Barcelona Burger King

Pax Barcelona reigns — but it’s a reign, perhaps, more akin to the Roman Empire than Alexander the Great, crushing us into compliance “within a prison of engineered perfection,” lacking a human element to fall in love with. “For this consumer there is a certain processed, robotic quality in the application of Barcelona’s peerless skills…There is a textureless quality to this elite fondue. Every bite of Barcelona tastes of something similar: blended and gristle-free Barcelona.” (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

(Image: Burger King Steakhouse Angus burger. Image credit: AR Pratama/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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What Chance Have Minnows Got Now?

Just nine years after Wimbledon’s club was stolen with the permission of the FA, AFC Wimbledon have finally punched the FA back with promotion to the Football League. But perhaps the sweetest-seeming story in football this year is really the product of relentless vengeance-seeking. Can a club continue being promoted on fury alone? Against the bigger gates of League Two, as Ian Holloway put it yesterday about his relegated Blackpool, “what chance have minnows got now?” (Martin Samuel/Daily Mail)

Why Pray for Liverpool?

Prayer and elite sport require the same kind of discipline – a daily practice that demands perseverance, even when it seems so not worth it. But isn’t it absurd to pray for your team to win? “The point lies not in God’s partisan enthusiasms or capricious passions, but in the nature of prayer itself. Prayer is about growing a relationship that gradually helps the one praying to see as God sees. Any honest and free relationship encourages the parties to express themselves freely, to be outrageous in their desires and to tell the truth. That is what I am doing when I raise with the almighty the possibility of swinging it Liverpool’s way.” (Nick Baines/The Guardian)

The Soft Homophobia of Women’s Soccer Coverage

Virtually unnoted: The Nigerian women’s national team has been purged of all its lesbian players…after which it was featured on FIFA’s website for the upcoming Women’s World Cup. While male gay athletes stay in the closet, the media’s homophobia does the closeting for us about gay female athletes — never covering the momentous moments in their lives beyond the field. “The sexism of the world of sports is related to its homophobia; the feminism of women’s sports spaces is related to the queerness of those space – which, given the sexism and homophopia of mainstream sports spaces, leaves little room for representing the specificity of the athletes in women’s sports at all.” (From a Left Wing)

Belodedici the Treasonous

The story of the only man to win the European Cup twice for Eastern European sides reads like an Alan Furst novel – river crossings in fog to avoid border patrols, an unlikely friendship with Ceausescu’s son, a 10-year sentence in his native Romania for treason…oh, and a stupid FIFA ruling. “If the Steaua of 86 played the Red Star of 91, who would win? ‘Which team am I playing on?’ asks Miodrag Belodedici.” (Jonathan Wilson/The Guardian)

Bodice Ripper

The first MLS Cascadia Derby is over, but not before drawing almost every US fan’s (and soccer writer’s) attention away from the USWNT-Japan match in Columbus — indicative of the plummeting fortunes of the US women’s game these days in this country, and maybe for feminism as a whole. “Consider your perception of the importance of a regular season MLS game relative to a men’s World Cup warm up game. Now to a women’s World Cup warm up game. It sort of boggles the mind, doesn’t it? And it wasn’t long ago that perception gap would have been unthinkable.” (Fake Sigi)

The Life Lessons of Relegation

Having a team in the drop zone is like being on death watch for a relative: The world swirls around you, bee-busy, while your time slows to black-hole slowness. “Football mirrors our meritocracy, so this only works out for so many people or teams. The majority stoically settles for stasis – mid-table safety may not be ideal but we’ll plod along in the hope that something better might develop. But if people or teams must shift upwards (and they must), some of us have to shift down to accommodate them.” (Ian Plenderleith/When Saturday Comes)

The Education Fix

FIFA announces evidence of rampant massive match fixing and creates a new anti-corruption center...but with funding for “education,” not investigations or enforcement. (And forget about any mandate to investigate corruption inside FIFA.) “So the anti-corruption centre promises to be one of those well-constructed snooze-fest places where people go to hear their bosses give seminars full of corporate nonsense and then leave to get on with the lives.” (Declan Hill)

