate markets). To use a term from Eric Hobsbawm's recent thesis on football , they have been caught up in the imperialism of a few capitalist enterprises such as Manchester and Arsenal.

Note: hat-tip to Tom for pointing out the Hobsbawm article

Now, there's nothing wrong with watching foreign football. And in watching the Premiership and La Liga, the entire world gets to watch much better quality football as a result of satellite TV and Hobsbawm's imperialist clubs. That's a good thing. Moreover, I would argue that the passions and rivalries of these few imperialist clubs actually constitute one of the few genuinely global conversations in the world today. The fact that I can have knowledgeable conversations about Arsenal and its youth policies with people in the middle of the Serengeti is phenomenal. People around the world choose clubs based on their playing styles and then follow tem year-round. It's even better than the World Cup, because unlike the WC, there are none of those disturbing animal tribalisms being aroused.

That's the up-side. The down-side is that in some countries, domestic leagues seem to be faltering because people prefer to stay home and watch the Premiership than watch the local teams which are simply of inferior quality. And let's be clear - they aren't inferior because of "leg drain" (to my knowledge there are no Tanzanian players playing anywhere in Europe) they're just inferior, period.

As I said, there's nothing inherently wrong with watching foreign football teams. Lord knows in Canada, we've all had to do it for years since we never had teams worth watching. But letting established domestic football fail because the population is hooked on watching global super-teams based in former colonial metropoles?

That, friends, is bringing us back very close to imperialism. It's not without its benefits, of course but it can make one feel a little queasy.

Tanzania = Premiership-land

2007-10-15T01:43:00.001-04:00

The fastest way - bar none - to start a conversation with males in Tanzania is to wander around with a shirt with some kind of Premiership team connection to it. Not something as naff as an actual replica shirt (there are plenty of those around, but wearing them on vacation in sunny climes tends to mark you out as a wide boy) - just something with a team name and a slogan.

When I wore normal clothes - linen shirt, etc - nobody noticed me. When I went around in my Arsenal is Life T-shirt (which, let me assure you, was brought strictly for the purposes of this experiment) I had difficulty moving more than five metres without someone reading the short alound and adding the words "the Gunners!". This would usually lead to a chat along the lines of "do you support them?", to which the answer would always be "yes" or "no, Liverpool/Manchester/Chelsea/plus one poor bastard running a curio shop who supported Newcastle".

I would estimate between 5 and 10 percent of the boys and young men one seens on a given day wear various forms of replica shirts (a subject for a later post) of various teams, roughly 2/3 of which were English in origin, with Arsenal seeming to have slightly more support than any of the other teams. More damagingly, their football literature seems to have been imported entirely from the FA (England World Cup Heroes!) and of the various folks wandering around in national team shirts, a disturbingly high proportion of them wore three lions shirts. Instilling the idea that England are a side worthy of emulation and adoration is a terrible post-colonial burden to shoulder and no doubt accounts for Tanzania's utter crapness at the international level.

I estimate that at least a third of all plastic bags at markets come with a team logo (again, always the big four) emblazoned upon them. Owners of dala-dalas (route taxis) that operate as "public" transport in Dar and in Zanzibar sometimes emblazon their vehicles with massive stickers and decals provlaiming support for their team (these drivers, for some reason, are massively pro-ManU, although I did se one brave soul in Arusha completely break ranks and decorate in support of the NY Yankees (MLB comes to Africa courtesy of South African satellite sports channels).

In print, local football always gets the back page in English and Swahili papers (there are currently big crises at both Simba and Yanga, Tanzania's Old Firm), but Premiership football gets most of the next four pages, which are usually unattributed wire stories. Radio, too, seems to carry results very frequently. Even in the middle of the Serengeti, tour guides always seemed extraordinarily well-informed about the previous evening's scores.

And, inevitably, there are Premiership slogans and posters daubed on all kinds of walls in public places (see photos, all taken in Zanzibar's Stonetown).

All in all, a somewhat surreal experience.

I'm back

2007-10-14T14:10:00.001-04:00

OK, so apparently life at the Globe and Mail desk in Winnipeg is much busier than I had assumed, which accounts for Giuseppe's relegation-level output over the past three weeks (I'm betting much time was spent tracking down the news that Spurs boss and acting legend Martin Jol (pictured in a typically morose pose) has bought vacation property in Manitoba).

But still, you all kept coming to visit (including somebody up in either Churchill or Rankin Inlet who had manged to come almost once a day during the whole time I was gone), longtime reader Cam actually made an appearance in the comments section (welcome!), and a bunch of people I've never met have wished me many happy returns on my recent wedding, all of which touches me to no end. I can only try to repay your kindness and patronage with some decent posts in the near future. I've got lots to relate from my trip to Tanzania, but it'll have to wait a few hours until I manage to download my photos.

So, grazie to Giuseppe and I'll be back in just a bit. Stay tuned.

We're back

2007-10-11T00:49:00.000-04:00

Ok, so it took me a little while to figure out this blogging business. I gather the frequency of posts matters to you readers. I apologize. Clearly, I'm not fit to wear Gramsci's shirt.

Now, on to business. Yes, I'm still upset that Arsenal beat West Ham (as did Aston Villa), but I will remind you that West Ham were the only club to do the double over both Man U and the Arse last season - all that and 29 points from the other 34 fixtures, you can't help but be impressed.

My brother Antonio will be pleased to know that I can admit a grudging admiration for Arsenal. Wenger may only ever say the same six things in his press conferences (there is a great spirit in the team, etc) but he has a brilliant eye for young talent. And as these billionaires of dubious extraction try to buy the Premier league title, there's something to be said for doing things on a budget. As a West Ham supporter I had decidedly mixed feelings when a billionaire Icelandic biscuit baron took over the club. Sure, it's great to avoid relegation, but just look at the curse that Tevez and Mascherano have brought to Upton Park. Virtually every player bought since has gone down to injury. But let's pretend they hadn't - let's say West Ham went on to win the title, like Chelsea did under Abramovich. Something would be wrong with the universe, and I'm not sure I'd like it. I'd prefer an honourable struggle to achieve mid-table obscurity than to be a Chelsea supporter. Now you've got Usmanov threatening to make Arsenal the new Chelsea. It'll be a sad day when Arsene Wenger is forced to spend truckloads of money.

Housekeeping and an Introduction

2007-09-24T17:20:00.001-04:00

As per my previous entry, I'm taking a blog-breather for three weeks as I travel to Africa to check out two Non-Fifa territories who are members of the NF Board: Zanzibar (national team pictured, above) where with luck I can pick up a Sharp Boys FC game in Ras Nungwi. This is not a plan of which Mrs. Gramsci is currently aware, so schtum. Also going to the Maasai territory, which has managed to obtain NF Board membership without- as far as I can tell - ever playing a competitive match.

To keep you all amused and entertained while I am gone, I am handing the reins over to my brother, Giuseppe Gramsci, who is not only a proper journalist but has actually shared a press booth with John Motson. No, really, he has. Please be nice to him.

For reasons that are best left un-probed, Giuseppe has an unhealthy fascination with West Ham United, and he promises some pithy Russel Brand-ish commentary for you on this subject among others. I hope you enjoy it.

See you in a couple of weeks.

I Get Patched Over

2007-09-24T16:05:00.001-04:00

So I got married yesterday. And this brought me to a very difficult football dilemma.

As I have mentioned in a previous post, I support the French national team for reasons that date back to the 1986 World Cup and Canada's near-shock of the then-reigning European Champions. Last summer, this led to a lot of incredulous looks from my new in-laws (who are continually shocked that their daughter has managed to find - in their words - the one Canadian mangiacake who takes football more seriously than an Italian) who could not believe that I could possibly be supporting anyone but the Azzurri. Needless to say, we watched the finals several miles apart from one another.

So, anyway, as my mother-in-law is giving a speech last night, she motions me up to the podium and places an Azzurri scarf around my neck. No more Francia, she says. Forza Italia! Should I backslide, she announced, to the applause of the assembled masses, no more of her canneloni, veal or cannoli (all the things I have learned I cannot do without).

My wedding, I realized, was basically being turned into a patch-over ceremony, where I was being made to swap one set of allegiances for another. Which, I have to say, is not quite what I expected at the start of the evening.

So I ask myself: what's my loyalty to France? Not what it used to be, that's for sure. The glorious 98-00 team is almost all gone, and Vieira is the only player on whom I still have any kind of man-crush (I'm still pissed off at Henry leaving Arsenal because his wife found some incriminating text messages on his phone). Could I adopt a new team? Maybe.

If so, could I adopt Italy? Tougher sell. Can't say I've ever been an enormous fan of Italian football. But I did admire the sheer tenacity of Lippi's squad last year.

Should I adopt a new team? A dilemma peculiar to the North American fan. My own country's team is sufficiently crap that it is unlikely we will qualify for more than one more world cup in my lifetime. So all my choices are second choices - and it's not like one is intrinsically much better than another. So why not switch?

Because it doesn't feel right, that's why. I feel guilty about switching even though I have no real ties whatsoever to France (Arsenal aside). And yet, I also feel guilty about not showing solidarity with my new family.

Could I take the Azzurri flag publicly and continue to support France secretly? Or why even secretly? It's not like the two teams play each other that often (the last 14 months aside). Why not cheer for France *and* Italy, and lean to the latter when the two go head-to-head? Maybe, but that feels like cheating, too.

And so, I think I will simply have to learn to love a new team.

Fratelli d'italia...

Wow. Just....wow.

2007-09-22T23:59:00.000-04:00

These two stories are almost impossible to credit. Almost.

Among the basic allegations: John Terry, in a snit about Mourinho asking medical staff if there was a physiological reason for Terry's mediocrity this season, was the one responsible for sticking the knife into Mourinho's back. This was regicide, and it was the trusted general who was the assassin

This is an assassin who, by the way, is now alleged to have wanted a contractual guarantee that at the end of his playing days he would get to manage Chelsea. This is megalomania of the highest order. Even Abramovich drew the line at this.

Other great stuff: Abramovich on Tuesday thought it was appropriate to give Michael Essien a lesson on tactics in the dressing room in front of the entire team, using Shevchenko as an interpreter. This is like one of those contests in newspapers with the two slightly different pictures side-by-side...how many things are wrong with this picture? Several thousand, by my count.

Much of the squad, lured to Chelsea by the prospect of playing for Mourinho, are in a state of shock and fury at their captain. With Grant assuredly going to be playing Shevchenko every match, that makes two players out of Chelsea's starting eleven who are utterly loathed by the rest of their teammates. One has to think that Chelsea go into today's match with ManU playing the equivalent of at least a man down even before they step on the pitch.

A rich man using the team as a plaything as a form of ego gratification is not necessarily a recipe for failure. Berlusconi has done it rather successfully for more than 25 years now. But to my knowledge, Berlusconi doesn't play favourites with players on his team to the degree Abramovich does. And while he certainly has his views on tactics - "Milan play with two strikers", "Zoff was an idiot not to man-mark Zidane" being his two most well-known interventions of the past decade - I'm pretty sure he has never barged into the dressing room to tell a star midfielder how to pass a ball.

