The European Super League founder and Juventus chairman, Andrea Agnelli, has said that the breakaway can no longer go ahead after nine clubs withdrew.
Asked whether the project could still happen after the exits, Agnelli told Reuters: “To be frank and honest no, evidently that is not the case.”
Continue reading...‘We will not have our national game taken away from us for profit,’ says Oliver Dowden
The withdrawal of six English Premier League clubs from the European Super League highlights the need to examine the governance of football, the UK culture secretary has said, pledging “we will not have our national game taken away from us for profit”.
Oliver Dowden paid tribute to the fans whose pressure prompted the withdrawal of the six English clubs initially signed up for the breakaway competition, leaving the project in tatters, but warned that more needed to be done.
Continue reading...The energy of football’s outrage over the Super League has been heartening, but this is just a retreat, a ceasefire
As the sun dipped below the roof-line of Stamford Bridge something strange began to happen. The birds flew backwards through the sky, the cats barked, the trees turned a tangerine hue, and Roman Abramovich became, at a stroke, the protector of the people’s game, enemy of the elites, the oligarch of the masses.
What world is this we have now entered? How far have we travelled through the looking glass? What powerful hallucinogenic drugs have been administered to lead us in the space of three days to a place where the hordes of football supporters on the Fulham Road can proclaim English football’s original – and most dizzyingly transformative oligarch – as their white knight, tender of the grass roots, pharaoh of pyramid and all the rest of it?
Continue reading...Anas Laghari claims elite competition will reignite love of game and end ‘madness’ of big money transfers
The Spanish banker who created the controversial new European Super League has promised the new JP Morgan-backed competition will pump €400m (£350m) into the national leagues that the elite clubs plan to leave behind.
Anas Laghari, a partner at the Madrid bank Key Capital and the newly appointed general secretary of the Super League, said the new league would reignite younger people’s love of football and end the “madness” of big money transfers.
Continue reading...Prime minister will offer ‘unwavering support’, he tells FA, Premier League and fans
Boris Johnson has promised football groups that the government will consider using what he called “a legislative bomb” to stop English clubs joining a breakaway European Super League, as official efforts to thwart the plan were stepped up.
The prime minister and Oliver Dowden, the sports and culture secretary, held a meeting with the heads of the Football Association and Premier League, as well as representatives of fans’ groups from Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, three of the clubs involved.
Continue reading...The UK government and football’s authorities launched a furious counter-offensive on Monday against plans for a European Super League that threaten the entire structure of the club game.
The culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, supported by Downing Street, vowed to do “whatever it takes” to thwart the plans which feature 12 “founding members” including six leading clubs from England. European football’s governing body, Uefa, also threatened to ban any players involved from next year’s World Cup.
Continue reading...We all knew that eventually, money and corporate interest would mutate the game at the top level into something approaching Rollerball
In my children’s novel Future Friend, which I began writing in January 2020, the future is imagined as a dystopian universe where the presence of mutant viruses infecting the air mean that no one goes out. When it was published, in the midst of lockdown, I was therefore congratulated by some for my previously unacknowledged psychic powers. A not so noticed feature of the Future Friend world, however, is that football is still played there: but only in one stadium, above the clouds, and only the super-rich can go and watch games there. So, given Sunday’s Super League news, I say, just call me Nostradavidmus.
Or don’t bother. Because of course we all knew this was coming. We all knew that eventually, money and corporate interest would mutate the game at the top level, beyond what it already in so many ways has, into something approaching Rollerball.
Continue reading...European football was thrown into turmoil on Sunday night after new plans for a European super league were revealed that would mean six English clubs – Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham – joining the breakaway competition alongside three teams from each of Italy and Spain.
Related: Only someone who truly hates football can be behind a European super league
Continue reading...Mohammed bin Salman warned of damage to Saudi-UK relations if Premier League refusal not ‘corrected’
The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, warned Boris Johnson in a text message that UK-Saudi Arabian relations would be damaged if the British government failed to intervene to “correct” the Premier League’s “wrong” decision not to allow a £300m takeover of Newcastle United last year.