In the Thick of It

Is English football dominated by The Culture of the Thick — managers and teammates of below-average intelligence who can’t stand players who are smarter than they are? The Craig Bellamys and Joey Bartons are villified for being disruptive, while “[t]he type of player English football breeds — hard, stupid men — are the men who decide which direction teams go: men like John Terry are the dressing room ‘leaders’ whose opinions are, ironically, allowed to be heard.” (Surreal Football)

Against The Run of Play

The Run of Play — soccer blogging’s chalice of ambrosia, or a site where “far too many wasted words populate posts that go nowhere,” the Wordpress equivalent a Yngwie Malmsteen wankfest“? “I’ve built my own site on rage, heartbreak and transcendence. Nick Hornby sat utterly depressed at dozens of soccer games and so have I. Sometimes the purpose of sport is to mark time, feel miserable about something, get close to someone of the same gender, or a hundred other things that don’t involve enjoyment of the sport, and that’s totally fine.” (Fake Sigi)

Out of Sheer Rage

Anger is now our default response to sports: at referees, at unseen hands and secret handshakes against our club, at youth who decide not to play for our national teams…a hyperpartisanship that fills but never satisfies because, while “your club itself becomes the index of all meaning in the game,” the game often disappoints. Rage has replaced enjoyment of sport; rage is killing sport. (Brian Phillips/The Run of Play)

Future Tense

The “quartet of El Clasicos” (which made it sound like a PBS series) might be over, but they showed us the hyperreal future of big-money football — in which the swirl of discourse and self-devouring media coverage detaches from the event itself and becomes the event. “El Clasico now has no end, temporally and teleogically. It now exists merely to be covered.” (Richard Whittall/The Footy Blog)

Madrid Wins!

Barca may have won the tie, but Madrid — which has long had an inferiority complex about Barcelona — is catching up in the culture war battle between the two cities. There’s an architectural and urban renewal renaissance in Spain’s capital, it’s the commercial center of the country, and some Catalan intellectuals are moving to Madrid, repelled by Barcelona’s annoying tourism and Catalan nationalism. “Madrid is beginning to be Barcelonised,” says one writer. (Giles Tremlett/The Observer)

Mourinho’s Madness, and Ours

To say that Mourinho is paranoid and therefore dismissible ignores the mirror he holds to us, to our inability to take responsibility for our mistakes. Further: What Mourinho also does, a la “The Matrix,” is point out the disturbing glitches and conspiracies in our seemingly solid, ever-shifting systems. “As long as conspiracy talk fills his press conferences, our eyes will be glued to the television. We dare not stare with a magnifying glass at the inconsistencies that plague our own daily lives and concept of knowledge – we’d probably trip over our own feet and hurt ourselves.” (Elliott/Futfanatico)

Blame When Saturday Comes

WSC ploughed the field we all play in now — first with a literary, “unashamedly cerebral” take on the sport; first with football humor set-pieces; first with “the new vocabulary of puckish humour, critical scrutiny of football’s hierarchies and the promiscuous eliding of football with other parts of the popular culture. Cranky, and populist, it might seem a little outdated now, “like a slightly mildewed Victorian keystone buried within the sparkling bowels of a craning new-build mega-city, it has remained essentially unchanged as football has mushroomed around it.” And thank God for that. (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

Children’s Theater

El Clásico — just how sick of it are you right now? It’s as if we bought tickets to the Ring Cycle and stumbled into “Step Brothers” instead, two frothing siblings feigning outrage and piling grievances as high as their old bunk beds. “As the heat rises in the corporate and cultural rivalry between these two great institutions we see a reversion to a child-like state…The game’s two most illustrious teams sent a terrible message around the world. This was not a football match. It was warped political theatre and there is more to come next week.” (Paul Hayward/Irish Times)