When Shevchenko and Ballack came to the Bridge, I remember thinking that this was the first step in the Inter-fication of Chelsea and that Abramovich, like Moratti, was behaving like a fan, buying whatever players seemed best without a second thought. But I now think we may actually be heading into Jesus Gil territory, where the owner actually thinks he is smarter than whatever coach is there at the moment.

Even with gobs of money, success in football is delicate and ephemeral. Abramovich has thrown away the only thing that united his fissiparous squad. The rest of the season will be one long disaster, and fifth place isn't inconceivable. And then what? Might Abramovich get tired of his play thing? The mind reels at the consequences

If I were a Blues fan, I'd be terrified. Poor bastards. They didn't deserve the success of the last three years, but they don't deserve this nonsense either.

Least Surprising Headline in History

2007-09-20T04:48:00.000-04:00

Justly overshadowed by the shock news from Stamford Bridge is the news that Michael Owen - wait for it - is injured! Hernia operation, this time, minimum six weeks.

For Newcastle, it means having to wait until at least November for little Michael (shown, left, in a rare ambulatory pose) to come back and make his record-shattering 18th league start in 2.5 years at the club.

For England, it means McClaren is now shorn of both Heskey and Owen, the two men who saved his job earlier this month. So, back to an insipid Rooney - Johnson combination and inevitable defeat in Moscow it is, then.

One shouldn't snigger, I suppose, but oh MAN is it hard not to...

Mourinho Wins Sack Race

2007-09-19T20:23:00.000-04:00

This is incredibly bad news for Chelsea fans (although, let's face it, as a group of individuals, they're hard to empathize with).

Mourinho was the difference between Chelsea being a band of high-price mercenaries (think Lazio in their heyday) and being a well-oiled team. This man understood the chemistry and psychology of teams, and he succeeded brilliantly, as he had (with far less money) at Porto.

The full story isn't out yet, but the basic story seems to be this: Mourinho preferred team work and results and Abramovich preferred sexy players playing sexy football. Mourinho seems to have tried to asjust his style at the beginning of the year, but the experiment went wonky. 1-1 to Rosenberg wouldn't be considered a crisis in most places - and shouldn't by rights have been considered so at Chelsea, either (hell, six years ago they were being knocked out of the UEFA cup by St. Gallen at about this time of year). But it was the excuse the Russian needed to push Mourinho out.

The replacements? The papers right now are saying Sevilla's Juande Ramos, but one has to suspect that Abramovich's "sexy" vision for the club requires a sexy coach, which Ramos - for all his good work - is not. You'd have to figure, based on form (signing Ballack and Shevchenko for untold millions when neither was really needed), that he'd go for something spectacular, like trying to coax Cruyff out of retirement. That's not going to work, so the obvious candidates would then be Cappello and Lippi.

Both would be interesting choices. Lippi is probably closer in style to Mourinho, but frankly it;s hard to see how Lippi's style (or Cappello's, for that matter) would work if he has to go through a translator all the time. The secret to team-building is man-management, and the effectiveness of a quick arm-around-the-shoulder chat with Frank Lampard is inevitably going to be diminished if a translator needs to be present.

The best choice right now might be the man that Mourinho narrowly pipped to the job, former Chelsea player and French captain Didier Deschamps. Though again, his style is not necessarily especially sexy. For that, you really need a Dutch coach, which - one would think - with Frank Arnesen in place, might not be difficult to obtain.

Frank Rijkaard? Marco van Basten? Both have jobs right now, but the former in particular could be tempted if stories that he is losing the Barca dressing room prove correct.

But don't listen to me. As we found out a few weeks ago, I suck at predictions. Regardless, with Chelsea visiting to Old Trafford in three days, it's certainly an amazing amount of grist for the melodrama-mill of English football.

And you know what? I'll miss him. As irritating as he could be occasionally, he was damn smart, never boring and was by some light years the best-dressed coach in the league (the charcoal coat he wore his first winter in England was completely dreamy). I doubt if I'll like his successor anywhere near as much.

Keeping Sane when Madness Takes its Toll

2007-09-16T19:15:00.000-04:00

I'd write a match report of TFC-RSL, but seriously, what's the point? Arsenalist has already said most of what needs to be said about a match in which we failed to score despite being a man up for over an hour.

I think what we all need now, being deep into our 14th hour of play without a goal, is some group therapy and sharing of how to keep sane until we come to the end of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I'd welcome your ideas via the comments function, but for now, here are my four suggestions.

1) Count your blessings. Northern Ireland went 1298 minutes without scoring a goal between late 2001 and early 2004. I haven't been able to determine if this is definitively the longest scoring drought in history, but it should do us for another six games, anyway.

2) Pretend you are at choir practice. Really, the singing is the only thing worth coming to the ground for, anyways, so why not make it the focus of your activities while there? Treat the events on the pitch as an annoying aside. Respect to the Red Patch Boys, btw, for trying - unfortunately without too much success - to make a go of the Forza TFC chant, (a variant of this smashing and intimidating tifosi ditty). I was a little sad that no one thought my idea of singing "Three wives...you've only got three wives" to the RSL players was worth an effort, but nevertheless it was a good day for singing over all.

3) Credit Mo Johnston with a brilliant new invention - Tantric Football. Really, this delay in scoring is all part of the plan. We're going to build up slowly - not peak quickly - just keep building for hours and hours...and hours and hours....working around the edge of the box...really, the longer we wait to score, the better it will be...

4) Join the increasingly bizarre discussions with us up in Section 221. The most interesting discussion this week turned on Sonny's observation about the inherent similarities between tifo and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Think about it: the role-playing, the dressing up, the singing, the co-ordinated reactions to events on-screen/on-pitch...

I really think this has potential. And Mo in Frank-n-Furter bondage gear-lingerie can't possibly be more of a sartorial disaster than the pastel French-cuff shirt, no-jacket no-tie combination he's been inflicting on us all season.

Screw the streamers - I'm bringing toast to the next match.

Fair Play

2007-09-16T18:32:00.001-04:00

Way down deep, beneath all the money and corporate stuff that has grown up around our sport, there is a simple game: a ball, a net, some lines and some feet. Watching young boys play the sport reminds you of that.

My boy, "Benito" Gramsci, is keeper for the Toronto Eagles' U-10 team (above, at a recent tourney at BMO field). It's a team with the ethnic diversity of a G-14 squad: despite Eagles' being nominally a Portuguese club, it also has kids with Trinidadian, Jamaican, Argentinian, Ukranian, Greek, Colombian, Croatian, and Chinese and plain old Anglo heritage as well. Welcome to Toronto. The coach has taught them in the best traditions of Portuguese football: short passing, compact lines and hard tackling (one or two lads in particular are capable of maiming with deftly-placed hip checks and as keeper, Benito's Lehmann-esque sprints to meet oncoming through balls have resulted in more than one opponent being knocked silly).

The football at this level is pretty good in Canada - probably on a par with anything you'll see anywhere in the world. The top Toronto teams, up to about age 13 or 14, do reasonably well at international tournaments (I know kids that age here who've been offered contracts at places like Cruzeiro). Crapness only sets in later, when the so-called "professional" coaches of the CSA and OSA bring their northern-English values into the rigid structures of top-level youth football, and speed and skill are largely discarded in favour of power and size. Good players - really good players who want to make a living from football - more or less have to travel overseas to continue their training, as Owen Hargreaves and the De Guzman brothers did.

And so to yesterday's TSA Cup Final, played at the God-awful Flemingdon park in unseasonably frigid weather against League winners-elect Leaside. I'll spare you the details. 4-2 to the Eagles, our top striker opening the scoring with an acute-angled toe-punt that was prettier than any goal scored at BMO this season, and Gramsci Junior making a spectacular save late in the game.

Happy as our boys were, what struck me most about this game was the losing team. This was the most high-stakes game of the season, but they were gracious in defeat, and laughing and joking with each other and in some cases even chatting to the winners within just a few minutes of the end of the game. It was highly competitive, but fundamentally friendly.

I could put that down to there being two good sets of "supporters' clubs" present - not insignificant since the Toronto league has its share of nightmare parents (one team got hit with a $200 fine this year because their parents were so obnoxious - and we've had opposing parents escorted from our indoor facility for such things as threatening to "disappear" our coach and - I shit you not - charging onto the field to attack one of our then-eight-year-old players).

But I don't think that was it. This was just two groups of kids who respected each other and who didn't confuse competitiveness and rivalry with actual antagonism. And who love the playing the game as they love to win it.

In an age where kids get too many messages about gamesmanship from watching pro sports and popular culture, that doesn't always happen (I, for instance, let Gramsci Junior watch Victory at far too young an age, and he still voices lurid fantasies about bent refs every time his team loses). But it did yesterday, and that was at least as nice to see as our boys' hands on the Cup.

Rivalries

2007-09-14T23:58:00.001-04:00

The globalization of football, like globalization in many other areas, has led to both a spreading and a concentration of wealth. All of us get to see a lot more quality football, but that quality football is increasingly concentrated in just a few leagues or even teams.

Take the Premiership, for example. Fifteen years ago, almost a backwater in terms of prestige and certainly not the most attractive thing to watch - now, more watched than any other league in the world. The decline of football in many weaker African nations (e.g Tanzania or Mauritius) is often ascribed to the increasing ubiquity of the Premiership, which sucks viewers away from the domestic game.

In North America - outside the Latino areas which have their own allegiances to various Latin American leagues - the major source of televised football is also English. Most of us see the game in fundamentally English terms and almost all of us identify our primary team as being an English one (except, of course, for those of us cursed by the presence of TFC, whose subterranean awfulness is beginning to take on the characteristics of a H.P. Lovecraft novel).

English football clubs seriously groove on this worldwide notoriety. Nothing gives them more pleasure than to have mirror websites in Thai or Korean or to tell their AGMs that they have 50 million fans in China. It becomes a local riff of FIFA's meme about the global game; as football united billions in the love of a match, so too do Man U unite over a hundred million fans worldwide - plus possibly a few in Manchester itself - in their love of Fergie, Rooney, Nani, Giggsy, Scholesy...

(hmmm...note to self...must write blog-entry speculating on possible nicknames for Ronaldo ending in obligatory "y" sound...)

But football identity is not just above who you love. As Pierre Bourdieu noted, we define ourselves by what we dislike as much as by what we like. This is why football rivalries are so important. Except that the problem is, I'm convinced that none of these "global fans" actually care about historic rivalries. And it is this, fundamentally, that creates a gap between locally-experienced fan-dom and overseas fan-dom.

Take me, for example. I have spent an unhealthy amount of the last ten years watching and obsessing about Arsenal. And yet I cannot, really truly cannot, bring myself to hate Spurs. Giggle, occasionally, but not hate.

Why should I? Unlike London Gooners, I don't live cheek-by-jowl with these other norf Landaners. I don't even know any Spurs fans personally (though there seem to be some very nice ones over at OTF). What have Spurs ever done to me? Man U and Chelsea really get on my wick, sure. I really hate them. Not too fond of Blackburn, either. But Spurs? They're harmless. I even kind of like Martin Jol and what he's done with the club.

