“Watford’s success has been nothing if not understated. Like waking up to find the sun bright outside one’s window in the middle of winter, Watford’s success invites a slight smile but no small amount of bemusement. For a team whose solid consistency and durable success belied the extent to which they by no means set the Championship alight last season, à la Bournemouth, the Hornets could perhaps have been expected to struggle. Yet in a Premier League reminiscent of the End of Days, where Jamie Vardy scores for fun and Chelsea sit just two points clear of the relegation zone, Watford have proven a balm of consistency.” backpagefootball

“Waterford has had its share of visitors over the centuries, ever since the Vikings first set up shop there back in the 9th Century. The football team have been no different, whether it was former World Cup winner Bobby Charlton, Polish international Piotr Suski or the Coventry born duo of Johnny Matthews and Peter Thomas who would enjoy great success down on the south coast, all playing in the blue of the city at one stage or other. In his recent, meticulously researched history of soccer in Munster, David Toms goes into some detail in the development of the sport in the southern province and he focuses especially on developments in urban centres like Cork, Limerick and Waterford.”backpagefootball

“12 months ago the expectation was that Pierre-Emile Højbjerg was on the verge of breaking into the Bayern Munich first team. We felt sure that the young midfielder would start to feature more regularly after a handful of Bundesliga and Champions League appearances to end the year had gone reasonably well. Instead he has spent 2015 on loan at Augsburg and currently Schalke, and admittedly he is a better player for it even though he’d clearly have preferred to have had the same experiences with his parent club.” In Bed With Maradina – Pierre-Emile Højbjerg, Pione Sisto, Etc.

100 2015

“One of the classics of Spanish football was played on Sunday, Valencia CF – Sevilla FC faced each other at the Sanchez-Pizjuan Stadium. No doubt, the match promised more than it gave, because the expulsion of J. Cancelo of Valencia completely distorted the development of the game, and the second ejection only served to confirm the supremacy of the Sevilla team.” Outside of the Boot

“Born on the 28th of July, 1993, Harry Kane is well on his way to footballing stardom. The youngster began his football journey with his local club, Ridgeway Rovers before seemingly getting his big break at Arsenal. However, the move didn’t work out (just imagine if it did), and after a brief return to Rovers, Kane continued his development at Watford. The last step in his circuitous career was to be the club where he has made his name since and one whose fan base has come to idolize the youngster.” Outside of the Boot

“After eighteen months in charge, Mauricio Pochettino’s plan appears close to completion. Last sunday’s 4-1 win against West Ham, coupled with excellence at the Emirates, the multi-goal hammerings of Bournemouth and Manchester City, have only added to the growing belief that Tottenham can finally clear that final hurdle. After all, Champions League qualification, after five fifth place finishes in a decade, has proved notoriously elusive. Displaying energy, efficiency, inherent interchanging combined with an outstanding collective awareness, Tottenham’s early-season excellence shows no signs of slowing. A far cry from the fragile, eternally transitional shambles of recent years, Pochettino has interspersed the bulldog spirit of Harry Redknapp and Tim Sherwood with a continental strategy a la Juande Ramos and Andre Villas Boas.” Outside of the Boot

“We are a third of the way through the Premier League of 2015/16 already, so it seems as good a time as any to evaluate that greatest of football imponderables – Everton. How have the Toffees done and what can we expect to see from them going into the crucial winter slog? Up front I’m going to declare that I was one of those people who clamoured for Roberto Martinez’ head last season. Does that make me one of those intolerably excitable kneejerk types? Possibly, but plenty of managers have been given the shove at all levels of professional football – never mind the Premier League – for presiding over the type of dross that was served up by Everton during the 2014/15 campaign.” Football Pink

“The football world is obsessed with transfers and possible surprise moves; it all boils down to multi-million dollar pay cheques, club rivalries and a never-ending flow of players. Often, we only see the sport from the perspective of the premiere leagues and forget that the large majority of transfers occur in the lesser known divisions. There is a soccer transfer being made every five minutes that you won’t read about. It’s not just the big teams that are looking for new talents all over the globe. Today, almost every team has to compete with the rest of the world to find the right balance of players and hopefully discover a future star that will help them reach a new playing and financial level.” Football Pink

“Judging the calibre of a young player is often a tricky task. Perceived potential has an important bearing in any consideration and is just one of the many parameters to consider when trying to quantify the ability of football’s young stars. To add a basis to what may be a leap of faith, it is useful to look back and trace the growth, or indeed lack thereof, in young players.” Outside of the Boot

