“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

“Now without this being another cliché attack on the English game, whether it be grassroots or transfer fees, I’m talking about an issue much closer to home, and when I say home, I mean the hallowed turf, our homes away from home. Ticket prices have come under scrutiny a lot as of late, but my concern comes from another area. As a young child, most of us fall in love with football after that first step into a roaring stadium. Beyond the mist of cigarette smoke and smell of burgers, there lived some magic, something which engulfed all of us, but as the generations age and the game moves forward, so has the passion some fans share.” backpagefootball

“… The field of public soccer analytics has a left-handed-pitcher problem. Since it consists of so many events, baseball is fertile ground for analytics. A whopping 143 players in Major League Baseball had more than 500 plate appearances this season. Meanwhile, in the Premier League last season, only seven players took 100 shots, and only two had more than 50 shots on target. To get around that problem, most of the advances in soccer analytics have come from working with aggregates. Whether it’s some of the more basic concepts (like total shots ratio or comparative shots on target) or slightly more opaque metrics (like expected goals), the process comes from looking at the totals across leagues and then drawing conclusions.” Grantland

“After such a draining international break for us Americans, there will be no hard-core analysis here this week. It’s a nice time to introduce and use a few new tools to take a look at some of the more extreme early teams as far as chance creation. Following Paul Riley’s lead, I’ve opened up chance/deep completion maps for the big 4 European Leagues (he’s taken care of the EPL quite nicely). It’s a tableau workbook with every pass ending within 30 yards of goal for every team with all kinds of filters available. If you want to see only long-balls that wind up incomplete tried by Sassuolo, you can. If you want to see only chances created from the left half-space by Koln, go ahead. These will ideally be updated every two weeks.” Stats Bomb

“For Villarreal, standing atop the La Liga summit for the first time in their history, 2015/16 represents a culmination of an extraordinary rejuvenation. European semi-finalists three times since 2003, domestic runners-up in ’08, yet relegated in 2011; they are perennial overachievers beset by an implausible penchant for self-destruction. Never the bride, yet their presence on the guestlist is achievement enough.” Outside of the Boot

“Ever sat down to send a tweet, and no matter how hard you try, simply can’t fit in everything you want to say in 140 characters? Well, at this very moment in time, I’m trying to condense the world of non-league football, with its dozens of leagues, hundreds of teams and thousands of players into one simple yes or no answer. Is the game below the Football League working? Every fibre of my body wants to be able to type a big fat yes, but the reality is that the game at this level is too vast to say that in a convincing manner.” Football Pink