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...
The energy of football’s outrage over the Super League has been heartening, but were the clubs only posturing after all?As the sun dipped below the roof-line of Stamford Bridge something strange began to happen. The birds flew backwards through the sky, the cats barked, the trees turned a tangerine hue, and Roman Abramovich became, at a stroke, the protector of the people’s game, enemy of the elites, the oligarch of the masses.What world is this we have now entered? How far have we travelled through the looking glass? What powerful hallucinogenic drugs have been administered to lead us in the space of three days to a place where the hordes of football supporters on the Fulham Road can proclaim English...
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....
We all knew that eventually, money and corporate interest would mutate the game at the top level into something approaching RollerballIn my children’s novel Future Friend, which I began writing in January 2020, the future is imagined as a dystopian universe where the presence of mutant viruses infecting the air mean that no one goes out. When it was published, in the midst of lockdown, I was therefore congratulated by some for my previously unacknowledged psychic powers. A not so noticed feature of the Future Friend world, however, is that football is still played there: but only in one stadium, above the clouds, and only the super-rich can go and watch games there. So, given Sunday’s Super League news, I...