Like all Danes I feel proud to be represented by a team who have shown vulnerability and togetherness after their traumaI am proud to be Danish. Now more than any time before. To watch the Denmark players act the way they did, to see the way they shouldered responsibility in the heat of the moment after Christian Eriksen’s collapse and to see the way they cared for each other was incredibly admirable. It makes me proud as a Danish person but also as the captain of the women’s team. The whole country feels the same: immensely proud to be represented by these players and this team in this tournament but also in general. In that moment this tournament became bigger...
The qualifying tweak that admitted North Macedonia was a plus but third-placed teams advancing undermines integrityA little over a decade ago, John Delaney, the infamous then president of the Football Association of Ireland, approached Sepp Blatter and outlined his proposal to expand the Euros from 16 teams to 24. A little later, having thought about it, Blatter came back and told him he thought it was an excellent scheme, saying: “You should be honoured the president of Fifa said it was very good.” Blatter, notoriously, was a man who had 50 ideas a day, 51 of them bad. Related: How to support our sports coverage (without asking a billionaire) | Jonathan Liew Related: Belgium’s attacking riches bail out creaking back...
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...
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...
In the first of a series of columns, the World Cup-winning Germany captain argues for an expanded league which includes clubs from across the continentFootball has changed for the better. In the 1980s, it was open season on artists like Diego Maradona, with foul specialists sent in to stop him. You can watch the clips on YouTube, and be horrified. The end, back then, justified all means.Today, tripping and brutal tackles are heavily penalised, and such fouls have all but disappeared. The international football community agreed on the stricter approach in a transparent process. Players must now play fair, and fouls are seen as a last resort. These days, the end is justified by the means. For this development, from...