Similarly, do you think ManU's 50 million Chinese fans care a fig for the rivalry with City? Or that a majority of Barcelona's overseas fans could even spell "Espanyol"? Not likely. But does that mean they love the team any less? No. They just love it in a very differently-constructed social context.

In introducing the Premiership around the world, Rupert Murdoch has brought half of the fan experience - the nice bits involving following a team through thick and thin - to hundreds of millions of people outside the UK. But this does not mean that the Arsenal or Man U "community" has grown. For the price of extending the presence of a few clubs has been the irrevocable fracturing of these clubs' communities because they no longer all hate the same people.

Some people, no doubt, will choose to interpret my inability to hate Spurs as an example of a fair-weather, overseas, cosmopolitan fan who is far too effete and plastic to be a "real" fan. So be it. But I think it would be plastic of me to pretend to hate a rival for whom I feel nothing simply so I can fit in with the constructed reality of other Arsenal fans. So help me God, I just can't hate Spurs.

I guess, in this way, modern football has two types of teams: "local" ones with small, intact supporters communities and "global" ones with vast but fractured communities. It is an essential - perhaps the essential - trade-off in modern football.

Dread

2007-09-14T23:18:00.000-04:00

Christ. Sixteen hours to game time. I'm not entirely sure how much more I can take of this.

If TFC were playing a decent team - pretty much anyone other than Real Salt Lake, in fact - I could face this game. I could go to BMO confident in the knowledge that with Andrea Lombardo and Collin Samuel up front, we would have absolutely no chance of scoring, let alone winning. Really, none. They're terrible. Danny Dichio has Nedved-like fluency in comparison.

But no, we have to be playing RSL, the only team in the league that genuinely has a claim to be worse than us. The imagination begins to stir...maybe, against the worst defence in the league (and in the MLS, that's up against some pretty stiff competition), Samuel's Clydesdale-like first touches won't matter. Maybe, given a yard or two of space, Lombardo will learn how to hit a cow's arse with a banjo.

Or, more prosaically, we might get a fortuitous penalty call on one of our seemingly endless stream of long-balls to no one in particular and score from the spot.

To quote John Cleese, It's not the despair. The despair I can handle. It's the hope that gets me.

I can't wait for this game to be over.

Internationals Week and More Good Blogs

2007-09-13T10:19:00.000-04:00

England. Have to admit England looked pretty good against Russia. Much ado in the press about how McClaren finally picked a good team instead of just the 11 best players (to be fair, this was an Erikson failing, too). Heskey certainly seems to have done enough to keep a place ahead of Crouch or any of the midgets on the bench; but I have a hard time believing that Barry will keep a place ahead of either Lampard or Hargreaves.

And what of Rooney - how does he get back into this side? Is it possible that Rooney himself is the problem with England? He can't play Heskey' s big-man-barging-around-like-a-bull-causing- problems-at-the-back role, and he can't play the Owen-cheeky-little-fella-grabbing-goals-in-the-box role. So what does he do? He has no obvious partner, so maybe it's best to leave him on the bench (fat chance).

Anyways, McClaren now looks like a genius (dear God, you have no idea how hard it is to write that sentence) because injuries made him actually think. The team sheet for the next game will be the most interesting football document of the year. Keeping Lamps and Roo on the bench might even make me want to cheer for England. A bit. Not much. Actually, not at all. But it would make me respect McClaren.

Italy. Lucky. But like England, they managed to get three points from a star-poor line-up. Good for them.

Scotland. Scotland? Scotland?!? France seem hell-bent on proving that they can't do shit going forward without Zidane.

Worst. Ref. Ever. Check out Zoltan Gera's sending off in the Turkey-Hungary match. See what I mean?

Good blogs. Has anyone but me noticed that all the decent international-culture-and-politics-of-football-blogs are based in North America? Culture of Soccer and Pitch Invasion I've already mentioned (although the latter's custodian is an English expat). There's also the grandaddy of these sites, The Global Game, which I can't believe I've never mentioned here before. Why, I wonder, do these sites not flourish in England itself? Or anywhere else? Do we North Americans just obsess more about this stuff because it's not actually in our blood? Hmmm...

It's not as though there aren't any good UK sites. Twohundredpercent is more anglocentric than is strictly my taste, but the writing is undeniably better (and certainly more voluminous) than most anything else out there. And, while not a blog, the onetouchfootball messageboard is an astonishingly addictive way to meet knowledgeable football folks from around the world and talk complete bollocks with them (many thanks to a mysteriously-named Milanese Brown Bear for turning me on to this insanely counterproductive use of my time).

And finally a good Italian site. Sort of. Spangly Princess is an Anglo-Italian history grad student Gooner with a shoe fetish and a Roma season ticket in la Curva Sud. I know, I know, be still my heart. Were I younger, unbetrothed and living 5000 miles closer to Rome I'm sure I'd be totally obsessed with her (although, to be honest, her writing style reminds me of no one's so much as that of a woman now at the FT with whom I had my most totally catastrophic affair ever, so maybe not). Anyways, the football writing is OK, but the photos of Italy, long discursive bits about art, history, life in Rome and the inevitable (for Italians) food porn make for a nice way for those of us not actually able to live la dolce vita to dream a bit. For which, again, many thanks.

photo credit: Dakhino via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool

Oh Good Lord

2007-09-11T04:00:00.000-04:00

From the mouth of Steven Gerrard, brain surgeon:

"This is the best England squad I have been involved in since I started with England in 2000."

(just so we're all clear - I'm not making this up. I could not make this up)

"We have under-achieved of late and we need to deliver for this country. I think with the quality we've got here, I don't think the quarter-finals is enough. We should be doing better."

Everybody got that? Two days ago, England were hopeless. Now, after a 3-0 victory over a team ranked 23rd within UEFA, Fleet Street is reporting this drivel straight up.

The semi-finals!?! Is everyone insane? Admittedly, watching England play without Frank Lampard is kind of exhilarating, but come on.

Barring some major catastrophe, Croatia will qualify with a game to spare. Over the up-coming home-and-away against Russia, England are going to drop at least two points and basically have to hope that a) Croatia field second-teamers when they show up at Wembley in November and b) Israel are less abject against Russia than they were in London on Saturday. The nation should be weeping tears of gratitude if the bastards make it to Switzerland by finishing level with Russia and going through on goals scored.

Also, it will be intriguing to see whether or not McLaren has the cojones to keep a fit Lampard out of the starting eleven. I'm guessing not. But we'll have to wait another few weeks to find out.

World Soccer, Incomprehensible Blatter and I Make it Big

2007-09-09T21:20:00.000-04:00

Just picked up the August issue of World Soccer (it comes late to these poor colonial parts - in countries with an actual footballing culture, the September issue has been out for a week already). Three things of note:

1) The editorial re-vamp is really quite good, isn't it? Much more readable than it used to be.

2) Blatter has another idiotic proposal. This one is perhaps not new, but I tend to lose track of the multitude of idiocies emanating from Zurich. Anyways, in an interview, he talks about trying to implement a rule in which clubs must field at least six home-grown players and a maximum of five foreign players. And by foreign, he does not mean the post-Bosman all-Europeans-are-domestic definition: he means from a different country, period.

I quote from FIFA's mission statement: "FIFA has a huge responsibility to reach out and touch the world, using football as a symbol of hope and integration."

If football is such a symbol of hope and integration, why limit the number of people of different nationalities in a single team? Does hope and integration stop at national boundaries?

I quote from FIFA's mission statement: "We believe it is FIFA´s responsibility to foster unity within the football world and to use football to promote solidarity, regardless of gender, ethnic background, faith or culture".

How can football promote solidarity if it limits the ability of people of different nationalities to play together? How is solidarity promoted by limiting the ability of people from poorer nations to earn a living playing football in richer nations?

3) I also noticed that I actually made it into World Soccer this month. Not because of any of my writing, but rather as an innocent by-stander. Page 28, directly beneath the CN tower, eleven rows down, two seats over from my nephew Camillo, who is in the yellow Brazil shirt. The Mulroney-like appearance of my chin is no doubt due to the effects of the plastic slice of Pizza Pizza pepperoni I was chewing at the time.

Islam and Football

2007-09-09T05:15:00.000-04:00

Going back over the many posts here, I realize that I may have been a teensy bit unfair to Islam and football by twice harping on the quite goofy 2003 fatwa on football by Sheikh Abdallah al-Nadji. So I thought it might be useful to go over the record on Islam and football in some more detail.

Football is reasonably popular across the Muslim world, though it suffers in a few respects. In the world's largest Muslim country, Indonesia, football is very popular, but like other (non-Islamic) south-east Asian countries, the country punches far below it's weight in international competitions.

("punches below its weight", by the way, is the nicest euphemism for "crap" you will ever see me use).

In two other large Muslim countries - Pakistan and Bangladesh - football comes a distant second to cricket in popularity, though Bangladesh shares a strong footballing tradition with the neighbouring Indian state of Bengal. In Iran, football competes with wrestling; in Arabia, with camel and horse racing. Across North Africa, football is pretty much the dominant sport and has been for some time: Egypt - home of perennial Africa champions Al-Ahly - was both the first Africa country to obtain FIFA membership and to compete in the World Cup.

Nigeria, of course, is another major football power - a fact proved once again by the fact that the Baby Eaglets won the FIFA U-17 Championship earlier today in South Korea, the third time they have done so. But football has historically been a preoccupation of the country's more prosperous - and more Christian - south. In Northern Nigeria, the Islamic elite traditionally preferred games like cricket, field hockey and polo and so football did not really catch on until the 1950s. Post-colonial leagues have therefore tended to centre around Lagos in the Christian south.

Nigerian Islam can be quite conservative. In 2005, the state of Zamfara banned women's soccer as "unIslamic" shortly after adopting Sharia law. This would no doubt come as a shock to the rather devout (albeit Shi'a) Iranian imams, who see nothing wrong with women's soccer provided they are appropriately clothed and fans of different genders do not mix in the stands.

All this said, it is true that Islam appears to be the one major religion where football has become an issue of religious controversy. The mainstream religious take on football - which can be seen at Islam online and fatwa online, is pretty harmless: so long as football does not distract one from any obligations (religious or otherwise) and one remains modestly clothed, football is all right. Even earning significant sums of money from football is seen as OK, because it is a fruit of one's own labour, but that one's use of said income should not be ostentatious (a right-on statement to be adopted by all PFAs around the world, as far as I am concerned).

However, those Muslims who are what I would call in serious denial about engaging with the modern world have a very different take on football. The Iraqi radical Muqtada al-Sadr, for instance, has denounced football as being "something Americans and Jews do" (has the man seen the MLS?) and that "all the running around after a ball" just distracts Muslims from their duties towards jihad.

And there is of the course the Saudi imam's bizarre football fatwa which I have mentioned on a couple of occasions, but which is reproduced in full here. Intriguingly, this article in the Washington Post suggests that the Saudi newspaper al-Watan, aware of the damage this fatwa was doing to Saudi Arabia, printed a half-hearted (and as it happened, untrue) denial in an attempt to make the story.