You Can’t Stop The Crowds from Singing

Trying to take politics and sectarian hatred out of football is “an operation likely to kill the patient.” Crowds have always been a place of identity formation, of resistance and the marginalized reaching their full throat. Sometimes that’s progressive, as with Spartak Moscow and Cairo’s ultras joining in recent rebellion. Other times, it’s the ugliness of the Old Firm or Red Star Belgrade vs. Dinamo Zagreb. “As with most cultural forms, from the cinema to the novel, the politics of football will be what we make of it.” (David Goldblatt/The Guardian)

Headed Out

Soccer’s concussion problem is finally surfacing into collective consciousness, but far too slowly. In some youth leagues, concussion rates are as bad as they are for American football and hockey; girls are especially vulnerable; and the learning curve for teachers, coaches and parents remains steep. Ask former MLS star Taylor Twellman, whose career ended because of a hit he’d endured hundreds of times before. He’s started a foundation for concussion victims — but he’s afraid to be left alone with a ball. (Scott Helman/Boston Globe)

Balls, Please (The Lie of English Football Passion)

“English football is in crisis. People are beginning to wake up to the fact that for too long we have suffered under hoof-merchants and ignorance, of early balls to target men and idiots crowing about passion instead of focusing on technique. An enlightened few are bucking the trend, standing up for all that is decent in football. The new world is upon us. The old ways are dying out. Tony Pulis is not long for this world. None of this is true.” (Callum Hamilton/Surreal Football)

The Seagulls, the Trawler, the Sardines, the Sea

Kids these days — so full of themselves, so goddamned cocksure, sad refractions of rap poseurs. And to what end? When Cantona was an asshole, he made you think; he inspired you with his dedication to something beyond himself, however delusional that pursuit might have been. Trumpeter, Roman gladiator, philosophe, the conductor of his own symphonies — in the wake of his infamous kung fu kick, he said: “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.” Ars longa, vita brevis. (Adams Sibley/The Other 87)

The Late Late Late Show

MLS start times are as inscrutable as the ways of Job’s Yahweh…or are they? “We want to be the league that no one really knows about. Scheduling games at the same time as say, a Plastikman show, gives us credibility in the burned out post-industrial urban markets of the midwest and northeast…. And not only will we be moving the times, but as this campaign evolves, you’ll see more games being pulled off tv and the internet. Promotion cycles will revolve mostly around stapling fliers to telephone poles, postings to obscure usenet groups and social media accounts that are started for one week and then pulled down, things like that.” (Fake Sigi)

Surviving Joe Pesci in the Desert

The bargain Real Madrid has made with the devil to beat Barcelona is now in full flower — they’ve lost the league, the players are embarrassed, Mourinho’s tactics infuriate the ancients. And yet the Madridistas celebrate a draw, their smiles a war between desperate hope and simple desperation, survivors of a meet with Joe Pesci in the desert. “Two former coaches agreed: if we had done this, we’d have been sacked; a former Madrid player was privately spitting blood — this, he said, was not worthy of Madrid. And even mad Madridista Tomás Roncero, while talking up the ‘euphoria,’ admitted: ‘It can be hard to take the medicine when it tastes like castor oil.’” (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)

The Binary Logistic Regression of #PissOffWenger

Other than change his disastrous personality and admit fault, what should Arsène Wenger do? The numbers say: Pay to get some defenders so you can stop losing in the closing minutes. “They may not be paying for transfers in the open market, but they are paying their players wages that are in line with winning championships. And that’s the rub.” (Zach Slaton/A Beautiful Numbers Game)

Urban Outfitters

Portland has laid claim to the title “Soccer City USA” — an overreach that highlights that football in the United States has become a game of cities, a confederation of weird Austins and sweet home Chicagos that is the true Red State. “Football, the most global sport, has ironically become the vessel for the most fervent and eccentric localist impulses. In a world of unacknowledged city-states, our clubs allow us to rally to the flags that matter.” (Zach Dundas/The Run of Play)

