“A lot of people asked to see more of these, so here’s a second batch, extending a bit later into the twentieth century.” (Run of Play)

“I haven’t read, or even seen, Hunter Davies’s Postcards from the Edge of Football, but I love looking at old football postcards. I like the thought that underneath all the large public channels of media and culture, the world is being crisscrossed with these incidental private images of the game, carrying greetings, questions, and experiences from one person to another.” (Run of Play)

“Ladies and gentleman, friends, family, opium smugglers, torch singers, bicyclists, balloonists, chemists, painters, gangsters, mysterious women in kimonos, and grad students; Three years ago today, armed with nothing but youthful pluck, a Google password, and a biography of Pierce Egan, I set out to create a sports website that would ‘be insanely profitable’ and ‘basically run itself.’ From those springs of innocent idealism, plus electricity and several computer languages, The Run of Play was born.” (Run of Play)

“Brian ‘Buster’ Phillips of Run of Play has a new post up extrapolating some of the ‘cultural shadow’ (my phrase) discussion on Ian Darke and the influence the English have on American soccer into a wider musing on cultural cross-pollination. The thrust of his piece is that perhaps English and American soccer cultures are beginning to blend and fuse as a greater number of Americans throw themselves into the game, English outfits looks to learn American marketing techniques, clubs are passing into American hands and the Internet puts us all into a rolling shared-language conversation on all of the preceding and more. Brian reasons that as time moves along, the language and the growing involvement of Americans will only pull us closer to our cousins across the pond when it comes to this game. That’s the nature of globalization, and soccer isn’t immune.” (Match Fit USA)

“The underdog phenomenon is a complicated one, and I want to do it justice, but even sketching the outlines of what it entails is a herculean task, or perhaps Aristotelian. To follow up on what Supriya said in her last post, one can argue that all stories are either tragic or comic. Human beings, being narrative animals, understand all events in terms of the story they fit into. Underdogs are comic heroes, forever fighting superior forces: Jackie Chan against overwhelming numbers, Jerry against Tom, Josef K against the system. That seems to be true even though, unlike Jerry and Jackie, underdogs in the footballing world rarely win it all. In fact, underdogs rarely win anything at all in football, even in cup competitions, which are much less predictable than leagues. In the five major footballing countries of Europe there has only been one stunning underdog win these past ten years: En Avant de Guingamp winning the the Coupe de France in 2009, when the team was in Ligue 2.” (Run of Play)

“International qualifiers might now lack the quality of top flight European football, but they more than match the major leagues for drama and unpredictability. In the qualifiers for Euro 2012, one feels that anything and everything could happen and probably will. For the likes of Italy and France, things are going to get worse before they get better. Both the fading powers are stuck in what could easily be described as groups of death, were it not for the fact that almost every group contains three or four sides that could finish first or second.11 The exception is Group E, which looks like it’ll be a fairly straightforward Netherlands-Sweden qualification. Only Spain (obviously), England, and Germany look certain to win their groups. Uncertainty lurks in every game—what has happened to the predictable march of the old élite?” (Run of Play)

“For the past two years, the home crowd at Anfield, the larger and more reliably histrionic of Liverpool’s two major soccer stadiums, has increasingly come to resemble a Tea Party rally from another dimension. Populist chants echo from the stands; angry signs bristle like javelins. But where the American resentment machine is fueled by anger at what’s seen as European-style socialism, the Merseyside protesters are incensed by what’s seen as American-style capitalism. ‘Yankee Liar$ Out,’ the placards blare. ‘Thanks But No Yanks.’ Liverpool Football Club, one of the most successful teams in English soccer history, is owned by a pair of American billionaires, and the fans absolutely hate their guts.” (Slate – Brian Phillips)

“It may seem odd to think about football as comedy when it seems to catalyse suffering so effectively for a great majority of its fans. After all, in what other major sphere of secular activity do people return repeatedly to have their hearts battered? Why do footballers—at least in La Gazzetta dello Sport—speak so readily of suffering and sacrifice, in terms that are picked up and incorporated into the way fans talk about their experiences?” (Run of Play)

“Last week’s Match of the Day 2 closed with a montage of scenes of sickening violence involving Joey Barton during Newcastle’s draw at Molineux. The novelty is that Barton featured as the victim of assorted crunching, scything and slamming, as Wolves’ enforcers targeted him on seven separate occasions.” (Run of Play)

“On a typical weekday, the English soccer press devotes itself to unsubstantiated rumors, manufactured scandals, and bikini pictures of players’ girlfriends (who seem to roam the earth together in a giant conjugal yacht, like the Beatles in Yellow Submarine). This week, however, thanks to an ingenious hoax that took in the Times of London, the soccer press has been engrossed by Moldova. Specifically by one Moldovan teenager, who is not, as it happens, a real person.” (Slate – Brian Phillips)

“I read an article this morning about how to build an audience on the internet. People on the internet, it said, don’t want a lot of fancy explanations and preambles. They just want to get in, get the information, and get out. People on the internet don’t need to know why you’re introducing something in a certain way, or where you’re thinking about going with it. They just want facts.” (Run of Play)

“The favors I owe Brian Phillips are beginning to stack up. First, he wrote an excellent piece comparing FIFA and FIBA for my blog, 48 Minutes of Hell. Now he has taken time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions about Brooklyn Asylum F.C., a serial novel about American soccer in the 1920s he is steadily publishing at his site the Run Of Play. If you’re new to the Run Of Play, it’s a bit like getting drunk with Lionel Messi in a bookstore in Nuevo Laredo, only to wake up, roll over, and say, ‘Oh my God, I wasn’t dreaming. That’s Lionel Messi. And he’s wearing nothing but briefs.'” (Norman Einstein’s), (Must Read Soccer)

“I often wonder about human potential. We know that young people learn fast both cognitively and viscerally. It’s as if everything has been juiced for children’s easy consumption while we grownups have to eat things raw.” (Run of Play)

“It happened in the early years of the City of Brooklyn that a man called Salzach, a German of Bavarian descent, lost his mind. He was ripping apart old sacks in the yard behind the hostelry when it happened. The innkeeper, who glanced out from the kitchen window a few minutes later, was alarmed to see him shaking his fist and furiously addressing a cat that was sunning itself on the tree stump. Brooklyn Asylum postcard, 1893. Evidently harboring some inkling of suspicion against Herr Salzach already, the innkeeper wasted no time in dispatching the Irish boy, Michael, to the police.” (Run of Play)

“Took at this place. Do these look like the living quarters of a criminal mastermind? “A devious architect,” they allege, “who builds his creations for the sole purpose of destroying what is beautiful, what is cherished.” I understand the role I play—that is, the role they have me play. It’s a business, like anything else: of course I know this. It’s just not fair. It isn’t fair that I have to build my own life, my real life, to confirm my existence as I want it to be, not as it has been manufactured by those who disseminate information to the masses.” (Run of Play)

“And it was about time, too. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Honduras is an amazing country is I can do footnotes on here now. A person is about to spread his wings. with a proud people who have stood firm through decades of hardship. I am not denying that. And they completely took me in and helped me lay low when that international criminal ring was trying to kill me. That is a given, for real. Much credit for that, Honduras.” (Run of Play)