Why try to deny the story? Because, I suspect, I suspect that radical Islamists know how dumb it sounds and how it hurts their standing among Muslims. If there's one riff on modernity that even the harshest zealot can groove to (remember, bin Laden is allegedly a Gooner), it's football. When Somalia's Joint Islamic Courts tried to ban people watching the World Cup in 2006, it led to violent protests and two deaths (and, arguably, to an erosion of public support that six months later made it much easier for the Ethiopian Army to sweep the JIC out of power).

Another reason, of course, was to avoid prosecution within Saudi Arabia. As this article makes clear, Senior Saudi ulama called for the prosecution of those involved in issuing and publicizing the fatwa and many senior figures used it as an extreme example of what was wrong with the country's religious discourse.

Even where football proceeds with official sanction, though, it's not exactly the game everyone knows and loves in the West. Women remain banned form attending matches in Iran despite President Ahmadinejad's decree to the contrary last year - the country's Supreme Islamic Council intervened to counter-mand the order by issuing a religious ruling to the effect that it is un-Islamic for women to see strangers' bare legs.

For the anti-capitalists out there, some might like the odd Islamic take on the game, such as hte occasional ban on advertising. In 1993, in the home game in the Asian Cup which matched the Tehran team, Pirouzi, against a team sponsored by Japan’s Nissan, there were no advertising hoardings on the pitch. Instead there were large placards reading "Down with the USA!" and "Israel must be destroyed!". I imagine North Korean matches are much the same...

Some have tried to use football as a way of reconciling faiths. Imams vs. priests games have been popular: one in Leicester ended in a 6-0 win for the imams; an imams vs. Lutheran pastors match in Berlin just before the World Cup ended up 13-1 for the pastors, a scoreline that doesn't say much for Christian charity. However, even here there can be problems. A similar proposed match at an interfaith conference in Oslo last year had to be cancelled when the Christians chose to field a mixed-gender team, forcing the Islamic side to pull out on religious grounds.

And speaking of inter-faith dialogue, I see Taribo West, formerly of (deep breath) Auxerre, Inter, Milan, Derby County, Kaiserslautern, Partisan Belgrade, Al-Arabi and Plymouth Argyle (no, really) has signed for the Teheran side Paykan. I'm wondering what kind of discussions were had about his extra-curricular activities as a Christian pastor and evangelist, neither of which would presumably be welcome in Iran. On the other hand, if they can overlook his brutal lack of pace and inelegant tackling (neither of which, I am sure, have improved with age), perhaps attempted conversions can be overlooked, too.

Fit and Proper Persons (Part II)

2007-09-07T19:12:00.001-04:00

Lots of people have been going around making comparisons between Thaksin Shinawatra and Alisher Usmanov, and suggesting that the two are both prime cases of people who shouldn't be allowed control of UK football clubs, etc. etc.

But I'm not so sure how comparable the cases are. Review the cases and you decide:

Shinawatra, a former business tycoon, was the democratically elected PM of Thailand, until ousted in a military coup last year. He has been accused of, among other things, human rights abuses (specifically, extra-judicial killings in a "war on drugs"), corruption charges related to tax evasion, insider trading and conflict-of-interest while PM.

Although he is currently facing a host of charges of varying severity, the fact that he is being charged in court by a military government that overthrew him casts the expected guilty verdicts in some doubt. Of the various charges against him, the clearest-cut case against Shinwatra is the conflict-of-interest charges. Rather like Berlusconi (whom he resembles a great deal), Thaksin tended not so much to break the law as to amend them to suit his purposes. Unfortunately, a trial by junta isn't likely to answer those questions in a manner that a fair-minded person would find...well..fair.

The nastiest charges against him are those regarding the extra-judicial killing of drug dealers in Thailand; evidence of which has been widely documented (see here among other places). These are the charges most in need of impartial investigation, but they also seem to be the ones least likely to be investigated by the junta since presumably any evidence against Thaksin would rebound against themselves, too.

But there are legitimate questions to be answered here, most notably the extent to which Thaksin himself is to blame for what happened (as opposed to people further down the command chain). Also to be taken into consideration is the extent to which the organization of drug runners in places like Thailand make the fight against them more like civil conflict (Thai drug runners are damn-heavily armed) than a criminal justice operation. This isn't to excuse malfeasance - it's to suggest that there may be more to the Thanksin story than the average self-righteous Guardian reader might have you believe.

Also - and this is a personal rant and possible over-generalization here - anti-Thaksin types are guilty of some pretty heavy double standards here. I have never, for instance, seen anyone criticize Thierry Henry for wearing Che Guevara T-shirts, despite Che's well-documented involvement in extra-judicial killings after the Cuban revolution and his classic statement of the need for hatred:

"Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine."

Oh yes, much better than Thaksin...

Now to Usmanov. I was going to post something very interesting about Usmanov, based on a post by Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan (Usmanov's nation of birth) who now spends his time as a vocal critic of the Uzbek regime. However, Usmanov's lawyers have been sicced on Murray's web-host and he has had to take them down. A similar cease and desist order went to my admired compadre Tom at Pitchinvasion, and his article on the same subject had to come down, too (though Murray's original missive is, for the moment, still available at this blog).

Briefly, Usmanov spent some time in jail in the 1980s but was pardoned, released and his criminal record expunged when Gorbachev came to power. In this article, the Daily Mail says that his conviction was for fraud, corruption and theft of state property. Usmanov claims he was a victim of a political frame-up. It's possible - but not everyone buys this story. And a pardon does not mean that the crime was not committed in the first place. Nixon, for instance, was pardoned; that doesn't change the fact that he obstructed justice.

The Mail also claims that Usmanov "has been dogged by claims that he has links to the KGB and to Russian mafia godfathers, among them Gafur Rakhimov, an Uzbek who is also - according to differing accounts - either a highly influential cotton trader, a sporting patron or a major drug baron in Uzbekistan's booming heroin trade." I make no comment here - I am merely passing along information.

Usmanov's dealings as a Director of Russian state-owned Gazprom have also come under scrutiny, not least of which from here.

As I read back over this page, I need to check my own biases. Am I harder on Usmanov because he's with my team while Thaksin is someone else's problem? Do I have a bigger problem with central Asians than south-east Asians? Am I being too cavalier about the Human Rights Watch report? Do I give Thaksin too much of a pass on human rights because he was a popular politician with a good record on fighting poverty (which, let me be clear, shouldn't give one any kind of pass on human rights).

I'm not sure about any of this. I think if clubs are limited companies, then tycoons - foreign and domestic - have as much right to buy them as anybody. And while both men seem to have a lot of questions to answer before they can be considered fit and proper, tycoons need a fair presumption of innocence, too.

But, that said, my gut just tells me that Usmanov is a much, much shadier character than Thaksin.

What do you think?

Former Modena Triallist Dead at Age of 71

2007-09-06T09:15:00.000-04:00

Believe it or not, he was a winger.

His lovely rendition of Puccini's Nessun Dorma was the theme song for the 1990 World Cup.

Oh, and he was also some kind of music superstar. Only operatic singer to sell 100 million records, most brilliant tenor ever, etc. etc.

My New Favourite Photo

2007-09-05T06:53:00.001-04:00

Call it youthful exuberance, call it the joy of Joga Bonito, or the cameraderie of sport, Total Fan-dom, or just plain old Dutch (or at least Rotterdam-ish) hospitality: this is an awesome snap which says as at least as much about the game - indeed, possibly, about the human condition - as any FIFA Fair Play advert.

(hattip: The Purple Cow)

Casual Stereotyping?

2007-09-04T07:22:00.000-04:00

Just finished reading an article by a history professor, Laura Fair, entitled Ngoma Reverberations: Swahili Music Culture and the Making of Football Aesthetics in Early Twentieth-century Zanzibar. No laughing at the back, there. Yes, I do this for fun.

The article is crap and to be honest I'm not sure how Richard Giulianotti allowed it to appear in his recent collection of articles on African football. It's not a bad piece on the early history of football in a particular corner of East Africa, but the empirical basis to conclude that football aesthetics in Zanzibar were influenced by ngoma (a local form of competitive music, drumming and poetry) is next to nil.

Her prime pieces of evidence are: 1) both football and ngoma provided ways for socially marginal people to become famous; 2) both football and ngoma begat regional rivalries based on class and ethnicity; 3) both football and ngoma caused large numbers of middle-aged men to sit around discussing tactics instead of doing productive work.

Words fail. Has the author never been around men in groups larger than two? The number of activities that men and boys can use to elevate the useless, fight each other and bullshit about tactics is almost endless - scrabble, drinking games, hockey, Pokemon cards - you name it. Someone needs to tell this woman that correlation is not causation.

Towards the end, she actually gets to the point of saying that the Zanzibar "style" of play is more about individual brilliance rather than efficient team play. And I got to thinking - you know, I've heard that before.

I can't, offhand, think of a non-Confucian third world country whose playing style is ever described as being "team-oriented". Virtually all of Africa is described as being "flair-oriented". So, too, is most of South America, with the exception of Argentina (which is, of course, probably the "whitest" of the South American countries). Sometimes, in pop anthropology not far removed from Dr. Fair's efforts, anglophone commentators ascribe Brazilian brilliance on the pitch to their love for capoeira. This, as far as I can tell, is nonsense. Anyone who tried any vaguely capoeira-like moves on the pitch would either be sent off (e.g. Cantona) or laughed off.

One can make the case, of course, that because young people in poor countries don't have proper training facilities, they rarely learn the fundamentals of team-play from an early age and therefore must needs become flair-oriented individualists. I can accept that.

But ascribing Afro-Brazilian flair to things like ngoma and capoeira... isn't that just a fancy way of saying that "Blacks have rhythm"?

Just Asking.

The Inverse Relationship Between Quality and Goals

2007-09-02T23:17:00.000-04:00

We always hear about how great the Premiership is. It's easy to dismiss this sometimes, because the evidence can sometimes seem pretty thin. First of all, these claims come from mindless Sky chatter; second, English players (still a majority in the Premiership) are pretty crap; third, pretty much any game involving Liverpool, Everton or Boro is guaranteed to be boring as shit. And there's the little matter of how few goals are scored in the league - fewer last year than in any of the major European leagues.

But then again, the top English teams do seem to be reaching the final stages of the Champions' League much more regularly than anyone else these days, so maybe they are doing something right.

We also hear a lot about how boring Italian football is. Some of this is a hang-over from 60s-era catenaccio (English commentators in particular seem to be under some delusion that any time an Italian squad plays fewer than three up front they are playing catenaccio), but for much of the period 1997-2003, pretty much every team's defensive philosophy could be summed up with the phrase "ten men behind the ball".

Yet, over the past few years, as money has bled out of the Italian game, scoring totals have been going up. A quick look at the first two rounds of this year's Serie A shows that 59 goals have been already been scored (with Milan-Fiorentina still to be played) - a goals per game average significantly higher than any of the other major leagues. So maybe it's not so dull after all.

Also, as the German league has fallen behind further and further behind the other leagues in terms of spending, the game has become noticeably more open and attractive - I can actually enjoy watching a game of German football these days, which certainly wasn't the case six years ago.

