“INT. DRESSING ROOM – EVE. We are somewhere in the bowels of a large football stadium. Several staff and 23 players – three lions on all their shirts – sit around looking nervy, or nervously applying ‘product’ to hair (hair shaped like one of those asymmetrical postmodernist sculptures named after abstract nouns – Courage, Trust, Camaraderie – and habitually found outside civic buildings, which, within a generation, have become discoloured, unloved, and appropriated by skateboarders).” Run of Play

“Seated stands, modern roofs, security guys like well-fed oxes: none existed back in those days. Chaos and disorder reined in the stadiums, just like it did on the streets outside. I told you, there were no seats on the stands. You had to bring something to put under your ass; anything you could lay your hands on. Real sofa cushions from your house, make-shift cushions out of styrofoam, old magazines, newspapers, whatever you could find outside the stadium…” Run of Play

“Harry Redknapp does not have a soul, but he has a sort of dead-eyed Cockney sparkle that’s served him as a pretty adequate replacement. England’s most successful English soccer manager, he’s also England’s most successful allegations-shrugger-offer, ‘Who, me?’-expression-haver, preposterous-quip-to-distract-your-attention deployer, and crafter of bespoke logic-annihilating narrative Möbius strips. When 60 police officers crash-swarmed his house as part of a conspiracy sting in 2007, Harry insisted that they were merely soliciting his help catching other people.” Grantland – Brian Phillips

“Soccer is boring. One of the misconceptions non-soccer fans have about soccer fans is that we don’t know this. The classic Simpsons parody of a soccer match — ‘Fast kickin’! Low scorin’! And ties? You bet!‘ — hangs on the joke that the game puts Americans to sleep while somehow, bafflingly, driving foreigners wild with excitement. Calling the game for Springfield TV, Kent Brockman practically grinds his teeth with frustration: ‘Halfback passes to the center … back to the wing … back to the center. Center holds it. Holds it. [Huge sigh.] Holds it.’ One booth over, the Spanish commentator is going nuts: ‘Halfback passes to the center! Back to the wing! Back to the center! Center holds it! Holds it!! HOLDS IT!!!'” Grantland – Brian Phillips

“Nicolas Anelka will soon be playing professional soccer in China. This is surprising because Nicolas Anelka is still a talented, effective soccer player who would help all but about 10 teams in the world. This is not surprising because Nicolas Anelka is going to a place where they’ll pay him an exponent of a number it’d take me years to count to.” Run of Play

“In an era of Galácticos, oil ball, and 300,000-a-week wages, it’s easy to view football as a revolution. When something is wrong, blow it up and start over. Avram Grant not working out? Try Ancelotti. Ancelotti not the ticket? Go for AVB. If Ronaldo and Kaka aren’t enough to be beat Barcelona, maybe Ronaldo, Kaka and The Special One will be. If a group of mostly-academy grads isn’t enough to hold off Madrid, add Alexis Sanchez and academy washout Cesc Fabregas—even though you’re already millions in debt.” Run of Play

“A proposal: when we wile away the hours compiling lists of the Greatest Ever Footballers, we are doing a disservice to this form of discourse if we do not take its premises seriously. To pretend that we can go on existing without this genetically-hewn proclivity for reducing the world to an Excel document is both futile and obscene, and we’ve no interest in arguing as to whether Grand Ranking is real a childish waste of everyone’s time.” Run of Play

“I’ve watched Diego Maradona’s final World Cup match (a 2-1 victory over Nigeria played in Boston) at least ten times. Nigeria pushed Argentina back early with plundering counter-attacks, one of which led to the match’s first goal—a sumptuous chip that had more than a whiff of offside to it. Maradona was imperious that day though, Napoleonically strutting around the confetti-flaked pitch, drawing fouls, and making key passes for both of Argentina’s goals—free kicks finished by Claudio Canigga.” Run of Play

“I first came to understand the passions that soccer could arouse when I was about twelve years old, though at the time I had never seen a match. I may have noticed some people kicking a ball around, though I doubt it; I expect that I had been exposed to a few grainy highlights on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. No, I learned about soccer obsessives the way I learned most other things I knew, or believed I knew, when I was twelve: through reading science fiction.” Run of Play

“Expressions of regret at missing a chance to score require, in almost all circumstances, contact between (a) one’s two hands and (b) one’s head. It is never appropriate to employ one hand only to demonstrate one’s dismay and/or wrath. Parts of the body other than the head may be touched, but only after manual contact with the head. All appropriate hand gestures will employ bilateral symmetry. The repertoire of approved gestures — to be used immediately after popping the easy header over the bar, scuffing the volley into the turf, or dragging the simple side-foot shot well wide of the gaping net — is as follows…” Run of Play

