Daily Archives: January 2, 2025

Best of 2024 from The Athletic UK: Our staff pick their favourite pieces (by their colleagues)

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“We didn’t expect to write about flowery wallpapers in 2024, that’s for sure. Or Taylor Swift. We did expect to write about Jurgen Klopp, Erik ten Hag, and Lamine Yamal, and Andy Murray retiring. It was a wild old year in the world of sport and we wanted to take a moment to look back at — and celebrate — the excellent work of our writers over the past 12 months, covering not just football (soccer), but tennis, the Olympics, the Paralympics, and athletics, too. We wanted to know what they liked, too, so we asked them to nominate articles, podcasts or videos produced by their colleagues and tell us why. So here are all the pieces of work selected by writers, editors and producers on The Athletic UK and North American soccer staff (the editors in the U.S. did their own version of this, too). Enjoy! …”
NY Times/The Athletic (Video)

Johan Cruyff and the incredible wallpaper drawings that explain modern football

The art of scanning in football

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“Earlier in the season, Frank Lampard spent some time with Rodri at Manchester City, breaking down the Ballon d’Or winner’s game as part of a ‘midfield masterclass’ that he was filming. ‘I did about a 50-second run of him against Aston Villa where he was scanning through the pitch,’ former Chelsea and England midfielder Lampard tells The Athletic. ‘He kind of went deep, got the ball, checked his shoulder five times, did it again and ended up putting (Ilkay) Gundogan through on goal. So he’s a scanner.’ Lampard was a scanner too. When Geir Jordet, a professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, carried out a study a decade or so ago, after getting his hands on a pile of Premier League ‘Player Cam’ DVDs, he discovered that Lampard scanned more frequently than any of the other 117 footballers he watched. …”
NY Times/The Athletic (Video)