About This Blog

Tim Vickery: The wonder of Chivas making the Copa Libertadores final

Is Wayne Rooney already too old?

Left Back in the Changing Room's 11 most pivotal English soccer moments

Futfanatico: EPL preview if the teams were rap artists

Zonal Marking: When three-man back lines go bad

What's the greenest soccer stadium in the world?

The strangest, possibly most wonderful soccer film ever

James Hamilton's 11 most pivotal English football moments

Tim Vickery on the importance of derbies in South America

World Cup College: England's tension between neo-realism and Hobbes' mechanism

Zonal Marking's 23-man all-World Cup-side

Soccer Spieler dares look back to name the real Group of Death

Tim Vickery's advice to Brazil: Hire Leonardo and start attacking

Isn't it time to take down the World Cup flags?

Said & Done wraps the World Cup: Jack Warner's noose, how many teachers executive hospitality costs in South Africa would have employed, and the best FIFA expenses ever claimed

Watford Academy: Jockeys + ballet + school = the envy of Europe

Sleep well, Minus the Shooting and World Cup College -- you will be missed

Neil W. Blackmon: Normalizing the Thierry Henry signing

Football Management: England's early World Cup exit boosted English tourism, and other deceptive correlations

This just in: The decline, fall and remaining prostrate of World Cup TV punditry

WSC: In defense of card-waving (sort of)

Zonal Marking's final World Cup final analysis begins: basic shapes and pressing

Tom Dunmore on the example rugby is setting for soccer on dealing with homophobia

The history of the U-20 Women's World Cup...now on in Germany

The sOccket ball: Play and plug

James Hamilton asks: What is the connection between poverty and skill on the ball?

Jennifer Doyle and Jason Davis: Is the new Nike ad thanking the USMNT sexist?

Andrew Guest: Stumbling on African voices and views at the World Cup

Jennifer Doyle: Germany still remembers Enke

Why China lags in soccer: A roundtable

Daniel Alarcón on Hand of God II and the tragic luster of Gyan's second penalty kick

Tim Vickery: The emotional immaturity of Maradona and Dunga

Stefan Fatsis scans the endless horizon of FIFA corruption

Roddy Doyle: England in 2014 Ha Ha Ha

The Run of Play says: Throw away all skeleton keys

Is Argentina's style Borgesian?

Jennifer Doyle: Reading the World Cup through Moby Dick

FIFA: Reasons to be thankful

Previously on Well Struck

Mariana Castillo Deball and Gianluigi Buffon: Chance, Intelligence, and Humor: An Interview with Gianluigi Buffon

Jonathan Wilson: The Joy of Nets

Fake Sigi: More Deplorable Ideological Twaddle

Pitch Invasion's supporter-ownership series

Sam Wallace: David Beckham: England Legend -- Or a Vain Failure?

The Millions: The Magisterial Goal

There are No Fours: Draw Up a Morality Play on the Clipboard

Sport is a TV Show: In Respectful Disagreement of Mystics

This is American Soccer: Good People Doing Bad Things

Sid Lowe: Getafe Emerge from the Shadow of Their Own Advertising Campaign

Sid Lowe: Benítez returns with a reminder of what might have been

Running Downhill: Sports and the Truth in Being Wrong

The Run of Play: Barcelona and the Idea of the Beautiful Game

The Run of Play: The Tuesday Portrait: Zlatan Ibrahimovic (2)

"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)

"[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)

"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)

"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)