The Rendez-Vous. A Bagatelle for Arsenal in Russian Landscape
“Anyone who has crossed from the leafy district of Hertfordshire to that of Brockhall Village will probably have been struck by the sharp difference between the natives of the respective provinces of Arsenal and Blackburn. The peasant of Brockhall is short, stooping, sullen; he looks at you from under his brows, lives in flimsy huts of poplar wood, does labour-duty for his master; never goes in for trade; eats badly, wears pleated shoes. In Hertfordshire the peasant pays rent and lives in spacious cabins of pinewood; he is tall, with a bold gay way of looking at you and a clean white face; he trades in oil and tar, and on feast-days wears boots.” Run of Play

“Like every aspiring plutocrat who loves AC Milan, I sometimes fantasise about owning the club. I have big plans for it. Investing heavily in the youth programme. Engineering unbreakable bonds of affection between players and club. Brokering a creative and generous understanding between our ultras and local government. Smiling calmly from the director’s box as the team crushes English clubs in the Champions’ League. This is before we lead our revolutionary boycott of UEFA competitions, demanding a structure that creates more equitable opportunities for smaller leagues and clubs. Giving incentives to star players for participating in local coaching initiatives, and encouraging young players (from the revitalised youth programme) to undertake higher education. Improving the rose gardens at Milanello. Exacting lasting vengeance on those who let so much as a single tear fall from the eyes of Andrea Pirlo.” Run of Play

“My affinity toward Landon Donovan is remarkably simple: He’s about my height and about my age. It’s enough to create a bond in my brain. I suppose if I grew up in Europe the success he’s found in athletics despite his small stature might not surprise me quite so. But I didn’t, so it does. The kids born across the pond in the early 1980s had little guys such as Baggio (five-nine) and Scholes (five-seven) to adore after Johan Cruyff (five-eleven) led the way, but American sporting heroes of the 1990s were larger than life and simply huge. Bledsoe and Barkley, the Michaels: Jordan and Johnson. Hell, even Tiger Woods was so damn good at least in part because he was so damn big.” Run of Play

“EDITOR’S NOTE: Someone (me) once said (just now, for real) that American soccer is a question in search of a question mark. But who asked that question, and what other punctuation might it contain? To find out, we deployed two brilliant young sportswriters, the latest in electronic-communications technology, and the copy-paste function. Here’s what happened.” Run of Play

“John Crace, beloved author of the Guardian’s digested reads, has written a book called ‘Vertigo: One Football Fan’s Fear of Success,’ which we may suppose is John Crace’s delightful way of offering a point of view into every football fan’s fear of success.” Run of Play

“Roberto Martinez picked a ball up from by his feet, rolled it across a tray of thick brown paint and tossed it across the field to Victor Moses. Moses stopped its flight with his chest and let it fall to his feet. He moved forwards with the ball, lifted his head and sent the ball arcing across the field at knee height. The paint lightly sprayed as the ball spun, tracing a curved line over the grass.” Run of Play

“Let us go then, the reserves and I,
When the afternoon is spread out against the sky
Like Newcastle etherised upon the league table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted stands,
The muttering fans
Of Amsterdam…”
Run of Play

“The human mania for classification manifests itself in countless ways, and one of the more peculiar is somatotyping: organizing people by body shape, usually with the belief that there’s some correlation between body shape and personality. These types tend to come in threes.” Run of Play

“The ancient Greeks were a wonderful people, whose reliance on slaves and women to do all the actual work meant they could devote themselves to increasing the size of their brains, and then devote those gigantic brains to the asking of brilliantly pointless questions, many of which still entertain and irritate philosophy students today.” Run of Play

“Of all the people on the train, the one I wanted to talk to the most was the middle-aged man with the graying goatee, traveling with wife and two children. He and his son were wearing Chelsea jerseys. It’s not rare to see folks around Chicago in soccer gear, but considering this train and most of its occupants were heading toward Soldier Field, where Manchester United were to take on the Chicago Fire, those two made out of Amazon boxesbold blue shirts stuck out. I tried to catch up with them as we disembarked, but couldn’t weave through the crowd quickly enough without them or someone else.” Run of Play

“On a busy London street, two Ancient Greek philosophers from 1980s Brazil happen upon one another. They are dressed in particularly fetching togas, with yellow tops and blue bottoms. It’s confusing, but not in a bad way.” Run of Play

“Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that part of the Americans’ genius was their taming of the human pursuit of greatness. Their art was moderate, their religion egalitarian, and their guiding spirit was thoroughly anti-nobility. Their only stab at greatness was in the commercial world. ‘The Americans,’ Tocqueville wrote, ‘put something heroic into their way of trading.’ In all other spheres, they were that new human archetype: the bourgeois vanguard of a modern world yet unfolding. In other words, Americans lived in a world already ‘disenchanted.'” Run of Play

“Seemingly as bumptious as he is precocious, Jack Rodwell recently said that several of England’s senior players including Rio Ferdinand, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Wayne Rooney, and John Terry, would be certain starters if they were in the current Barcelona squad—a boast sure to induce more than a few guffaws even if publications like The Sun are patting Jack the Lad on the head for his bulldogged patriotism.” Run of Play

“In early October of 2010, I sat at the bus stop and politely nodded11 Many a Seattle liberal has died in the manner of Tycho Brahe, terminally enslaved to etiquette. as a flushed woman in a floral print mu mu described to me her irrefutable eschatological proof that the Day of Judgement was not only approaching, it was known.” Run of Play

“Why isn’t el Tri better? Mexico is the most populous nation in the Spanish-speaking world, and soccer is by far the most popular sport.11 In the second most popular sport in the poll, boxing, Mexico currently has twice as many world champions as any other country. Youth leagues and impromptu street games dot the landscape from one peninsular extreme (Yucatan) to another (Baja California). The nation boasts a rabid fan base as well as a successful pro league that lures talent from around the globe. These are the ingredients for a world power.” Run of Play

“I’ve identified three problems with the American soccer missionaries. 1. Rarely—so rarely—have they been converted from Our Sports. I’ve never heard anyone talk about how they used to be a football fanatic but have decided soccer is the better game.” Run of Play

“Ronaldo was (yes, I’m still getting used to talking about him in the past tense too) a great player, of that there is no doubt. The finest striker of his generation, the Brazilian had in abundance the supernatural technique—those abilities that even fellow professionals struggle to fathom—that marks out the game’s true masters.” Run of Play

“You’ve got to be someone pretty special to work in the highest echelons of professional football in Europe, a most arrogant and self-aggrandising industry, and still be singled out for narcissism. As any media across Europe, maybe even the world, will attest though, José Mourinho snugly fits that bill.” Run of Play

“few months ago, I was fortunate enough to attend a talk by the mega-historian Professor David Starkey, during which the characteristically flamboyant expert on the British monarchy (and self-appointed ‘rudest man in Britain’) broke into a somewhat controversial massacre of contemporary culture with a provocative alignment of 21st-Century life with the more insidious aspects of Imperial Roman society.” Run of Play

“I do very little on Sundays. I sleep late. I half-heartedly clean my apartment. I peruse my Netflix Instant queue. Sometimes I nurse a hangover and journey a few blocks north for some fried chicken and a soda. I also spend roughly two hours staring at a laptop screen with a slack jaw, intermittently wiping spit from the corners of my mouth. I do not have a medical condition nor do I indulge in Sunday afternoon peyote binges. I’m an Atlético Madrid supporter, and
TracksI am in awe.” Run of Play

Garrincha
“Put all your partisanship aside and enjoy the ball in flight. It’s been switched crossed field from the inside-left position by the skillful, balding, English bulldog in ballet slippers to the man on the right touch in all black boots and pomade-infused black hair. Taken out of the air with the inside of the foot and stopped dead by the simplest of grace, the game has changed from a waltz on spiked Lucozade to an aguardiente-inspired pasillo remix. That sequence of events gives me joy. There is technique and there is technique. And, such deft touch is evidence of the latter. What happens next, the soccer equivalent of a crescendo, brings me happiness.” Run of Play

“I begin with a warning and an observation. First, I do not want to dwell on American soccer troll topics. This post is not meant to gauge the ‘effectiveness’ of the college soccer system in producing elite players as compared to European youth academies. Rather, I want to focus on the intangible. I also want to grapple with a topic that has long ached at my soul: does our consumption of top-level European soccer foster child labor exploitation in Africa and elsewhere? As 21st century consumers with unparalleled access to tomes of information, we have a moral obligation to reflect on how our decisions in aggregate affect the world.” Run of Play

“‘All referees are good, and all are bad. A referee only needs to make one mistake, or an assumed mistake, against a club and if he lives till he is a hundred he never gets over it.’ So said Charles Sutcliffe, former referee and president of the Football League, d. 1939. Yep, 1939. And you thought your contempt for officials was all modern and shit. Tsk.” Run of Play