Major sporting events need patience and time. Shortening the cycle would confirm that the game really is all about moneyThere has never been so much football. Every day, someone somewhere plays someone else, and you can follow it all over the world on any device – live, on demand, or just the highlights, on YouTube, DAZN or Twitter. There’s more to come; soon the Champions League will host a hundred more games a year. Our collective attention, as research calls it, is declining in the process, but it’s hard to stop the trend.What Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, and his adviser Arsène Wenger now have in mind could finally lead to overconsumption. They want to hold the World Cup every two...
The England manager picked a brave starting XI against Hungary – their failure to win the game should not tempt him to revert to his more risk-averse nature“Failure is a figment of your imagination.” Kobe Bryant had a pretty good line on the importance of trial and error, on failure as the father of success, on disaster on Monday as a signpost to triumph on Friday. To be fair this is perhaps a little easier to embrace as an approach to life when you happen, by an accident of fate, to be Kobe Bryant. Or indeed when failure doesn’t involve a migraine-inducing attempt to break down B-list international opponents at a lukewarm Wembley, while a group of budget fascists riot...
‘Order was restored,’ said the police, but only because they were forced to retreat during England’s World Cup qualifierWe came for the football. What we got, with the anthems still fresh, was 10 minutes of violent culture clash in the Wembley seats. This was a tableau of viciousness played out via the fists of Hungary’s travelling ultras and what looked, at times, like a lone Metropolitan police officer waving his (massively outgunned) baton of liberal justice.Ultra-nationalist football thugs versus the Met. And it’s live! It was a dismal, toxic, at times surreal night at Wembley Stadium. At 7.45pm England’s players kicked off this Qatar 2022 World Cup qualifier to the usual hopeful, tinny cheers. By 7.48pm, the first fists were...
The Poland striker has the most thankless job in international football but earned redemption after creating the equaliserThe second most thankless job in international football is trying to steer England through a mediocre qualifying group. Draws are a humiliation, defeats a disgrace. Wins are either “dreary” or “routine”. If you won narrowly, you were dour and unimpressive; if you won easily, then you can’t read too much into it anyway because of the weakness of the opposition. In a way this is one of those rare scenarios in which neither the process nor the outcome really matters. You are dullards by default; reassessments take place every two years. Next.So it was here for England, who in succumbing to an injury-time...
This is about money and power – with Fifa trying to isolate Europe and weaken UefaIt sounds so enticing, doesn’t it? A World Cup or European Championship every summer, allowing us to gorge like a footballing Augustus Gloop almost all year round. Never mind the risk of burnout, of greater TV subscription fees, of the game becoming even more bloated; just listen to the tinkle of nickel and copper swelling Fifa’s coffers.Yet such a proposal is about to sneak up on us, without most people realising, just like the 48-team World Cup – a ridiculous idea that became a reality. On Friday, Arsène Wenger, Fifa’s chief of global football development, even suggested a new football calendar could be decided by...