So, I'm thinking about all this and it occurs to me: are good leagues inherently low-scoring?

This isn't an easy conclusion to reach, by the way. I despise negative football and football played in the air (I know, I know, so why am I supporting TFC? I don't really have a good answer other than that the stadium is only a few blocks away). But then, fortunately, I came up with an alternative explanation.

It's been noted a few times by the press that the game has become much faster and more athletic over the past two decades. It's hard to imagine either Socrates or Cruyff - pack-a-day smokers the pair of them - making much of an impact these days because of the increasing pace of the game. The simple fact is that with increasing athleticism, players can cover much more of the pitch now than they used to. Space is therefore at a much greater premium than it used to be, at least in leagues with the very top players. And lack of space in football - in pretty much any sport, come to think of it - means fewer goals.

In other words, as Italian football has seen the average quality of its players fall over the past half-decade, it has seen more space open up and more goals allowed. And the reverse is true in England. Better players might make for better technical football, but it doesn't necessarily make for better spectacles

Disappointingly, I then discovered that Socrates had already essentially made this observation in an interview with Alex Bellos that was included in his book Futebol (which suggests that I hadn't so much made the observation on my own as I had drawn it from the depths of my subconscious). The iconic 80s Brazilian superstar even has a suggested remedy for the side-effects of increased athleticism: open up space by reducing the number of players on the pitch to 9-a-side.

This, of course, is unlikely to occur if for no other reason than that FIFPro would go totally stark raving bananas at the idea. But think about it: nine or ten a side would mean more room, more goals, and more room to introduce tactical variations. No other rule change could possibly have the same galvanizing effect on the game and return it to its attacking roots. Above all, it would reduce the tendency of having the athleticism of expensive and talented players cancel each other out. Reducing the number of players is an idea well worth considering.

Truce in Sevilla; Transfer Round-up

2007-09-01T10:52:00.000-04:00

1) The pictures of lifelong beticos laying flowers at the makeshift Antonio Puerta shrine at the Ramon Pizjuan is possibly the most moving thing I've seen in football in years (El Pais has a good video here). The Betis-Sevilla rivalry at the same time one of the most passionate and yet completely baseless rivalries in football: two clubs who share the same team but whose animosity is based neither on class (e.g. Torino-Juve), religion (Celtic-Rangers) or city regionalism (Roma-Lazio). It just is. And then suddenly, this week, it wasn't. Beautiful.

2) I clearly suck at predictions. That'll learn me. Back to armchair after-the-fact punditry, I guess.

Almost nothing of note, in fact, happened on deadline day. Milan still have a back four with an age profile that resembles that of the Rolling Stones. Man Utd still have no strikers - maybe they'll be the first to go for the 4-6-0! Man City didn't grab anyone (though they did ship out some Dickov-shaped deadwood out on loan and sold Bernardo Corradi to Parma). Arsenal signed Diarra from Chelsea, bringing their number of first-team midfielders under the age of 22 to approximately 400. And Nobby Solano, age 82, moved from Newcastle to West Ham, apparently of his own free will.

(Question of the week, courtesy of the Guardian's James Richardson: is signing for West Ham the football equivalent of playing drums for Spinal Tap? Ba-ZING!)

In Spain, Sevilla, apparently more worried about scoring goals than plugging holes in midfield, signed Arouna Kone from PSV. Asier Del Horno, after deceiving two real teams that he was a capable right-back, has returned to Bilbao and - shock! - Danny Szetela has moved from Columbus Crew to Racing Santander. This, needless to say, is a significantly more important sign of MLS quality than, say, the Andy Welsh-to-Blackpool transfer. Maxi Lopez decided that freezing his ass off in Russia was marginally better than being the butt of innumerable terrible hair/terrible player jokes as the 13th-choice striker at the Camp Nou, went to FC Moscow. In one of the most brazen pieces of highway robbery seen in years, Barcelona managed to get 2 million euros in return.

Somehow, over the course of the summer, I managed to miss the fact that Alexandre Pato made the jump from Brazil to Milan. How signing a lightweight midfielder came ahead of signing a defender not in imminent danger of need hip replacement surgery is beyond me. Tsk. Tiago continued his somewhat aimless international wanderings by leaving Lyon for Juve. Oh, and Uruguayan crap-merchant Alvaro Recoba has moved from Inter to Torino.

(I think I speak for just about everyone when I say: "Alvaro Recoba was still playing for Inter?")

A host of interesting but obscure transfers this summer involved Aegean teams. LuaLua went to Olympiakos, where he will be put in the unenviable position of trying to make fans at the cauldron-like Karaiskaki Stadium forget about Rivaldo. Tomasz Radzinski chose to sign for no-hopers Xanthi rather than return to Toronto. Kazim-Richards - arguably Sheffield United's only decent young player last year, made the switch to Fenerbahce, Shabani Nonda got shipped to Galatasaray and Gonzalo Higuain's less-talented brother Federico was snapped up by Beisktas.

In France, Lille paid the price for not qualifying for Europe last year by getting absolutely creamed in the transfer market, losing Peter Odemwingie (10 M euros) to Lokomotiv Moscow and Kader Keita to Lyon (18M). In return, they signed....er...Patrick Kluivert. Monaco picked up Adriano on dead-line day. (Not that one. This one.)

Finally, it is a complete mystery to me what the hell Dani Alves and Juan Roman Riquelme are going to do for the rest of the season, given that neither really wants to play for the team to which they are contracted. Or what Eidur Gudjohnsen, who is clearly now ranking about seventh on the Barcelona strikers' depth chart, plans to do for the next four months other than flake out in the city's cafes and enjoy the Barri Gotic.

Onanism, Abuse and Men in Black

2007-08-31T16:54:00.000-04:00

Different cultures have different "affectionate" names for referees. In Italy, the term "testa di merda" is the usual term of abuse for the men in black. In Spain, "cabron" is the phrase of choice , and while among American Latinos this term is usually thought untranslatable because of the way it manages to mix the concepts of "dude" and "asshole", among Castillians it's the latter, pure and simple. The English, however, for reasons that are not entirely clear, prefer the term "wanker".

I'd never really pondered how strange this was until about three weeks ago when, in the midst of another catastrophic Toronto FC performance, several thousand people began chanting "the referee's a wanker".

Now, "wanker" is not a term that comes easily to North American lips. It is incredibly difficult to insert into a sentence because it is so obviously British in origin; it's like referring to "the lads" or saying someone's performance was "pants". It's English, and everyone understands what it means, but it's probably less North American-sounding than, say, "cabron".

So I said to my neighbour, a noted local scribe and ecrivain, "do you think anyone in Canada can use the word "wanker" un-selfconsciously? It's so colonial." This earned me a stern rebuke from Sonny, who both sits behind me and is the owner of the loudest singing voice in section 221, who yelled: "don't intellectualize things!"

(I suppose another way to put that would have been "don't be a wanker".)

Back to my story: if you call someone a "shithead" or an "asshole", it suggests not just that you bear some hostility to this person, but also that you believe that the person in question is inimical - if not malevolent - towards you or your interests. If you call someone a "wanker", on the other hand, you're implying deviancy, not malevolance.

I think, arguably, this is a sign of differences in attitudes to the game between northern and southern Europe and explains why, say, at the Bernabeu, whistling at the ref is sometimes the most participatory event of the night - sometimes even ahead of applauding goals scored. The ref is seen as a potential opponent in Italy and Spain, whereas in England (the place from whence, for better or for worse, the MLS has imported its culture) he is seen as someone who might inadvertently ruin the game because of his potential for idiocy.

Wanking, after all, is something that happens periodically (like bad offside calls) - but an asshole is an asshole for ever.

The magnificent Italian referee Pierluigi Collina (pictured, above) is, by the way, neither a wanker nor an asshole nor a shithead. But he is both laziali and, as far as I can tell, the last remaining refugee from the set of THX 1138, both of which must make him eligible for some form of abuse.

The New Face of Arsenal?

2007-08-30T16:20:00.000-04:00

Yeah, that's Alisher Usmanov., new owner of the 14.5% of Arsenal shares formerly owned by David Dein. Not exactly Abramovich in the style department, is he?

Nor in other areas, either. Abramovich, to his credit, has managed to keep out of Moscow politics, even while being an elected governor of Russia's remote Chukotka province. He has always been careful never to get on Putin's bad side (his good friend Mikhail Khodorkovsky did so and he is now spending 10 years behind bars), but he has never been seen as a Putin cheerleader, either. Usmanov, in contrast, is very definitely a "Putin" oligarch. One of his more recent purchases was to Kommersant, one of the few remaining opposition newspapers which he allegedly did in order to turn it into a pro-Putin broadsheet

(For what it's worth, the US State Deparmtent's 2006 Russian Federation Country Report on Human Rights says there has been no discernable shift in Kommersant's editorial policy since the purchase).

In a neat coincidence, Kommersant used to belong to Boris Berezovsky, one of the first oligarchs to fall foul of Putin, fled into exile in London in 2002. Berezhovsky, long thought to be part of the obscure consortium financing Kia Joorabchian's MSI, was recently indicted in Brazil along with Joorabchian for having used MSI and Corinthians as a vehicle for money laundering. In response, Berezhovsky issued an indignant press release and said he could have nothing to do with Corinthians because "he was an Arsenal fan". Indeed, Emirates is so well known as a Berezhovsky hangout that his box might have been the site of an attempt on his life: during the Litvinenko assassination investigation last year, Berezhovsky's box at emirates was named by London police as one of the many sites around the city where traces of Polonium-210 were found. This raises the possibility that the take-over bid is in fact simply another Putin-inspired attempt to get at Berezovsky (although, to be fair, Usmanov also had a box at the Emirates last year).

Who is Usmanov, you may ask? An ethnically-Uzbek Russian citizen, steel magnate and 267th richest man in the world, according to Forbes. But he's obscure enough that he doesn't have his own wikipedia entry, which tells you something. But the Times has managed to pick up some useful stuff .

Something about this whole thing doesn't quite add up yet, though. Dein was kicked off the board for consorting with American Stan Kroenke, owner of another 12.2% of Arsenal stock - now he winds up working for Usmanov (technically, he sold his shares to an Usmanov-controlled company called "Red and White Holdings Limited", of which Dein is now the chairman). Does that mean Kroenke is now selling and Dein acting as a broker? Certainly, Dein says that Red and White are committed to buying more shares though adds that there is no "current intention" to buy the club outright (weasel words if ever I've heard them). Or are Kroenke and Usmanov about to get into a bidding war?

With Kroenke on board, Usmanov would only need to buy Danny Fiszman's 24% holding to get majority control. Without Kroenke, he would need at least another 12% and only Nina Bracewell-Smith (who seems unlikely to sell) has that many. This means that a general buy-out offer to dispersed smaller shareholders would likely be necessary to gain control. In any case, Arsenal board members (who collectively own 45% of the club's shares) have collectively pledged not to sell their shares until April 2008. Given all the inevitable delay and uncertainty over this, why is Dein making his move now?

As for the price - Dein got a cool 75M GBP for his shares, which implies an overall market cap of 513M GBP. That's only a little above the 495M GBP valuation Forbes gave the club last year, but about 20% over the cap figure contained in Arsenal's last annual report.