“At the age of three, Zohib Islam Amiri fled the war in Afghanistan to find refuge in Pakistan. Now he’s a football hero in his homeland. Listen as he recounts his perilous journey to safety, his pride at playing for his national team, the shock of being signed by Brazilian legend Zico and the terror of watching Taliban executions on the pitch he would later play on for his country.” BBC (Video)

“For almost a century and a half, the beautiful game has offered excitement, advancement and delight. But only, it seems, if you’re white, straight and male. Such is the dissonance between football in theory and in practice. If there is a European equivalent to the American dream it is this, the universal promise of a game that can transform regions, offer hope to broken communities and raise even the poorest from rags to riches.” backpagefootball

“David Moyes has been sacked as Real Sociedad boss. The Basque side are marooned near the bottom of La Liga – they are above the relegation zone on goal difference – and a limp performance in Friday’s 2-0 defeat against lowly Las Palmas was the final straw. This is how his 364 days in charge went.” BBC

“Venture into any bookshop today and you will find a section given over to ‘graphic novels’[1], books that talk about them, books by or about their creators. After a dip in quality and interest around the millennium, the field is now full of great writers and illustrators, challenging stories and subject areas, and even the superhero genre has undergone a bit of a reboot[2]. This piece was originally conceived as a history of how football has appeared in comics, graphic novels, whatever terminology you want to use, but in the course of researching it I had the good fortune to talk to Paul Trevillion[3] and decided that Paul and his work on Roy of the Rovers was a much more interesting and specific point of departure. And as I talked to Paul, I found myself thinking more about football than comics, but you’ll see what I mean by that in due course[4].” Put Niels In Goal

“As the leading sports industry, every dimension of soccer demands that talent be found for premier club opportunities. Globalisation of the sport leads to the globalisation of the market and the only way to act in this context is through a network of players, clubs and market opportunities. When we look at the fact that every move is a calculated manoeuvre to drive club ranks, we see that the foundation to this success lies in finding elite talent. Considering the interconnectivity of all things modern, clubs must consider their online possibilities as they drive business forward.” Outside of the Boot

“Although indigenous people are the original inhabitants of the Americas, they are minorities throughout practically all of its modern countries. The exact numbers change depending on your data source, but only Bolivia and Guatemala could legitimately claim that their populations consist mostly of indigenous people. In some countries, the percentage of indigenous people is negligible. Puerto Rico, for example, counts indigenous people as being somewhere between 0 and 0.2 percent of its population. In Brazil, the biggest and most populated country in Latin America, the indigenous population is about 900,000, or a mere 0.4 percent of its total inhabitants.” Fusion

“As we enter, once more, into the depressingly-inevitable annual period of more-widespread and focused moral outrage reserved for poppy-refusenik James McClean, it is refreshing to encounter a more considered contribution to the debate from a proponent of the Remembrance symbol, as opposed to the usual abusive, outraged, reactionary and knee-jerk bully-boyism we have come to expect in relation to the matter. The author of this contribution, ‘DowntheMannyRd’, offers sincerity and good will in encouraging James McClean to reconsider his refusal to wear a poppy this November.” backpagefootball

“Camus’ aphorism, often misquoted as ‘what I know most surely about morality…I learned from football’, is a favourite of high-brow fans of sport and t-shirt printers everywhere. It is, of course, a reference to his experiences playing in goal for the RUA, the Algiers Racing University football team, and the Montpensier Sports Club. He started playing for them at the age of fifteen and quickly made a good impression. Jonathan Wilson’s beautiful book on ‘keeping, The Outsider, the title of which is surely a conscious echo of Camus’ novel, describes in detail some of his recollections of playing. He was praised for his bravery and his abilities in goal, and was even once knocked out taking a powerful shot straight to the chest, a forewarning of the tuberculosis that would force him to hang up his gloves and, from that point on, only participate in football as a spectator.” Put Niels In Goal

“More than ever, the cold hard financial reality of dropping out of the Premier League is firmly at the forefront of club owners’ minds, so it is relatively unsurprising to see Tim Sherwood flung onto the managerial scrapheap alongside Dick Advocaat. Both men hit a simple goal after coming in late on last season- to survive- and both oversaw a terrible run of results at the start of 2015-16. That’s the crux here, throughout the history of the game results have been the fundamental currency for measuring success and underlying metrics and strategies run a distant second to losing six straight and eight of ten when gauging a manager’s survival chances. Sherwood’s season win percentage was closer to none than second to none and that was that.” Stats Bomb