Top football clubs are different to other businesses. Whereas most companies exist to generate wealth for their shareholders, football clubs must balance this against the pursuit of trophies. Of course, the two aims are linked, or can be: mountains of silverware will increase a club’s popularity, tending to make it more valuable and, hence, to enable its owners, should they so choose, to sell it at a profit.
The thing with politicians is that it is in their nature to be opportunistic. When their popularity drops, their preparedness to talk out of their backside increases. Quite a simple equation, really.
Then there is that other phenomenon, best characterised by bandwagon-jumping. Once an issue appears to be safe to populate with general outcries of self-righteous babble, myriads of morons join the party and jump up and down like five-year-olds who have discovered the trampoline.
With the start of a new Premier League season less than three weeks away, I have repeated last year’s exercise drawing on data from the Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance to compile 26 top-three ‘mini-tables’. These rank the 20 English top-tier clubs in the 2012-13 season according to different financial parameters.
The Noam Chomsky quote appears to apply to all sorts of societies, businesses and people. One is tempted to add a variation of the theme and say: “For the hypocrites, crimes are those that others commit”. Far too many Brits have been claiming rather jingoistically, and for many years, that Britain could never compete with the massive corruption scandals that “those awful aliens” seem to specialise in.
“Our properties within our own territories [should not] be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.” Thomas Jefferson
Conflict, throughout the course of human history, has taken on many forms. But whether it be the bronze swords and spears of Homer’s Iliad, the muskets of Jefferson’s American War of Independence or the rockets, bombs and drones of today, some things have been constant.
One constant is the continuous presence of the narrators of current affairs,
“You make your own luck.” A saying that is sometimes true, sometimes designed to push you to do your best and sometimes…it’s nonsense.
But I’m intrigued by the role luck plays in life, in football, in World Cups.
As football has become a business, so coaching has become increasingly like a game of chess. Coaches posing as grandmasters, players often pawns, the straightforward approach of inviting a player to go out and PLAY looking increasingly over-simplistic,
By Andrew Warshaw
July 12 – If a hurt and bruised host nation thought it couldn’t get any worse, the sight of Argentina’s players emerging for Sunday’s World Cup final will dig the knife in even deeper. Especially at Rio de Janeiro’s ‘s iconic Maracana stadium.
July 11 – South America vs Europe, The two dominant confederations have found their regional representatives for the final winner takes all match-up in the Maracana this Sunday.
July 11 – It wasn’t meant to be like this. The World Cup was planned to be a triumphal march through Brazil for the Seleção, ending at the Maracana for the grand finale at the grandest of football venues. Instead they meet Holland in Brasilia for the third placed play off Saturday. Wake, party or just time for Brazil to wake up?
“The strongest of all warriors are these two – Time and Patience.” War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Threaded within a fabulously entertaining Napoleonic soap opera, Leo Tolstoy’s masterwork properly explores the human condition. In short, the greatest of all the Russians tells us, if you think you have any free will of your own you are very much mistaken.
Tolstoy conveys that we mortals are swept along by predetermined currents towards outcomes preordained.
By Andrew Warshaw
July 9 – In this most extraordinary and unpredictable of World Cups, nothing even came close to the humiliation of brutal proportions that unfolded in Belo Horizonte. Anyone who has watched Brazil during the tournament knows that the squad, for all the expectations, was full of deficiencies, a far cry from the great Brazilian teams of the past.
July 8 – The last few weeks, with the tournament in full swing, have been a lot better. But I don’t think anyone could justifiably argue that Brazil’s first of three years in the global sporting spotlight has gone entirely to plan. Today in Belo Horizonte Brazilians must face up to the distinct possibility of more bad news: can their yellow-shirted warriors, shorn of their two best players, feasibly get the better of a typically well-drilled,
Tempo fermo. L’orologio del calcio italiano non si è mosso da quel triste ultimo 24 giugno, quando l’uruguaiano Godin ha rispedito subito a casa la Nazionale azzurra, togliendola di scena dal Mondiale in Brasile. In realtà sembrava che tutto dovesse cambiare in fretta. Pochi minuti dopo il fischio finale il commissario tecnico Cesare Prandelli rassegnava le sue dimissioni “irrevocabili”, seguito nel giro di una manciata di secondi da quelle del presidente della Federcalcio, Giancarlo Abete.
With two African teams making the knockout rounds in Brazil, the continent has obviously written a new chapter in tournament history.
Ever since Morocco became the first African team, at the 1986 finals in Mexico, to reach the Round of 16, the continent has maintained a solitary presence there.
Considering that I had, in a previous piece, seriously considered the possibility that its five teams were at risk of being knocked out in the first round,
It was the most eagerly awaited of FIFA’s daily World Cup media briefings and the questions came thick and fast. Why, asked one highly respected news agency reporter, was FIFA preaching zero tolerance towards racism when zero action on the ground was in fact the reality?
It was a fair point but few, if anybody, expected the two distinguished members of the panel to provide such diametrically opposed responses.
Sometimes, quite fairly,