Macabre and Just Plain Wrong

2007-08-30T11:28:00.000-04:00

I want to like Michel Platini, I really do. He's the first European superstar I ever really followed. I still believe the France-Brazil quarterfinal match in the 1986 World Cup is the greatest game of football ever played, and despite the penalty miss, he was the star.

But really, what kind of an asshole would use the death of Antonio Puerta to launch the following message (quoted from Reuters)?

"These accidents on the pitch (i.e. Puerta's death - AG) will probably bring up the problem of the calendar," Platini told reporters on Thursday. "We all want to play less but we, at UEFA, are the first to play more Champions League matches, the associations have created the League Cup. The system is made so that the players play more and more."

Er, Michel? The last time anyone tinkered with the Champions League, it was to remove four matches. As far as I know, Portugal is the only country that has introduced a new League Cup recently (Denmark brought one in last year, but given that it consists of 45 minute matches I think we can discount any fatigue effects it may have). The only thing that has increased lately are qualifying matches for major international tournaments, due to the fissile nature of Europe's former multi-national entities like Yugoslavia and the USSR.

Moreover, when Puerta collapsed, he was playing in only his third competitve match of the season. These matches were spaced well apart - the Supercopa on the 12th and 19th of August, and the Getafe match on the 25th. He did not play in any international tournaments during the summer. Neither, by the way did Chaswe Nsofwa, a Zambian international playing in Israel who suffered a heart attack and died during a training session yesterday, nor did 16 year-old Walsall player Anton Reid, who dies in similar circumstances nine days ago, and - just so we're being inclusive - neither did Leicester's Clive Clarke, who collapsed during a League Cup match Tuesday. So the inference about fixture congestion is - shall we say - not empirically-driven.

So what prompted this spectacularly inaccurate outburst? We all know that Platini's long-term goal is to reign in the perceived power of major clubs in part by changing the organization of tournaments like the Champions League. Possibly, his agenda may also include the revival of his stillborn 2000 plan (back when he was working for Sepp Blatter) to harmonize the international playing schedul e by - get this - forcing all national leagues to reduce to 18 teams and to have national cups (including the FA Cup) end in November.

Though I don't agree with much of this, I suppose Platini's got a right to air his views and argue his corner before the UEFA membership. But draping spurious arguments over Puerta's coffin and using it as a prop is not just over the top but quite creepy.

Man United Spam Update

2007-08-30T08:49:00.000-04:00

So, I wake up this morning and find that this blog's daily hit-count has doubled. Not, let me assure you, due to my own meagre efforts, but rather to those of Tom at PitchInvasion, (possessor of the greatest flickr board in existence), who has kindly decided to link to my previous post about ManU spam and dignify it with the word "campaign". For those of you not bothering to read the comments section under each post, my missive has also attracted its fair-share of humour-challenged Mancs infuriated by my dissing "the greatest club in the world" (sigh...they make it too easy, don't they?).

So given that this seems to be causing some bit of a stir, I'd best mention some correspondence from a loyal reader who says that his message to the spammers was met with a very courteous phone(!) response from the Man Utd USA supporters' association that sent the spam. The gentleman apologized for the spam and said that they had been unaware that the mailing list to which the spam had been sent was filled with a lot of fans of other clubs (a bit odd, but whatever). He fully acknowledged the error and said they were trying to rectify the situation - which, admittedly, is really tough to do without spamming everyone a second time.

I'm not sure how many of you actually chose to contact the ManU folks, nor whether you got a similar call or email. But from where I'm sitting, I'd say fair play to them. They got the message and responded well.

Now, if only Fergie could acknowledge his transfer market blunders - still, no striker! - with the same speed....

(sorry, couldn't help it)

Last Minute Sales

2007-08-29T15:13:00.000-04:00

It's that time of year - a little over 48 hours to the close of the transfer market and everybody's out to see what the last minute deals are. Here's some brief predictions:

- Man U ain't buying another striker - but could borrow one or get one for free. Man U are totally stony broke. In fact, they've already spent probably two years' worth of transfer budgets this year - which is OK because Hargreaves, Anderson and Nani are all going to be at Old Trafford for quite some time. But following the sales of Rossi and Smith and the retirement of Solskjaer, they do have the teensy, weensy problem of not actually having a recognized striker that they are prepared to play. So expect them to look for someone cheap-ish. Gudjohnson is a possibility even though he doesn't entirely fit the bill as a striker.

- The Ronnie to Chelsea story is horseshit. I'm sorry, but it is. He's staying in Catalonia. Eidur Gudjohnsen, on the other hand *is* on his way out - now being about the 6th choice striker at the Camp Nou. Likely destinations: Anyone of a half-dozen northern cubs in the UK such as Man U, Man City, Blackburn, all of whom could certainly use him. But I wouldn't rule out a move to Italy, either.

- Man City have at least one more big buy in them. Not for any particular tactical reason, you understand - Eriksson is still memorizing his players' names and can't yet have any real sense of his squad's strengths and weaknesses. But that doesn't mean that he and his publicity-seeking owner won't go out and buy some big names. Julio Baptista is a distinct possibility. Ditto West Ham, who have seen two of their bug summer buys get nasty long-term injuries before the season is three weeks old. The problem is, it's not obvious how to back up for a guy like Kieron Dyer (what does he do, exactly? I've never been able to figure that out...)

- Adriano is going nowhere, except possibly Fiorentina. It is a smart idea for Inter to loan him out to given him time to keep his fitness levels (such as they are) up while he gets his head together. Unfortunately, this is one of those Groucho Marx situations: any team desperate enough to actually want Adriano is by definition not good enough for him (viz. the Hammers). I think Fiorentina may be the only place desperate enough for strikers that would appeal to him, but we'll see.

- Dani Alves will end up going *really* cheap - Sevilla clearly miscalculated somewhere. Del Nido clearly thought that by using the same techniques that Lyon used with Essien, they could extract big bucks out of Chelsea. But, totally out of character, Chelsea went with the cut-price option of Belletti instead (a move a feel sure they will regret, but whatever). And they didn't just not sell him - they went further and accused him of unprofessional behaviour by not flying with the team to Athens (a charge he vigorously disputes). Now they have an incredibly pissed off right-back and no obvious big-bucks buyer. He clearly can't stay - the situation seems too far gone for that (though the outpouring of emotion over Puerta's death makes a reconciliation at least conceivable). Real Madrid would die to have him, even though his attacking proclivities make him a nonsensical addition to a (ahem) defensively-challenged squad. But with no rival bidders and no option but to sell him, Sevilla may find they get a lot less from his sale than they would have ten days ago had they sold to Chelsea.

- Milan will make a last-minute bid for a defender under the age of 40. Seriously - doesn't it strike you as odd that the allegedly best team in Europe last year had not one but two defenders whose career started during Reagan's first term? Demographic crises shouldn't hit clubs as big as Milan and yet, instead of addressing the issue, what does Ancelotti do in the off-season? Buy Emerson, yet another central midfielder. This for a team which already has the world's finest central midfield pairing of Gattuso and Pirlo. They need someone younger to help rejuvenate the back line, desperately...which is why it is not out of the question that they may just turn up as surprise suitors for Alves...

Anyways, that's my 2 cents. Anybody else have any rash predictions? Hit the comments, below...

Worst. Spam. Ever.

2007-08-29T10:10:00.001-04:00

I have been spammed by a football club.

Now, look, I enjoy getting penile enhancement product spam from people with names like "Guido Subramanian" as much as the next guy. It's a part of modern life. But getting unsolicited email from the Manchester United Supporters Club of America was a bit of a shock.

Seriously, who thought this was a good idea?

If you're going to do direct mail, you don't need to know that everyone you send it to will be in agreement with you. But you do need to know that what you're sending them won't drive them around the bend to the point where they react negatively and do something to your brand.

With that in mind, if you are like me and loathe Man United, or just loathe spam in general (or both), why not write to membership@manutdusa.org and tell them to stop this nonsense?

Nonsense on Stilts

2007-08-28T19:20:00.000-04:00

Rummaging through some old press clippings, I came across an interview with Michel Platini in the FT from last September (that is to say, just before he became UEFA President). It's an intriguing interview, because he makes a lot of sensible points while at the same time occasionally making an incredible howler.

The best bit: Football has always been based on identity and rivalry. There were the people of Arsenal against the people of Tottenham, the people of England against the people of France, Moldova against Georgia.

This is good, sensible stuff. Football is very tribal, with the caveat that unlike in real life, you get to pick your tribe to a certain extent anyways. Football is not really about peace and love, as Sepp Blatter and the FIFA-heads would have you believe: it has a hard edge that cannot be dulled. Bravo, Michel!

He continues: Today there is no more rivalry. If the President of a club like Chelsea isn't English, if the coaches aren't English, if the players aren't English, I wonder why Chelsea plays in England.

Here's where he goes off the path. Even those of us who find incessant Sky yammering about "Super Sundays" incredibly irritating have to admit that there is in fact quite a bit of rivalry about these days, not all of it contrived. And part of the reason is that Chelsea fans are damn proud that all these foreigners have chosen to sign up and fight for Chelsea's colours. Why should Chelsea fans care who fights for them on the field or coaches them from the sidelines? To care would be to suggest that people who aren't from South London aren't fit to play for Chelsea - which to my mind borders on racism.

I would say that the popularity of football has been based on this sense of identification and on sporting rivalry between people. Never on turnover. Today, if you have money, you win.

Good Christ. Where to begin?

First, the idea that results have never been based on turnover is just wrong. In most countries, there have always been a couple of very large and well supported teams (e.g. Juve in Italy, Real Madrid in Spain, Benfica in Portugal) who have used their financial muscle, based on gate receipts, to buy the best players available. And second, to the extent that in some countries there were factors that restrained big clubs from using their full financial muscle, this restraint could only be exercised by limiting the rights and remuneration of footballers through things like maximum wages and restrictions on player registration.

There has never, ever been any restraint on teams making money: only restraint of allowing players to earn their full worth on the market. So what Platini is really so dreamily nostalgic about is the days when players knew their place and could be well exploited

(Platini himself, of course, famously spurned a move to Arsenal in favour of La Signora Vecchia, as players in Italy were much freer to earn large amounts of money).

I know it is fashionable to bash "big money" in football and a lot of people - including Platini, apparently - get a certain amount of anti-capitalist cachet from doing so. But it's bullshit. Big money, fundamentally, means playing players well. And lord knows, I'd prefer my money to players than to owners. They play, they entertain, they are the ones who give us the games we love. For the most part, they deserve the money.

R.I.P

2007-08-28T11:39:00.001-04:00

Update: Antonio Puerta was pronounced dead today, three days after suffering a heart attack. There is no word on whether an autopsy will be performed.

In the last 48 hours it has been revealed that Sevilla at least knew that he had some kind of serious physical condition. In an interview on Brazilian radio, teammate Luis Fabiano said that Puerta had "fainted" twice before - once in a friendly match and once in training. Sid Lowe, speaking on the Guardian podcast yesterday said that Puerta himself - in his brief moments of lucidity between his revival on the pitch and his subsequent second (and permanent) collapse in the dressing room - was heard muttering about the return of "that illness".