Chinese Gambling & Soccer’s Coming ‘Truman Show’

Betting is everywhere in China — even under statues of Marx and Engels in Shanghai parks — and that can only mean rampant match-fixing everywhere else.”In the largely deserted stands at Dutch second-division games, Chinese with headsets report every corner-kick back to Shanghai…Traveling around China, I felt what I had previously only understood intellectually: that what is happening there will change most things that happen elsewhere. In football, the consequences could be terrible.” (Simon Kuper/FT.com)

Mourinho, El Diablo

For the moment, no more flirtations with the EPL for The S.O. — he pushed that game as far as he could and now has renewed his dedication to Real Madrid, even possibly using an accidental touchline embrace to woo Gareth Bale southward, just in time to solidify his squad’s collective psyche. “There is in him…a deeply tenacious streak, which he transmits to his players to make them think their fates are bound up with his…Life has a habit of bending Jose Mourinho’s way.” (Paul Hayward/The Guardian)

The Lincoln City Assassination

What’s worse than rooting for a crap team? Rooting for a crap one that has a good little run and fools you into thinking that it’s shed its lousy ways…only to tumble right back into the shit. Welcome to Lincoln City FC: “My English teacher once told our class: ‘You’re in school to learn, not have fun.’ Great preparation for life, and all that. Except that we never do learn, do we? And we don’t have much fun either.” (Ian Plenderleith/When Saturday Comes)

Goal-bal Cooling

While actual scoring seems out of the question these days for some famous EPL strikers, there’s no adequate way to measure the severity of their goal-scoring droughts, unlike other natural-events scales such as Beaufort and Richter. Enter the Birtles Index, named after the hapless Man Utd center-forward Garry Birtles, whose infertility on the pitch stretched on so long pop stars took up his cause. Next up? Calls from environmentalists for measures to halt global scoring change. (Harry Pearson/The Guardian)

Ruud Gullit’s Faustian Bargain

Everyone scratched their heads when Ruud Gullit agreed in January to take over FC Terek Grozny — first, because it’s Chechnya, and second, because the team is owned by Chechnya autocrat Ramzan Kadyrov, under whose regime around 3,000 people have disappeared. (He also picks the team captain.) Gullit isn’t dead yet, but Kadyrov hired him to become “the Chelsea of the East” — quickly. Still, Ruud says, it’s better than managing in L.A. (Walter Mayr/Der Spiegel; translated from the German by Paul Cohen)

Messi/Ronaldo: The Style of No Style

Yes, Messi and Ronaldo score like Colin Farrell — but while they dominate, they don’t transcend, they aren’t memorable. And that’s our fault — they reflect our recent taste for soccer as Castrol Index, with the supreme value not magic but data. “We watch and wait for the goal, only mildly surprised by the steps along the way…There’s a great chance that Messi or Ronaldo, or both, will make the difference. But how do they make that difference?” (Futfanatico)

Picking it Up

Americans fetishize the pickup game across all their sports in that irritating, kitchifying way we have with all things amateur. (Call it “love-of-love-of-the-game.”) But American soccer fans love pickup for more practical reasons: There isn’t enough of it, and that absence hurts our overall play. “Pickup is an incredibly useful teaching tool not just because of its numbers, but because of its informality which means coaches — those who might be the pickup advocates — couldn’t create the ideal pickup scenario even if they wanted to. It has to be organic.” (The Other 87)

Read of the Day: Blinding Ourselves to Blind Luck

A goal like Dejan Stankovic’s volley from midfield against Schalke 04 Tuesday obscures the crazy luck it takes to pull off such a shot — we end up drooling over the replay and celebrating the player’s astonishing skill. Yet Stankovic had…a bad game overall. “If football is merely a series of attempts at the same thing, with a precious few coming off while the rest are forgotten, why do we celebrate the lucky one-offs as if they were always meant to be?” (Richard Whittall/The Footy Blog)

