“11 February ~ Arsenal target Marouane Chamakh, currently at Bordeaux, will be standing for the centrist MoDem party in French regional elections. In WSC 63 (May 1992) Mitchell Sandler traced the history of footballers’ involvement in politics” (WSC)
“”Successful football is about good habits,” quoth Brian Clough, more or less in those words. Maybe so. What he meant was that you inculcate good habits into a player on the training ground to the extent that the player then reproduces them automatically on match-days, usually without the manager’s further intervention. Clough, for one, was famous for not turning up for training sessions, preferring to take his dog for a walk, which was his implicit way of acknowledging that the habits had been taken on. Vicente Del Bosque is another one from this school of management, preferring not to change the well-oiled Luis Aragonés machine, and only applying fine-tuning when necessary.” (ESPN)
“Football’s transfer system has always been a murky business. Unlike the National Football League or the National Basketball Association in America, where players enter the professional ranks amid the glitz and razzmatazz of the college draft, the movement of players in football is an altogether more furtive operation. Players are effectively the property of their employers, bought and sold by professional clubs without oversight or regulation from the sport’s authorities. Since every player has a price attached, recruitment is a cloak and dagger process.” (WSJ)
“As football sinks further and further into the financial mire, the official statements made by clubs themselves are becoming more and more odd, and more and more telling. Mark Murphy has been looking at some of these statements, and is less than convinced by them.” (twohundredpercent)
“Lionel Messi is probably the top sportsman in the world right now: unless you ask fans in Argentina where the soccer star was born and grew up in a town called Rosario, roughly 180 miles (290 kilometers) north-west of Buenos Aires. After helping his club, Spain’s FC Barcelona, win most of the top awards in 2009, Mr. Messi was named World Player of the Year by FIFA, world football’s governing body. He received the 2009 Ballon d’Or, given to Europe’s top player— winning the honor by the widest margin since it was first awarded in 1956. He even won the Latino Athlete of the Year 2009.” (WSJ)
“A manager on the brink of quitting would typically walk head-down along the touchline after the defeat which seals their fate, ignoring abuse from fans nearby. But as Bradford’s 1-0 loss to Bury on Saturday spelt the end for Stuart McCall – his resignation was confirmed on Monday – he embarked on a lap around the pitch at the final whistle to applaud supporters. Putting aside two and a half years of frustrating League Two failure, almost everyone inside the stadium applauded him back.” (WSC)
“We’ve done it, at last, haven’t we: taken the silent and unanimous decision that Brian Clough matters… Brian Clough has made the step up: he’s cultural now, gone from the close, sweaty barracks of football because he stands for England like Elgar and Dickens. The news about Clough isn’t in the tabloids anymore. It’s strictly broadsheet, review and monthly: it’s been to the London Film Festival and must by now be under Granta’s walls, in strength. All that whilst never being out of place: all that, whilst never abandoning Derby, all that without losing the common touch. Clough, more than Ramsey, or Revie, more even than Shankly, his only possible rival, is a cornerstone and comment upon the zeitgeist, and post War Britain is impossible without him.” (More Than Mind Games)
“Ajax Amsterdam’s general director recently tallied his club’s transfers, and came up with this estimate: only 8.3 per cent of the footballers Ajax had bought in the past decade had succeeded. Ajax’s Dutch rivals, he said, had done even worse. This January European clubs spent barely anything during the “transfer window”. English clubs forked out about £30m ($48m, €34m) on new players, their lowest for any January since 2003. German, Spanish and French clubs spent even less. The credit crunch has bitten soccer in the leg.” (Simon Kuper)
“Harry Redknapp is known as a bit of a wheeler dealer, scouring the football bargain bins for days. He is so good at finding bargains he takes half of January off to play the Wii with son Jamie. It is also reported Redknapp once sold ice to Eskimos, but this hasn’t been confirmed but Mr. Redknapp’s representatives. But after a plethora of successful transfer coups, who are the top 5 Harry Redknapp transfer dealings?” (EPL Talk)
“If soccer agents had powerful lobbyists working for them in the halls of government, you can be fairly confident they would be asking for a generous stimulus package right around now. Just as fears of an enduring economic slump can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy in the real world, as consumers “feel poor” and hunker down to save, slowing or even negating growth, so too can the perception of imminent doom affect soccer clubs’ spending. And, when teams stop spending, the first to be affected are the agents and middlemen who grease the wheels of the transfer market.”
(WSJ)
“Here’s a little game you can play at home. Type the words “Mourinho” and “referee” in your search engine. When I do it, I get more than 3 million hits. Here are some random headlines…” (SI)
” In what sense is watching football a moral activity? It may seem an absurd question, but when we remove the partisan blinkers obligatory to following our own club, we all have reasons for backing one team or another when we watch a game as a neutral.” (WSC)
“A postscript to this mini-series on great players you never saw by going on a tangent and looking at two great managers probably unknown to the rest of you. Today’s subject is about two men who managed Celtic and between them won everything. These two gentlemen are a large part of the club’s history and are now legends…” (Football and Music)
“Yesterday, we noted that the avalanche of negative media stories about the Glazers’ regime at Old Trafford seemed finally to be pushing the moderate fans into the rebellious camp. Pointing to the same piece we noted in the Daily Mirror by Oliver Holt yesterday, Ian at Two Hundred Percent suggests there is a “sea change” in the analysis of football and money by the English media…” (Pitch Invasion)
“When Angola tied Algeria 0-0 on Monday in Luanda to finish first in Group A of the African Cup of Nations, it was cause for celebrations throughout most of Angola. Wherever you go in Luanda, the capital, you’ll see locals wearing the national-team colors of red, black and yellow. Angola shirts, scarves and flags are everywhere there; TV and radio broadcasts talk soccer around the clock. Billboards proclaim that Angola, which ended a 27-year civil war in 2002, can unite through soccer.” (SI)
“Amidst all the tragedy, politics, business, and even bits of sport that have made news from the 2010 Africa Cup of Nations, I’ve been intrigued by something conspicuous primarily in its absence: there have been virtually no stories of the juju / muti / witchcraft commonly used to exoticize the African game. Confederation of African Football (CAF) administrators must be pleased. In the midst of several embarrassing incidents during the last decade, most notably the arrest of Cameroonian coaches (one of whom was German) during the 2002 Cup of Nations in Mali for ‘trying to place a magic charm on the pitch,’ CAF has worked hard to ‘modernize’ the image of African soccer. As a CAF spokesperson noted after the Mali episode: ‘we are no more willing to see witch doctors on the pitch than cannibals at the concession stands. Image is everything.’ ” (Pitch Invasion)
Scissors Kick 