If true, it is quite possible that Sevilla may face severe penalties from the Spanish FA for knowing allowing him to play with a serious medical condition.

Fingers Crossed

2007-08-26T23:06:00.000-04:00

22 year-old Sevilla midfielder Antonio Puerta suffered a heart attack during the 4-1 victory over Getafe on the weekend. He was the fifth professional player to have suffered an on-field heart attack this decade, but the only one so far to have survived the incident.

Most famously, Cameroon's Marc Vivien Foe collapsed and died during the Confederations' Cup semi-final in 2003. As it turned out, he suffered from an enlarged right ventricle - a condition doctors said would not have been detectable prior to the heart attack. Six months later, Benfica's Miklos Feher died of cardiac arrest brought on by heart palpitations which - indirectly - were brought about by a condition involving the thickening of the heart walls.

Later in 2004, Sao Caetanho's central defender Serginho collapsed and died on the field of a heart attack. Unlike the other two deaths, Serginho's case was more sinister because the club knew he had a heart condition (cardiomyopathy) and permitted him to play anyway. In an extraordinary move the CBF - not normally being known for holding anyone to account for anything - hot the club with a 24-point deduction and handed lengthy suspensions to the club's President and chief medical officer (cynics would probably note that the severity of the punishment was inversely related to the club's popular appeal and that a team like Flamengo or Corinthians would not have received such a sentence).

A couple of weeks later, another Brazilian, Cristiano de Lima died of a heart attack while playing for Dempo Sports Club in the final of India's Federation Cup against Mohun Bagal. While scoring the winning goal, he was struck in the chest by the Mohun Bagal keeper Subrata Paul. The contact apparently caused his heart to stop and de Lima died en route to hospital. Many - including national team captain Baichung Bhutia - called for 19-year old Paul to be banned from the game and even criminally charged for the incident. But Paul stayed in the game and is now in the national team with Bhutia (the two both played yesterday in a 3-0 Nehru Cup victory over Kyrgysztan).

The latest news from Marca suggests that Puerta's condition is still very serious (he remains on a ventilator) but that it has not worsened. No news reports I have seen have suggested anything about any a possible pre-existing condition (though my Spanish may simply not be good enough to have noticed). Here's just hoping he breaks football's most macabre streaks.

Law 13

2007-08-25T16:23:00.000-04:00

Denizens of the Kingdom: I present you with a fiendishly difficult trivia question, which has been much vexing me for about four hours now.

Idly perusing the Laws of the Game this morning, I came across something I'd never noticed before in law XIII (Free kicks). To wit:

if a direct free kick is kicked directly into the opponents' goal, a goal is awarded
if a direct free kick is kicked directly into the team's own goal, a corner kick is awarded to the opposing team

Now the first bullet is easy enough to understand - it's what makes a kick direct, after all.

But where in the hell does the second bullet come from? Why does the IFAB feel the need to specify for this eventuality? Was the law originally written in such a different way as to give a team a possibility of some advantage to putting the ball in one's own net? Or did the rule arise because some poor idiot once managed to accidentally to score on himself?

A quick look at the History of the Rules of the Game on the FIFA site was singularly unilluminating, since apparently no rule changes prior to 1978 were worth putting on the site. And I can't find the 1938 version of the Laws of the game on-line anywhere.

So, does anyone know the answer to this?

Now My Brain Hurts, too

2007-08-24T11:41:00.001-04:00

Three books to tell you about.

The first is When Saturday Comes: the Half-decent Football Book. Now, I bow to no one in my admiration of the monthly magazine the folks at WSC put out. But this book is painful - and not simply because of its dictionary-like weight and format. I'm not entirely sure what they were thinking when they published it as it can only harm their reputation.

What's it like? Imagine taking about 20 issues of their magazine, concentrating all the bits that make them sound like humourless anorak-wearing little Englanders who would like nothing more than to bring the game back to its pre-Taylor report glories, and concentrate them in one book. Ok, now arrange the titled offerings in alphabetical order. That's this book. Personally, I'd have far preferred a WSC book made up of the bits they left out; notably their excellent but too-short foreign coverage. Unless you have some sort of chronic illness which requires you to have potted histories of 100-odd English and Scottish clubs close at hand, there is no reason to buy it.

There is even less reason to buy the book Casuals, by Phil Thornton. I would crap on this book from a great height but it's far too easy and really I'm the one who needs my head examined for ever having thought it worth perusing. The conceit of this book - are you ready for this? - is that there are actually people in the world who care deeply enough about the relationship between regional English youth cultures, football hooliganism and the evolution of fashion (English fashion, let me hasten to add) to actually read over 270 pages of mostly oral history on the subject from "those who were there", including "celebrity" interviewee Peter Hooton of the late and not-terribly lamented band The Farm.

Terrace culture is at least potentially an interesting subject. This book - which devotes an incredible amount of space to detailing the years in which mullets replaced mushrooms, Armani replaced Fila and Reeboks began rivalling Adidas - does not even begin to scratch the surface of this subject in an intelligent way.

Let me be perfectly clear: this book is not worth reading. It is worth incinerating. If you need to emigrate to avoid reading it, do so. My eyes bled and bits of my lower cerebellum crawled out my ear as I foolishly read the book cover-to-cover (I'm stubborn that way) in search of something with at least a passing resemblance to meaning or insight about football. The best I could come up with is that being a terrace regular - particularly those who make it a habit to go to away games - is a far more narcissistic pastime than is commonly thought.

The third book is David Wangerin's Soccer in a Football World, which is published by WSC. Unlike the other two, this one is most definitely worth a look. It is a little bit plodding in places (I think I now know more about internecine warfare between rival US soccer federations in the 1920s than any person strictly should), but it provides some great long-term perspective on the growth of football in America - and especially why particular regions in New England and the Midwest (e.g. Kansas City) became football hotbeds. For those who think the sport began with the arrival of the NASL (an impression one could easily get by reading Gavin Newsham's Once in a Lifetime), this is a great antidote. I'd write more about it, but CultureofSoccer has already written a far better and far longer review than I could, so just go read it here.

My Ears Hurt

2007-08-21T21:57:00.000-04:00

I don't usually do requests, but...

A few weeks ago I showed up at BMO field to be confronted by the very confusing site of the Barenaked Ladies wandering around the pitch. I thought maybe they were just there to do the national anthems - which they did without undue butchery.

But, as it turned out, they were also there to release a new song. One about TFC.

No, really.

They gave it a once-through, and by the time they'd finished the first chorus: "T is for Toronto, F is for Football, C is for the Club that we la-la-la-la love", my (admittedly somewhat jaded) ten year-old had gone as contemputously bug-eyed and slack-jawed as humanly possible.

"Oh. My. God," he said, as slowly as he could. "Worst. Song. Ever."

But, as it turns out, he was speaking prematurely. For the TFC tune was actually part of an Adidas promotional campaign where different bands made up cheezy songs for every team in the league.

No, really.

The efforts range from the barely respectable (Dallas) to the unbearably execrable (Toronto is bad, but Salt Lake is far worse), with a heavy emphasis on the latter.

But the fact that anyone connected to the league thought this was a good idea is cause for utter despair. It's as if the MLS actually wants people to think that the sport is as plastic as its pitches.

Listen and weep.

Statistical Cherry-Picking

2007-08-21T06:48:00.000-04:00

While surfing the other day I came across this gem of an article on football as a metaphor for globalization by Branko Milanovic, Lead Economist at the World Bank's research department. It's an interesting argument about how the free movement in labour in football - as in all other areas - can lead to higher overall welfare (i.e. better top-level competitions watched globally) while at the same time leading to localized losses of welfare (i.e. African competitions starved of local talent) due to what he cleverly calls "leg drain". Basically - more money + more mobility = more concentration of talent. Which is great if you happen to support the richer teams and bad if you don't.

Milanovic's thesis is interesting, but unfortunately he relies on three statistical examples which are - in my humble opinion - totally bogus.

The first two observations relates to the competitiveness of the European Cup/Champions League. He notes that since the start of the big-money high-mobility era (which, can be dated from pretty much anywhere in between the birth of the Premiership in 1992 and the Bosman ruling in 1995), the concentration of CL quarter-finalists has increased (that is, there are fewer of them over any given stretch of time), and that even among the quarter-finalists, there is also greater concentration of semi-finalists, finalists and winners. Fewer teams, in other words, are getting to the top at each level.

I won't bore you with the critique of his use of gini coefficients: suffice to say that he has managed to create a statistical argument in which 1998-2002 (the article was written in 2003) appears to be the period of the greatest concentration of talent in history despite the fact that no team won the CL two years in a row in this period. Other periods of clear single-team dominance - such as Real Madrid's five straight in the 50s, the back-to-back three-peats of Ajax and Bayern in the 1970s, and Liverpool's incredible run in the late 1970s and early 1980s - all apparently were more competitive eras than the present.

Even if this were true, there is presumably a confounding factor in his analysis; namely, the collapse of the east bloc after 1990. Yes, the 1990s were a time of increasing money and mobility in Europe. But in European competitions, the effect was magnified by the fact that certain footballing nations were in the midst of economic turmoil and unable to compete financially. Only now do we see a reversal of this trend, with big Russian (and to a lesser extent Ukranian) clubs starting to compete for big money players. Now that eastern teams can genuinely compete for the signatures of marquee players like Neri Castillo and Vagner Love, one assumes the effect will gradually be reversed.

His third statistical argument is even shakier. Using the more money + more mobility = less competition thesis, he hypothesizes that within countries with large income inequalities, over time good teams will tend to converge in the richer areas of the country. His illustration of this is that, over time (up until 2002) the number of teams in Serie A from the country's poorer south was decreasing.

This is nonsense. First, the disappearance of southern teams from Serie A in 2002 was an extremely temporary phenomenon: the number is up again - significantly - and Palermo even managed to qualify for Europe two seasons in a row. Second, the geographic concentration of football clubs is highly path-dependent and contingent upon historical factors. The concentration of English football in Lancashire and the midlands cannot be predicted on the basis of economics, but follows relatively smoothly from the fact that all thirteen of the original members of the League were from these areas. The near-total absence of good football in Paris is certainly not a result of the capital's lack of money, either.

Part of the problem here - and indeed, part of the problem of any econometric analysis of football - is that while the value of football's human inputs - (player quality as measured in transfer dollars, statistical measurements or whatever) can be be shoved into econometric equations with relative ease, the arrangement of those inputs cannot. Teams are more than the sum of their parts. Mourinho's Porto, Clough's Forest, Del Nido's Chievo - even Lobanovsky's Dynamo - are all examples of teams playing collectively way above their level because of the way they play as an integrated unit. As Perez found out at Madrid, you can't simply buy success.

There is also the issue of tactics. Teams with limited abilities (e.g. Liverpool under Benitez) can gain success simply by signing a lot of tall players and pinging the ball around in the air a lot. The resulting football can sometime resemble "shit on a stick" (best Jorge Valdano quote ever) but it is undeniably effective - and extremely difficult to model statistically.