Read of the Day: Benoit Assou-Ekotto Goes to Work

Spurs’ Benoit Assou-Ekotto says he loves passing to Christian Bale, thinks Harry Redknapp is cool, and…that he plays for the money, not the love of the sport. Is he a freak? A bore? Gore Vidal among the hypocrites? Or just like you and me about our workplaces? And how hard would that be…to root for someone who doesn’t root for “us”? (Ryan O’Hanlon/The Good Men Project)

Throwing Paul Ince a Life Preserver

The firing last week of Paul Ince as Notts County manager — one of only two blacks who held managerial positions (out of 92 English clubs) — highlights a recent survey that racism suffuses boardrooms in English football. But did Ince’s fast-tracking to Blackburn’s top job three years ago (only to crash and burn) do black managerial candidates any good? Wouldn’t a Rooney Rule for English football just be a cynical ploy, and isn’t it time to force those boardrooms to bring in faces of color first? (Jason/twohundredpercent)

Reads of the Day: Foul-tains of Wayne

Wayne Rooney has been cited by England’s Football Association for some ill-chosen on-camera verbiage on Saturday — a penalty totally justified despite its inconsistent application, says Left Back in the Changing Room. How far we are from the days of gallant, charming fuck-up George Best, writes Kevin Mitchell — Best, who accepted responsibility for his collapse, while Rooney’s “curled lip has merely been anesthetized.” And Martin Samuel wonders why Rooney — and everybody in English football — seems so angry these days, “as if they had been forced on to the pitch or into their seat at gunpoint.”

On DeMerit

The story of Rise and Shine, the new film about Jay DeMerit, is as improbable as DeMerit’s career itself: shot by an acupuncturist friend of DeMerit’s who had never made a movie before and who’s recovered from a list of syndromes bizarre enough to impress Greg House. “We were going to let the experts do it, but when that didn’t happen we had a moment in time to make it,” says Ranko Tutulugdzija. They did well: Rise and Shine just won the Rising Star award at the Canada International Film Festival. (Simon Burnton/Guardian)

Andy Carroll and the Drinking Game

Andy Carroll’s alleged weakness for lager (eight or nine pints in one evening!) flows nicely into English football’s sudsy history, but Carroll’s status as Albion’s bright young hope means his servers will probably be calling the Daily Mail with his nightly quaff tallies. Blame lager itself, which “begets only lager, and a full raft of degenerative lager trimmings: the palette-sharpening lager-fag, the lager-hunger solace of the sodden kebab. Lager turns the world a single colour: lager colour.” (Barney Roney/The Guardian)

Read of the Day: Guilt and the Lefty English Fan

“Anyone English, white and to the left of Walt Disney” was relieved at their national side’s tie with Ghana the other night — because “the sight of eleven dejected young millionaires yanking hunched carcasses off a football pitch following their narrow defeat to former colonial masters would [have been] enough to reach for the sulphuric acid and start scrubbing.” But can one be “as left-wing as an IRA bake sale above an alternative book shop” and still root for England? And call bullshit on England’s patronizing celebration of Ghana’s “excitement” and “vigour” without being called a reader of The Daily Mail? (Mark Critchley/twohundredpercent)

Just Take a Shot

Soccer has a paucity of meaningful stats on what gives a team a better chance of winning — and the pool is getting smaller, based on a new analysis by Sounder at Heart. Shot accuracy? It plots as a random blob on a graph, signifying nothing. Shot conversion? Even more random — a player who converts her shots well in the first half of a season is just likely as likely to convert poorly in the second half as continue the trend. The one thing that stands out? Shot rate. Just keep shooting. (Sounder at Heart)

