“Mexican striker Javier Hernandez stole the Monday morning headlines following his match-winning brace for Manchester Utd against Stoke City but things aren’t so rosy back at his old club Guadalajara Chivas. Sunday’s ‘clasico of the clasicos’ against bitter capital city rivals America ended 0-0, the second half of which was at times exasperating to watch. The clash pits the all-Mexican, provincial ‘people’s club’ from second city Guadalajara against Mexico City’s America, whose name alone alludes to intentions of grandeur.” (WSC)

“When Ottmar Hitzfeld was the coach of Borussia Dortmund back in the 1990s, he admitted that defeat would prompt him to sink into a two-day depression. It’s hardly surprising when you consider that being a manager (to use the British term) is the most demoralising job in football. You stand on the sideline, impotent to influence events other than through gestures and calls. And when your team loses, you end up taking most of the blame.” (WSC)

“The latter qualifying round stages of the FA Cup have a habit of rather creeping up on us. One week, village teams are playing each other in front of a handful of men and their dogs, but before you know it there is something altogether more significant at stake. This weekend it’s the Third Qualifying Round stage, and everybody involved this weekend has something to play for. The relative giants (and it is relative – Luton Town or Darlington, say, look like goliaths on the horizon if your club struggles to bring in a three figure crowd on a regular basis) of the Blue Square Premier enter the competition in the final qualifying round, and the winners of this afternoon’s matches also pocket £7,500 – a tidy sum for a small club, and on top of that lies the opportunity to profit still further from involvement in the next round, at least.” (twohundredpercent), (The Football Association – Video)

“It’s incredible to think of all of the enhancements that are made to Football Manager year after year. The game becomes closer to real life football management with each release. And now we have a sneak peek of what will be featured in Football Manager 2011 which will be released before the end of 2010.” (EPL Talk)

Football Manager 2011
(Football Manager)

“It was supposed to be a friendly game. One team, led by the president of Boliiva, Evo Morales, versus a team led by a political foe, the Mayor of La Paz, Luis Revilla.” (npr)

“FIFA 11 reinvents player authenticity – on and off the ball – for every player and at every position on the pitch with Personality+, an all-new feature that sees individual abilities reflected in game, enabling clear differentiation for every player.” (EA)

The twohundredpercent FIFA 11 Review
“Football games on consoles. FIFA vs Pro Evolution Soccer. There was a time when it was all so much easier than it is now. EA Sports had spent all of the money for FIFA on the licences and seemed to have very little left over for the game itself. Konami, on the other hand, knew that with Pro Evolution Soccer, if you wanted something that felt like the real thing, you would put up with Merseyside Blue playing against Connaught. With the seventh generation – the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 – of consoles, however, the balance tipped dramatically in the other direction. Pro Evolution Soccer stood still, while FIFA 2008, FIFA 2009 and FIFA 10 made quantum leaps in terms of the actual game-playing experience itself.” (twohundredpercent)

FIFA 11 – Demo Impressions
“It’s that time of year again football fanaticos. It’s FIFA time. Europe’s top leagues are now all underway and the transfer window has just slammed shut. The World Cup is now nothing but a memory, and a great one at that. While fans get used to their favorite European club’s new players and lineups, this time of year is full of hope, ambition, and potential for soccer fans the world over. There’s only one thing missing: an up to date FIFA!” (mmomfg)

FIFA ’11 Features You Won’t See
“It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of our super-secret-sources has given us the heads up about some of the features that DIDN’T make it into FIFA ’11. So when you put your brand spanking new copy into your PS3/Xbox today, you can think about what could have been.” (Cheeky Chip)

FIFA 11 – Arsenal vs Real
(YouTube)

“Football management is an extraordinarily harsh business. Managers are judged in the harsh glare of the public eye, with debate over their shortcomings often being led by those that shout the loudest, regardless of whether those doing the shouting are right or not. Many people that we might have expected to be very effective managers have fallen at the first hurdle, and many of them have not been given a second chance. It feels extremely doubtful that the position of manager of a football club could be beneficial in any way for the wellbeing of an individual that has suffered from alcoholism or is understood to have mental health issues.” (twohundredpercent)

“When you watch football you hope that the game flows, the referee knows what he/she is doing and there’s nothing really hideously unfair going on. That’s what FIFA are there for – to make the game better; like stopping the keeper picking up back passes or allowing a player who’s offside not to be offside, if you know what I mean. So why then haven’t they sorted out penalties? If ever there was a case of the punishment not fitting the crime, this is it. Something barely discernible happens and before you know it the game’s turned on its head.” (WSC)

“The latest FIFA World rankings are out with Spain on top followed by the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, and Argentina. There are a few changes but not many as the top 20 teams remains about the same. The major move is Slovakia who are now 16th after jumping 11 spots.” (The 90th Minute)

Wassily Kandinsky, Project for Yellow, Red, Blue
“The beauty of football is that it is essentially a subjective pastime, it can be as simple or as complex as the individual wishes it to be. There is no one way to watch football, no template for interpretation, no defined set of behaviours to adhere to. Football can be mathematical, it can be scientific, it can be poetic and it can be abstract. The same simple action can be delineated in a multitude of ways, each as improbable as the last.” (The Equaliser)

