In short: Come back here at 3pm on Saturday, March 28 to watch the Clasico match between Barcelona and Real Madrid from November 2010 in full – and tweet along using #SaturdayFFTSaturday, 3pm is an important cultural touchstone. We don’t need to explain it. You know immediately what it is, and what it means.It doesn’t matter what your routine in the hours building up to 3 o’clock is: whether you drive, take the train, bus or walk, or stagger from the pub. The only thing that matters is where you are at 3pm, when that whistle goes. For hundreds of thousands of people in this country, every single Saturday, that moment is exactly the same.For the next few weeks, and...
First a message from our editor, James Andrew.Records are there to be broken, and Cristiano Ronaldo certainly knows a thing or two about breaking them. Having scooped major honours in England, Spain and Italy, as well as leading Portugal to Euro 2016 glory, he’s now on the brink of smashing the international scoring record.Ronaldo is just short of Ali Daei’s milestone of 109 goals – we chart his rise from promising prospect to monstrous idol, chatting to the friends (and the odd foe) who have shared his unique journey.Elsewhere, we present FFT’s annual look at the 50 best players in the Football League – voted for by you. As a Fulham fan not old enough to have seen the likes...
Eight minutes on the clock, 30 namesto guess - all values are according to Transfermarkt.Remember to tweet your scores@FourFourTwoand share with your mates.NOW TRYQuiz! Can you name the last 100 penalty scorers in the Premier League? Did you know that for all the money that it took Paris Saint-Germain to sign Kylian Mbappe and Neymar combined, you could buy 1.1 billion Freddos? That's surely enough to keep you stocked during quarantine (other chocolate is available).Whilst the rest of the world gasps at the extortionate sums of money that football clubs pay for players, anyone who watches the game regularly is more than used to the fees that footballers command.It's weird, isn't it, that we watch Premier League players worth tens...
Ordinarily, it’s not in football’s interests to look long and hard at itself. It should be, but it isn’t. Those who hold the cards are doing very well for themselves and seem primarily intent on maintaining a status quo that enlarges their slice of the pie. It would take something unprecedented to challenge this ugly convention, to force a bit of introspection - something like, say, a pandemic shutting down the sport.You’d have to be old enough to remember when Portsmouth were back-to-back champions of England to have lived through this kind of societal shutdown before. The 1946/47 season may have been protracted by a brutal winter and the government’s desire to end midweek sport in order to increase productivity...
Formative football experiences are curious. Contrary to myth, they seem to pass without the football mattering too much. You don’t fall in love with players, do you? Maybe you do later, but not straight away. No, in the beginning it’s sensory. The green of the pitch through the bodies. The smell of the cut grass. The feeling of being one among many.In Fever Pitch, among his many other recollections, Nick Hornby remembered his father taking him to Highbury for his first game, to watch an Arsenalteam win by a single penalty-rebound to nil. A few weeks later, his dad would take him down Tottenham High Street, to watch Bill Nicholson’s Spurs at White Hart Lane.By any conceivable measure, Tottenham were...