Read of the Day: Gentlemen Can Agree

On the pitch, football in England is thoroughly integrated — so why are only 2 of 92 professional managers there black? A new academic survey of 1,000 fans, players, refs and managers indicates there’s systemic racism among England’s football boards, and that the the country needs to institute a rule similar to the National Football League’s “Rooney Rule” to break the recycling of mediocre water managers. (Lucy Tobin/The Guardian)

Reads of the Day: Managing Up

Everyone and The Special One are down on Fabio Capello — except Martin Samuel, who says Capello “has already been a Jackass, a weirdo and one half of Laurel and Hardy and this for topping his European Championship qualifying group with three wins and a draw, rightly restoring John Terry as England captain and evolving his squad more successfully than anyone could have imagined after the disappointment of the World Cup.” Meanwhile, everyone’s up on the USMNT except Paul Gardner, who calls Bob Bradley a yesterday man, leading “a team without style, a team that has nothing better than craven defense to offer in a home game against a strong opponent.”

Read of the Day: If Ronaldo Dives in a Forest

The heroic act, the inspirational gesture are social, not solitary — they require not just an actor, but an audience, and not just an audience, but one that can reflect on the experience and make collective memory out of it. Sport does not exist without our narration; we “turn the polis into an organization that is creative of memory and/or history/histories.” (Julia Kristeva, “Arendt and Aristotle: An Apologia for Narration,” via Sean Smith/SportsBabel)

Read of the Day: Self-Branding

A brand is something that prompts a choice, entices you to pay a premium. So while Houston and Vancouver are taking shit for some recent T&A advertising that’s not family-friendly, the real marketing issue for MLS is that nobody knows what the league stands for. If the core brand identity can’t answer “why are we here?” maybe that’s why we aren’t. (Fake Sigi)

Read of the Day: The Best Manager France Never Had

Few recall the brief tenure Jean-Paul Sartre had at the helm of Stade Saint-Germain — but those who do know it as the too-short reign of a revolutionary tactician, particularly his “absent forward” formation. (Just try covering him…or substituting for him.) His “players are condemned to be free” philosophy produced some of the most creative play of the postwar era; next to it, both Barcelona and Mourinho seem demigods of bad faith. (Russell Berrisford/Fisted Away)

Reads of the Day: Captain, Bye Captain

In cricket or death-spiraling planes, captains are critical — but not so with football, where the captain is as atavistic as an appendix, more a national worry towel than Henry V. Twofootedtackle and Nutmeg Radio trace the history of the term’s irrelevance, while Jonathan Wilson says Capello’s handling of Terry/Ferdinand shows his own increasing disconnection from England.

Read of the Day: Adriano Loses It

For every Aaron Rodgers, a thousand Alex Smiths — why is that? Why are the habits and sacrifices that lead to success almost always undone by the trappings and temptations of same? Throw in an suddenly slain father, and you have the story of Adriano — signed by Roma in June after an illustrious Brazilian career, dumped seven months later. “For a top-class player, every game is a statement of his own worth,” said Sir Alex. Or shame. (Tim Vickery/BBC)

Read of the Day: Charlie Davies Is For The Living

A woman is dead, another in prison, and Charlie Davies is alive and reborn as a soccer star. Unfair? Uncomfortable? “The one life that did emerge intact just happens to be the one that the soccer community collectively wants to see succeed, so we celebrate that life….We cheer because it makes us sad, hurt, and uncomfortable to think about anything else. Life is the most important thing. To live is to be grateful, even when those around us die or are interrupted.” (Fake Sigi)

Music to Lose to Barca By

What does 1-5 to Barca sound like? More Shutter Island than Desert Island, a soundtrack volte-facing from bombastic to ambient, impudent to watery, building to Television’s tiki-taka “Marquee Moon” and then sagging into Phil Collins “Against All Odds,” with a vomiting kitten tossed in just ‘cuz. “It’s getting to the point where every Barça game feels like an historic step on the road to an historic event of historic, historic proportions, like Obama’s primary campaign.” Cue the Half Man Half Biscuit, it must be… (Fredorrarci/Norman Einstein’s)

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