“In no small part, the print media and the film and music industries both made the same mistake with the arrival of the internet. They both reacted to slowly at first to the new technology and both are repenting their tardiness at their leisure. The print media have been unable – yet – to find a method that successfully been able raise revenue from the shift to online viewing (and the silence from The Times after their paywall went up would seem to indicate that the numbers probably haven’t been spectacular, although Rupert Murdoch has described them as “strong”), but how will football, which has been happily wedded to television for the last two decades or so, react to changes in viewing habits?” (twohundredpercent)

“In some strange turn of fate, Swedish channel SVT1 decided in early 2009 that it would behoove their nation to get a glimpse into Martin Hansson’s run up to the World Cup just finished. One year under the camera’s glare for a look into the life of Sweden’s best referee. You’ll know, of course, of the sharp turn the focus took in the late fall, when Thierry Henry handled the ball which became the goal which sent France to South Africa at the expense of Ireland. What was a simple documentary became a year in the life of the man who oversaw one of the biggest botched calls in recent footballing history.” (World Cup Blog)

“After a defeat at Staines Town in their opening Blue Square South match of the season on Saturday afternoon, the real test followed for Lewes this evening. Tonight’s match against Thurrock wasn’t merely their first home match of the new season. It was the first test of a brave new world, the first chance to see if they have a chance of stabilising their club under new management.” (twohundredpercent)

“The World Cup thus far has been less about the Beautiful Game on the field and more about the inexplicable refusal of Sepp Blatter and his clan to uphold FIFA’s own Fair Play Code of Conduct. In the wake of recent controversial decisions (or indecision – you make the call), the pressure is mounting on FIFA to stop making nonsensical excuses and step into the 21st Century and embrace the use of technology by game officials.” (Nutmeg Radio)

“Depending on which levels of football you follow, you may not have noticed that we’re in the middle of play-off season. The Championship Play-Offs begin tomorrow as Nottingham Forest travel to Bloomfield Road, and the make up of the League One and Two Play-Offs this season will be decided tomorrow afternoon. As far as non-league is concerned, Oxford United and York City are selling tickets for their Wembley final a week on Sunday, and this Sunday, Fleetwood Town, and Bath City host Alfreton Town and Woking respectively for the right to play in the Blue Square Premier next season. Below the Blue Square the Play-Offs are already over, and the winners are already planning next season’s campaign at a new level. But while the Play-Offs produce money for the club and excitement for television and the neutrals – are the Play-Offs all they are cracked up to be? Are the Play-Offs even fair?” (twohundredpercent)

“Stevenage Borough will play in the Football League next season for the first time in their 35 year history. Stevenage Borough were famously denied entrance into the Football League in 1996, when, after winning the Conference, their automatic promotion was denied due to their ground being below standards. So 14 years later, it’s payback time for Stevenage and their fans. In the interim, the club had improved their ground, Broadhall Way, to the point where it was considered one of the top facilities in the Conference. This season, Stevenage saw a 30% increase in average attendance, to a very respectable 2,589 per game.” (billsportsmaps)

“Reaction to last week’s post about football and hijab has been caught up in the veil (represented by some commentators as the first step in a “slippery slope to fundamentalism”). Some readers seem to have lost sight of the story at hand: whether FIFA’s support of the ban against headscarves specifically, and hijab more broadly, makes sense.” (From A Left Wing)

Iran’s National Women’s Football Team, 2007
“FIFA has declared that Iran can’t enter its women’s team into this August’s Youth Olympic Games if its athletes play in headscarves. Iran’s football association is calling for international protest – quite rightly. This decision comes from the International Football Association Board, which is made up of representatives of the four UK Football Associations (England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales) and FIFA, which itself has four votes in these decisions. One can imagine what that boardroom looks like – Sith Lords of Soccer, Imperial Experts in Sexism and Islamophobia.” (From A Left Wing)

“There was a time when members of parliament would only really queue up outside Westminster to discuss how to brow beat our game. They considered us animals that needed to be caged and carry ID cards at all times during the 1980s, it took a lot of work to undo the damage done to the reputation of the rest of us for the actions of what was always a very small minority. Times, however, have moved on. From Tony Blair playing keepy-ups with Kevin Keegan to Gordon Brown’s professed love of Raith Rovers, football’s use as a political football has almost now come full circle, and it has reached its logical conclusion with a story leaked to The Guardian this evening – possibly accidentally, more likely tactically – about Labour Party proposals for their forthcoming general election manifesto which, were it would happen, would go some way to changing the landscape of the game in this country.” (twohundredpercent), (Guardian – “Government’s plan to fix football: give clubs back to fans”)

“The Stade Sylvio Cator, Haiti’s national soccer stadium, is a low concrete building with floodlights poking skyward on the Rue Oswald Durand, across the street from a cemetery. It comes out of nowhere, like a small college football stadium crammed into the capital’s downtown. Tall archways with tight turnstiles lead inside, where the good seats are red-and-yellow plastic in the covered section by the midfield line. The rest are old-school standing-room terraces. They’ve been baking in the sun since 1960. Seven weeks ago, after Haiti convulsed, it all turned into an improvised refugee camp.” (SI)

“There are few more poignant sights in football than the goalkeeper that has just conceded a goal, and most goalkeepers will experience this on average once a match, if not more. It’s a small wonder that more of them don’t go insane with the existential angst of it all. Covered in the dirt that acts as a visual metaphor for the futility of their attempt to keep the ball out of their goal, they will turn and trudge back towards the goal, maybe lifting the net to pick the ball out and kicking the ball disconsolately yet angrily back towards the halfway line and standing, hands on their hips, replaying what has just happened over in their mind.” (twohundredpercent)