“Football is much more than a game. It has the power to bring us together. It has the power to bring joy, and great sadness. It has the power to divide, and it has the power to bring unity. There are many moments when football has caused an outpouring of emotion. Seb Stafford-Bloor charts some of the biggest and most impactful moments. Illustrated by Henry Cooke.”
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“Studies have discovered a link between heading a football and dementia in later life. It has been suggested that heading could be removed from the sport. But if heading a football was banned, what would the game look like? How would goals be scored? How would they be defended? What would a football player look like? Seb Stafford-Bloor explores this idea. Illustrated by Henry Cooke.”
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“Welcome to the latest instalment of It Is What It Is, the sister column to Adam Hurrey’s Football Cliches podcast, a parallel mission into the heart of the tiny things in football you never thought really mattered… until you were offered a closer look. The dictionary supremos finally open their footballing floodgates. There are some cast-iron guarantees in the annual UK news cycle, the hardy slow-news-day perennials that keep the wheel turning. … See also: some words that will infuriate your parents, let alone your grandparents, have made their way into the Oxford English Dictionary. …”
The Athletic

“ Football today is big business. Not only do the best teams have to be great on the pitch, but they have to be great in the board room too. But what makes a great decision in the football business? And what are the best decisions ever made in football? From player transfers, to sponsorship deals, to club structure, Abhishek Raj writes about some of the best decisions, Philippe Fenner illustrates. ”
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“Enshrined behind the gates that claimed so many lives at the Kanjuruhan Stadium is a chilling sight. Once they catch your eye, everything changes. The shoes, left by the dead. They sit alongside the twisted, contorted blue iron railings which have been forced from their concrete mountings. Walking in those shoes — the Adidas trainer, the flip-flop, the child’s red Croc — during those final moments came with fear, indescribable pain and, for so many, no way out. …”
The Athletic (Video)

“Julen Lopetegui’s golden era at Sevilla is over. The man who took the club into the Champions League knockout stage and won a Europa League title, beating Manchester United and Inter Milan along the way, has been relieved of his duties. For a brief, wonderful moment, Lopetegui let the Sevilla fans dream of a LaLiga title challenge. His sacking shouldn’t be viewed as a failure though. Sevilla flew too close to the sun under Lopetegui and given their strict economic policy and wage structure, they have to retreat now and think about the longer term future of the club. …”
The Analyst

“Penalties in the Premier League have a 78% chance of being scored. But not all attacking scenarios have the same high chance. Is this an unfair advantage to the attacking side? Should the rules be changed? Jon Mackenzie looks at the stats to find out how and why penalties are overpowered. Illustrated by Marco Bevilacqua.”
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“David Ginola once described retiring from football as ‘a little death’. For many players, that may not be an overstatement. Stepping away from a job which has defined a huge part of your life is a challenge for most people; but what happens when you are at an age which would be considered relatively young by normal standards? Life after football — in terms of self-esteem, relationships and financial stability — is one of the main themes in The Athletic’s ex-footballer survey, where 111 former professional players have responded to a series of questions about retirement and its impact. …”
The Athletic (Video)

“Trying to capture everything imaginable when watching a football match remains an impossible endeavour. But simultaneously, trying to capture absolutely nothing beyond the first glance won’t necessarily yield great results in your task to remember important information and events. You’ve probably heard it before as professors lamented your lack of note taking in university, but you are far more likely to remember information if you take the time to write it down. Your distracted brain already has a million other things to focus on, and if you don’t take the time to write down your thoughts, the chances of allowing a thought to go from short-term to long-term memory becomes less by the second. …”
The Mastermindsite (Audio)

“For those coming to this article to discover who is the ‘best’ Premier League centre-back statistically, you are going to be disappointed. The truth is, evaluating any defender based on the data will rarely show one is better than another, but will instead give you an indication of a player’s — or team’s — style. We could compare players in high-pressing sides with those in low-pressing ones; we could contrast ball-playing defenders with those who have a more no-nonsense approach; we could even identify centre-back partnerships by cat or dog-like behaviours. On this occasion, we ask: What does the data tell us about active and passive centre-backs in the league? …”
The Athletic (Video)

“LEICESTER CITY’s latest defeat, at Tottenham Hotspur by six goals to two, underlines the crisis that is unfolding at the club. It also highlights the plight of their manager, Brendan Rodgers, who will be only too aware that he has a big hole to quickly dig himself out of. In the Premier League, there is always a ‘crisis club’ and this season, the baton has passed from Manchester United to Liverpool to Chelsea to Leicester City. The moment a club dips into the crisis zone, they are rarely left alone to work themselves out. …”
Game of the People

“Ever since the release of StatsBomb 360, we’ve shown how this new dataset is the ultimate upgrade on traditional event data. 360 allows you to detect deeper insights, such as players who receive the ball in space, the positioning of defenders around each event, whether a pass was line-breaking and how many defenders it bypassed, and plenty more. On top of this, we’ve shown you practical use cases for the data in finding new insights into football and creating bespoke visualisations which display this. …”
Stats Bomb

“Sometimes a foul is worthy of more than a yellow, but not quite a red. What if professional football had sin-bins? What affect would having a player depart the pitch for a period of time? Seb Stafford-Bloor explores the idea of sin-bins in football, and whether it’d work. Illustrated by Craig Silcock”
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“The transfer window is a weird and wonderful place. … So much that happens during the window, which was officially open for 83 days between June 10 and September 1 in England but in reality is an ongoing conversation throughout the year, can’t always be written down. The majority of the activity involving agents, players, managers, sporting directors, recruitment staff and owners exists in the margins. It’s neither official nor unofficial, but somewhere in between. The task of journalists is to try to pull information from these grey areas, comprehensively source it and ‘stand it up’, to get to the point of being able to press publish. …”
The Athletic

“… It was early August when Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp revealed his concern over the potential impact this winter’s World Cup could have on international players. Fixture congestion is nothing new (nor are managers’ complaints about it) but adding a major tournament into the mix mid-season, with only brief pauses before and after it, certainly is. ‘… Clubs competing in Europe have no free midweek until the turn of the year, so this round of fixtures will likely be added to the list for early 2023, further complicating life for teams who progress in cup competitions domestically and in Europe. …”
The Athletic

“ The Adidas Predator, one of the most iconic football boots in the game. Worn by true legends, Zinedine Zidane, David Beckham, Xavi Hernandez. But before it became popular it was regarded as controversial. This is the story of how an Australian footballer had an idea, stuck some rubber to an old boot, and convinced one of the biggest sportswear brands in the world to make his boot. Written by Seb Stafford-Bloor, illustrated by Craig Silcock.”
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