By Roger Pielke Jr 30 September 2014  Sport is in the news for a lot of the wrong reasons, from the scandal over the NFL’s response to cases of alleged domestic abuse to FIFA’s latest farce – the global football body ordering executives to return $27,000 watches given as gifts during this year’s World Cup […]

By Ian Herbert 12 September 2014 One of the main panel events at the Soccerex global convention in Manchester this week was headlined: ‘How to run a club successfully.’ We heard all of the usual stuff about what the game has become: Liverpool selling £50,000 of Mario Balotelli shirts in a day, reaching 10 million […]

By Roger Pielke Jr 12 September 2014  It is a favorite debating topic among football fans in the United States: has soccer arrived in the United States? On one level the question simply reflects the fundamental insecurities of the American soccer supporter of a certain vintage. But those insecurities are based on experience. If you […]

* By Ian Herbert 5 September 2014 Why didn’t Manchester City buy Radamel Falcao? It’s one of the unexplained mysteries of the transfer market. They admire him. They would have leapt at the chance of buying him last summer. And now they go into the season with only three strikers, after letting Alvaro Negredo leave […]

* In his latest book, ‘Taking Our Ball Back: English Football’s Culture Wars‘, MARTIN CLOAKE quotes political philosopher Michael Sandel’s statement that “The pleasure of sports has been diminished by its commerciality.” One of the central questions running through the collection of articles that make up the book is how the thing that makes sport so […]

* By Nick Harris 22 August 2014 When the first episode of Match of the Day was screened 50 years ago today, there were more than twice as many people inside Anfield watching Liverpool beat Arsenal 3-2 than there were watching on TV later. MoTD was a one-game show then, screening whatever was deemed to […]

* By Roger Pielke Jr 29 July 2014 Over the weekend, British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg told the Sunday Times that Russia should be stripped of the 2018 World Cup. Clegg joins several senior German politicians in calling for the next World Cup to be moved as a sanction against Russia for its role […]

* By Tim Rich 21 July 2014 Before I was married, I used to go to weddings and sit at the back as the bride and groom danced to the first song – usually something utterly inappropriate like Careless Whisper or the Police’s creepy Every Breath you Take. I would wonder why it wasn’t me […]

* By Roger Pielke Jr 21 July 2014 Speaking last week in Australia, the winner of the 2011 Tour de France winner, Cadel Evans, claimed that professional cycling today is cleaner than at any time in his experience. The 37-year-old Aussie rider said: “It’s in the best shape – maybe not economically – but the best […]

* At the completion of the Italy-Costa Rica match in Group D in Recife, half of the 2014 World Cup group games (24 of 48) had been played.  There have been expected victories for some nations, big upsets for others – Adios Spain! Bye-bye England! – and more goals than most fans would have expected. So […]