Tag: Footballs
Kylian Mbappé saga shows football’s power lies with players, not clubs
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So whose side are you on in the fallout following Kylian Mbappé’s decision to stay with Paris Saint-Germain? Watching the extraordinary outrage in Spain, with the press accusing the Frenchman of lacking class and La L...
Qatar 2022 raises more questions of how to navigate modern football’s moral maze
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On 2 December 2010, I was hosting an event on behalf of the England 2018 World Cup bid outside City Hall in central London. It was toe-curlingly cold. My co-host, Charlotte Jackson, and I were joined by Peter Crouch a...
Pursuit of happiness: the problem with supporting one of football’s super clubs
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The hymns were still playing and the sermons were still being read, but the cathedral was in flames. The Parc des Princes, this monument to glory and desire, the place where you go to see your fantasies made flesh, wa...
How we met: ‘She was giving out free footballs, and I thought she was really beautiful’
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In January 2016, Nick’s mother died. He had only been living in Bristol for six months when it happened. “It was difficult because I didn’t know many people,” he says. A week later, his girlfriend dumped him by text. ...
Campaigners take three-day march in push to end football’s gambling habit
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A lot started to make sense for Peter Keogh in the aftermath of the suicide of his son, Lewis. The 2am requests for an online game of Scrabble, for example, in the months leading up to his death. Lewis, who died in 20...
‘We play to forget what happened’: football’s refuge for girls who fled atrocities
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Lucy is the team’s captain, so she looks after the ball. Her family’s house is about 10 minutes’ walk from the pitch: it is one of the more established dwellings in Minawao, a permanent structure largely screened behi...
African football’s indecisive leaders must accept the blame for Olembe tragedy
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Even in his first press conference after Monday’s disaster at the Stade Olembé in which eight fans died, Patrice Motsepe, the president of the Confederation of African Football, was looking to shift the blame. He conv...
Digital fans represent football’s future so should clubs start listening?
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In 2020 the European Club Association conducted research into what it called the “Future Fan”. A survey across seven countries asked 14,000 people about their interest in football and how they interacted with the game...
2021 was the year when football’s silent majority finally found its voice
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Remarkably, the website is still live. Eight months after the European Super League disintegrated in an embarrassing fireball, you might think its founders would be minded to erase all trace of their hubris and humili...
Could Deion Sanders tip college football’s power balance toward Black schools?
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Deion Sanders is the ultimate jack of all trades. As a college athlete at Florida State he starred at football, baseball and track. Selected fifth in the 1989 NFL draft Sanders instantly proved a triple threat as a co...
Male survivors unite to expose sexual abuse at college football’s biggest rivals
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Fans of famed rivals Ohio State University and the University of Michigan often boast of how little they have in common. But two of America’s biggest college sports programs are bonded by one issue: a history of sexua...
Revealed: football’s plan for Qatar workers’ centre as World Cup legacy
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Plans are being developed within football for the creation of a permanent workers’ centre in Qatar that would support the rights of migrant labourers, as the game seeks to leave a positive legacy after the 2022 World ...
Matt Araiza: college football’s breakout star is … a punter?
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Punting is one of those things non-punters rarely think about. It’s like the post office. It’s there. It does a job. But it’s rarely important unless someone makes a mistake. There has never been a rockstar of the pro...
Berbatov v Mihaylov and the battle for Bulgarian football’s future
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Two years ago, almost to the day, Bulgarian football made headlines for all the wrong reasons. On the pitch Bulgaria lost 6-0 to England in a record home defeat. Off the pitch, in the stands of the Vasil Levski stadiu...
Newcastle United sale is a new low in football’s corruption by money
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Barney Ronay is right that “English football has reached a particular kind of extreme” by agreeing to the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United (Newcastle’s Saudi takeover will cause faux morality of football to collapse...
Miro Rys: US football’s first teenage star was killed before his prime
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During a locker room celebration after a World Cup qualifying win over Canada on 20 October 1976, Miro Rys could not have been more elated. The 19-year-old striker not only scored the opener of the US’s 2-0 triumph bu...