Accusations of deceit and avarice have always been thrown at bigger clubs who want to improve and capitalise on their statusIn mid-April 12 clubs who fancied themselves to be the biggest, the most important and frankly the most potentially lucrative around made a controversial announcement. They had decided to set up a league together, and there was nothing anybody could do to stop them.Cue outrage. “A dozen clubs, who style themselves the pick of the talent, have joined hands for their own mutual benefit, apparently without a care for those unhappily shut out in the cold,” raged one newspaper. “Is it fair to the clubs thus coolly left to shift for themselves? On what principle has the selection been made?...
The club’s 33-year run in the top flight ended amid ugly scenes as fans turned on the players outside the Veltins-ArenaIt was all over bar the shouting, but there was plenty of shouting to come. Schalke had finally come to the end of the Bundesliga road at Arminia Bielefeld and though the final destination was not a surprise, it was still hard to take. Youth product Timo Becker wept on the bench and the general manager, Gerald Asamoah, a hero on the pitch in better times, only just held back his own tears in front of the television cameras.“We knew what to expect,” said Asamoah after relegation was confirmed. “But when the time finally comes, when you realise it’s now...
The last, short-lived rebel-league experiment seven decades ago in Columbia tells us much about why breakaways happenBogotá, Colombia: 9 April 1948. Before the 2pm meeting he had scheduled with a young Cuban lawyer called Fidel Castro, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, leader of the Liberal Party, decided to go for lunch at the Hotel Continental, five minutes’ walk from his office on Carrera Séptima. He never got to the restaurant. An assassin walked up to him, shot him four times and, five minutes before he had been due to meet Castro, Gaitán was pronounced dead in a local hospital.Violence was inevitable. The Colombian government knew what was coming and desperately sought a way to calm tensions. What could they do to distract...
European football’s dirty dozen must not be allowed to slip back into their routines. Now is the time to get vindictiveThose of you with a taste for these things will have noted the irony: a competition designed to eliminate promotion and relegation in perpetuity somehow managed to shed half its teams in a single evening. One by one the scions of the European Super League fell, like spurned pastry chefs in a televised baking competition: first the prize flans of Chelsea and Manchester City, then the rest of the English clubs late on Tuesday night, then Atlético Madrid and the two Milan clubs on Wednesday morning. Farewell then, Super League. You promised a leaner, more tightly-focused vision of football, and...
Manchester City fans like me had the chance to vote with our feet, mouths and placards. We didn’t and now the Super League shows we’re irrelevantI’m tapping out a tweet to my football club, Manchester City, trying to make a case for why they shouldn’t join the Super League. But nothing’s coming out except for abuse. A fuck at the start, one at the end and another in the middle for good luck. A three-word sentence. I delete them, and start anew. The same happens again. Pure senseless abuse. Well fair enough, I’m in an abusive relationship, and there comes a point when you say enough is enough, it’s time for the abused to fight back.But I’ve been here before....