Put the World Cup on a Diet

Not that there’s much hope of this happening, but here’s how to add excitement back to the World Cup: Shrink it. Go back to a 16-team for the finals, preceded by a fascinating 60-team pre-qualification split into 4 groups of 15 who play each other home and away — meaning the world comes to Togo (and builds the game there). “But then Fifa wouldn’t make its billions, so instead we’re condemned to an exhausting leviathan in which we have to hunt ever harder for football greatness.” (Jonathan Wilson/The Guardian)

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Quote of the Moment: How to Save Celebrity Football

"This summer it became obvious for the first time that the chances of a top footballer suffering a total mental meltdown during a detox session in a luxury Indian Ocean health spa because he has received yet another text offering him £100,000 to put his name to a half-built boutique marina-and-bowling alley development in Equatorial Guinea is only the thickness of a black Amex card away.

"It is therefore imperative that Premier League clubs act right away to prevent a situation in which some of our planet's best-loved and most thoroughly waxed attacking maestros literally have their vital juices sucked out of them by the ravenous funnelweb-spider of fame. Who wants to see Wayne Rooney reduced to the sort of dried up husk that can be kicked aside by some bloke from New Zealand who played seven games for Scarborough? Well, OK, but apart from you and me?" (Harry Pearson/The Guardian)
Quote of the Moment 2

"[F]ootball is a game, and not an especially peaceful one, that too many vested interests have elevated to a pedestal where the expectations of mass healing and harmony are more akin to those of cults and quackery. It's a mere wonderful sport that people play and watch, and sometimes they enjoy it and sometimes they fight about it. Or sometimes they exploit it for political or commercial reasons. In truth, the idea of football as the unifier of all people and nations stands up for about as long as it takes the fizz to evaporate from a freshly poured glass of Coke." (Ian Plenderleith/When Saturday Comes)
Quote of the Moment 3

"Soccer needs purity like a fish needs a bicycle. I'm a back-and-forth neutral on video replay, but I don't understand the absurd, pseudo-religious opposition to a technology that could in seconds rectify a simple wrong, like a big white ball crossing a big white line. I also don't think Americans who thought Sunday's final was boring, cynically physical, unskilled, and yes, low-scoring, are vapid idiots addicted to the instant gratification of the American Sports Machine. I just think they have a pair of eyes. While Zonal Marking's after-the-fact summaries are consistently brilliant, they have the habit of limiting soccer's 'ought' to a dismal, tactically negative 'is,' and many of us will walk away, slightly confused, assuming that must have been a brilliant final after all." (Richard Whittall/A More Splendid Life)
Quotes of the Moment: The World Cup as Couch, Sofa

"What the Cup does in microcosm, football does at large. It is the one major sport that raises more questions than it answers, and instills a fatalistic world view in just about all of its followers. Soccer says, what will be, will be—and we have no idea what that is, so you may as well have a Campari and soda and try to enjoy this 0 : 0 stalemate while you still have breath in your lungs. For better or worse, it’s hard to just drop in on soccer, because you’re likely to visit when Nigel De Jong is playing. To really understand the family, you have to crash on the couch forever." (Zach Dundas/Renegade Sportsman-True/Slant)

"It’s great, watching the World Cup on TV. Settling down on your own sofa, and thinking: “A month; a whole month; just sat here: paradise.” If you’re my generation, the World Cup on TV means the particular aching nostalgia that only the saturated colour and tinny sound of Mexico 70 evokes. It means Kenneth Wolstenholme, after Pele’s incredible dummy against the Uruguayan goalkeeper at the same tournament, throwing off his formal English shackles and inventing modern commentary by exclaiming: “Oh...oh...what...what genius!” It means hugging a friend of mine, now dead, in a dingy flat in Hornsey in 1990, my mind blasted with ecstasy, all thoughts except the shining, marvellous fact that David Platt has just scored against Belgium in extra time out of my head, still perhaps the only time in my life I’ve lived in the moment." (David Baddiel/The Sunday Times)
Must Read Soccer on Twitter
- Is Wayne Rooney already too old? http://bit.ly/ae4ikn 03:04:30 PM August 10, 2010 from SocialOomph
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