(for the record, I'm with Brian Clough: if football were meant to be played in the air, God would have put grass in the sky.)

Anyways, have a look at the Milanovic piece. It's entertaining and the basic points are interesting even if they are contestable: and it's a good economics lesson, anyway.

Home Truths About TFC

2007-08-20T05:52:00.000-04:00

Apologies to my non-Canadian readers who may find this post a little parochial, but I just have to write something about my own club.

I'll say it before anyone else does: the bloom is off the rose as far as Toronto FC is concerned. I offer you six points:

1) The midfield is atrocious. Pretty much the only statistic you need to know about FC is this: with Ronnie O'Brien in the line-up, their record is W5D4L3 with F18A16. Without Ronnie O'Brien in the lineup they are W0D1L7 with F0A18. Say what you want about Edu, Robbo or any of the clowns who have been playing on the wings apart from Ronnie: they simply aren't very good. They can't get forward to save their lives and while the central duo are reasonably efficient defensively, the number of goals conceded from breaks down the wing is woefully high.

2) The Dichio-worship is an embarrassment. Let me be clear here: the fans have a right to a hero and Dichio's performance against Chicago in May (first team goal, first team red cards) means it is right and proper that he be feted in legend and have his name sung every game in the 24th minute. But face facts: he's not actually all that good. A uniquely slow forward, with a turning radius the size of an elephant, it says volumes - libraries, even - about the quality of MLS defending that Dichio has managed to pot five goals in ten games. Don't get me wrong - it's great to sing his name (and I do!), just as Gooners sing for Perry Groves. But to actually think that this guy's return to fitness means anything other than an increase in the number of balls lumped forward in search of his big shiny forehead is madness.

3) Mo Johnston is a one-dimensional tactician. The problem with hiring Mo as a coach is this: he's British. And as such, he has brought with him a host of idiotic British coaching ideas such as: 1) the ideal combination up front is "a big 'un and a little 'un", with lots of long-balls played off the big 'un's head; 2) grit, effort and "battling" are worth more than actual skill (I can only think this is the reason that Andy Welsh and Colin Samuel - the latter being the possessor of one of the worst first touches in all of football - still grace the starting XI); 3) regularly changing to three at the back if the team is down a couple of goals late. The injury-induced experiment of 4-5-1 in late July and early August was another example of Mo's limited skills. 4-5-1 only works if your striker can hold up the ball (which Lombardo couldn't) and if your midfielders can get forward (which apart from Edu they couldn't). Given these obvious defects, five in the midfield just cluttered things up and made passing difficult: five at the back would have been preferable.

4) The fans aren't as great as they think they are. Yes. we're loud, yes, we sing, yes we regularly fill the place (although the boast that we "always sell-out" is clearly nonsense to judge by the number of vacant seats on the east and west sides these days). But the singing becomes more ragged with every passing game - rather like the team itself, each section is trying to do its own thing to help the struggling team, but the result is cacophony. The beer-throwing thing may seem cute at home but reflects badly on the team when we're on the road (see here for how that behaviour went over in New York - although for the record, I was there and can say with some authority that only two of our boys got tossed). And, in an inglorious moment in Giants stadium that had to happen, I got to hear my first racist comment from a fan; to wit, some guy who thought it would be cute to say that Colin Samuel's lack of distinction in the game was because "he thought Caribana was still on". It's not monkey-grunting or banana-throwing, but it's still really ugly.

5) MLSE is letting fans down by not signing a marquee player. We have the largest fan-base in the league. The team has to be making money - so why not invest in the squad? Maybe not a Beckham, but surely to God we have the money for a Juan Pablo Angel-type player. Not signing one in the European close-season means we won't have one at the start of next season, either: July '08 is the earliest we could reasonably expect one to arrive. The real worry here is that MLSE begins to treat FC the way it treats the Leafs: as a cash cow, where investment in players in unnecessary because the fans will show up no matter what. That Aston Villa friendly may have been portentious: we may just have a Doug Ellis ourselves....

6) That goddamn John Doyle article in the Guardian. I know a lot of people were chuffed by seeing our beloved team noticed in England, but it's humiliatingly colonial to want to be noticed back in the old country that badly. Plus the tone was irritatingly self-congratulatory, harping as it did on our allegedly great fans and allegedly multi-cultural nature. Personally, I thought the fellow who commented on the story by pointing out the lack of enthusiasm for FC and the overly Anglo style of its play and fan culture among the city's Italian and Portuguese communities was much more interesting and on-the-mark. Plus it was inaccurate (who the hell, apart from Doyle himself, actually calls Johnston "Trader Mo"?). Why the Guardian chose to publish an article by a journalist that the Globe and Mail doesn't trust to write sports is beyond me. He's their TV columnist, for Christ's sake; moreover, one whose only original contribution to Canadian journalism in the last five years has been to hilariously christen CBC headquarters as "Fort Dork". Seriously.

Anyways, that's my rant. I'll be back singing "Toronto 'til I die" like always next Saturday in section 221. But I'm an increasingly unhappy camper and I don't think I'm alone. I just think that being Canadians, everybody else is too polite to say it.

4-6-0?

2007-08-19T08:59:00.000-04:00

Here's my bold prediction for the week. At some point in the next decade or so, some club playing 4-5-1 will introduce the bold experiment of withdrawing their forward and the new era of 4-6-0 will begin.

Partly, this move is predictable in terms of long-term historical trends We've gone from the 2-1-7 (1860-1880), to 2-3-5 (1880-1935) to 3-4-3 (1935-1956 in its British W-M version and to the present day in its more attacking Dutch version), to 4-2-4 (1950-1960) to 4-4-2 (1960 - present day) and even to 4-5-1 (mostly in the past decade, mostly in England).

Some people assume that the increasing ratio of defenders to forwards is the sign of an increasing negativity in the game. This is only partly true. Yes, defending has taken on more importance, but only because attacking play has become so much more refined.

Another key historical trend is the increasing fitness levels of players as a whole, which permits players to cover much more ground in a game (the average footballer in 1970 ran 3 miles per game - it's now up to about 6...this is how Johan Cruyff and Socrates could both be footballing giants while maintaining pack-a-day smoking habits). Put simply, goals don't have to come from cherry-picking forwards, they can as easily come from surging midfielders.

The third important trend is that midfielders themselves are - in a classic example of late-capitalist production modes - becoming increasingly specialized in their roles. The division between wingers and central midfielders has always existed, of course, and there has always been a difference in style between the more attack-oriented "wingers" and the more defensively-oriented "wing-backs" (although the latter are a seriously endangered breed - since the popularization of the overlapping full-back most have been converted into defenders in the Ashley Cole/Dani Alves mode even though they would probably play as well or better in midfield, rather as Emmanuel Eboue is doing this season at Arsenal).

But now we have a plethora of roles: the deep-lying "shield"/ballwinner (e.g. Makalele or Gattuso), the central attacking trequartista or "number 10" (e.g. Totti), the hard-running dynamo or "watercarrier" (e.g. Hargreaves), the cut-inside winger (e.g. Pires), the long-pass specialist (e.g. Pirlo and possibly Beckham), the short-pass specialist (e.g. Fabregas), the deep-lying playmaker/"number 5"/"quarterback" (e.g. Riquelme).

None of these are new positions, per se - each of them has existed to some degree somewhere in the world for decades. But the globalization of the game in the 1990s (or, more specifically, the influx of a vast array of international talent into the Spanish, Italian and English leagues) has meant that a lot of these styles have mixed and converged for the first time in the past ten years and this is producing some new possibilities for the game. The Argentinian "number 5" position, for instance, is almost unknown in Europe: but the arrival of Juan Roman Riquelme has opened a lot of people's eyes to the possibility of that type of player. Trequartistas are common in Italy and Portugal but still haven't completely caught on in England (think Bergkamp playing a little deeper or Scholes playing a little further forward).

Anyways, with all these new bustling creative midfield options available, do you really need a striker? Why not play with two ballwinners behind four attacking midfielders (two central, two wide), all of whom have license to surge forward at will?

There are some obstacles, obviously. Six in midfield is pretty crowded and does not have a glorious history (Steve Sampson famously and disastrously became enamoured of the 3-6-1 in the 1998 World Cup and the Americans came home after three straight losses). Not having someone high up the field reduces the ability of defenders to play long balls (though not everyone would see this as a bad thing).

Obviously, a 4-6-0 would require a certain fairly specific mix of quite talented individuals playing a high-tempo pass and move game with a lot of position-swapping. But I'm fairly sure it would be successful simply because it would create chaos among opposing centre-backs who would no longer have anyone to man-mark. A similar ploy by the Hungarians in 1953 (dropping one attacker - Hidegkuti - off the forward line by a few yards) resulted in England shipping 13 goals in two games because none of the admittedly none-to-bright Englishmen could figure out how to mark deep-lying attackers.

The team to do it? Possibly the Brazilian national team, possibly Arsenal. The squad that played in Prague this week was pretty close having the right combination of talents to play a 4-6-0...if van Persie had played a little deeper we might have seen the birth of something quite interesting.

Forwards will ever be eliminated completely because they represent individual flair and brilliance more than any other position, but they will become optional for some teams. Squads that prefer an athletic, attacking, intelligent, collectivist approach may find that leaving one or two men upfield all the time is a bit of a waste. 4-6-0 will be their formation of choice.

Narcissism of Small Differences

2007-08-18T06:18:00.001-04:00

Ok, so everybody here knows that a star on a jersey at the international level represents the number of world cups won. Everybody also probably knows that a star on a club jersey in Italy means ten scudettos won.

Some of you might even know that in Italy, the presence of a little multi-coloured bull's-eye on the jersey (one that looks like it belongs on the wing of a WW-II spitfire) indicates that the club in question are current holders of the Coppa Italia.

But did you know that in England, only teams that have won the FA Cup are permitted to have triangular corner flags? Everybody else has to do with simple rectangular ones.

Someone smarter than me may be able to derive some deeper meaning from the fact that English FA are prepared to sanction such extraordinarily obscure and trivial public displays of rank, but I'm stumped. To me it just seems dumb.

Good Football Blogs

2007-08-14T02:12:00.000-04:00

You know my familiar beef about football blogs - too many team-specific blogs, not enough blogs about the game itself. Two in particular have caught my eye this week.

First up is Culture of Soccer, which covers a lot of the same ground as this blog except that its author, David Keyes, is clearly a lot more disciplined about maintaining his site than I am about mine.

Second is pitchinvasion.net, which is a new site specifically about fan cultures. It's still pretty new, and so may still fall prey to the perennial blogger's nemesis of "who the hell has time to update their blog all the time?" syndrome, but let's hope not: it's very much worth reading.

Finally, on the subject of football website - does anybody know what has happened to French football club Web FC? Has the team gone under or does the web site just suck? And why have none of the British journalists covering the MyFootballClub story not clued into the fact that the particular wheeze of fans-own-club-and-choose-tactics -and-players (sort of a James Surowieski take on football management) stuff has already been tried across the channel?

And yes, that's Surowiecki's picture up there. I know, it's lame. But you try finding an appropriate phot to accompany a blog entry about blogs.