Johnson asked Edward Lister, his special envoy for the Gulf, to take up the issue, and Lord Lister reportedly told the prime minister: “I’m on the case. I will investigate.”
Continue reading...Informal games are a lifeline while the Premier League is locked down, but at what risk to players?
Sweaty and tired, the players tussle before the winning goal is scored on a red-dust pitch at the No 1 ground in Mufakose, a township west of Harare. The football fans start up a chant on the touchline, triggering a frenzied response from opposing supporters, who break into rapturous song.
This parched pitch and others like it have become a source of livelihood for some Zimbabwean footballers, struggling to earn a living during the Covid-19 pandemic’s lockdown regulations.
Continue reading...Read the list of super-rich claimants, from Saudi princes to Dubai monarchs, tax exiles to the UK’s richest
Glympton Park is a sprawling, 2,000-acre estate featuring an 18th-century stately home, nestled in the verdant Oxfordshire countryside near Woodstock.
It was bought for £8m in 1992, by Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, the senior Saudi royal whose past roles include ambassador to the US. He is said to have spent £42m on renovations, including a pheasant shoot and bullet-proof glass on the driveway to thwart would-be assassins.
Continue reading...Former Manchester United manager tells of brain surgery worries ahead of documentary about his life
Sir Alex Ferguson has said he feared he would never be able to speak again after suffering a brain haemorrhage in 2018. The former Manchester United manager told a Q&A at Glasgow film festival he was worried that he could lose his voice and memory after undergoing emergency surgery.
A new documentary about the two-time Champions League-winning manager premiered at the the film festival on Saturday.
Continue reading...Guardian analysis indicates shocking figure likely to be an underestimate, as preparations for 2022 tournament continue
More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago, the Guardian can reveal.
The findings, compiled from government sources, mean an average of 12 migrant workers from these five south Asian nations have died each week since the night in December 2010 when the streets of Doha were filled with ecstatic crowds celebrating Qatar’s victory.
Continue reading...Netflix’s new film captures the legendary Brazilian’s genius, but its lead character remains a fascinating enigma
Casa Pelé, the small two‑room house in Três Corações where Pelé was born in 1940, is now a popular tourist attraction. As no photographs or descriptions of the original house have survived, it was rebuilt entirely from the memories of Pelé’s mother, Dona Celeste, and his uncle Jorge, with period furniture and fixings sourced from antique shops. And so what greets visitors today is really only a vague approximation of the house where one of the world’s most famous footballers spent his earliest years: a heavily curated blend of hazy memories and selective detail. As you walk in, a wireless radio plays classic songs from the early 1940s on an endless loop.
As it turns out, this is also pretty much how Pelé himself is remembered these days. It’s 50 years since he played his last game for Brazil. Only a fraction of his rich and prolific playing career has survived on video. The vast majority of us never saw him play live. And so for the most part, the genius of Pelé exists largely in the abstract: something you heard or read about rather than something you saw, a bequeathed fact rather than a lived experience, a processed product rather than an organic document.
Continue reading...Stuart Ward of West Midlands police aims to stamp out racist abuse in grounds and online to bring back community spirit
Since starting his role as the UK’s first football hate crime officer earlier this month, PC Stuart Ward has been busier than expected, considering football fans are banned from stadiums as part of the coronavirus lockdown.
Instead of jibes from the stands, players are now fielding more abuse on social media – just the other week, in Ward’s biggest case to date, West Midlands police arrested a man suspected of racially abusing West Bromwich Albion footballer Romaine Sawyers online.
Continue reading...The great-grandson of Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini has officially joined Lazio’s under-19 team.
Romano Floriani Mussolini, son of the former European parliamentarian Alessandra Mussolini, plays as a right-back and has already been called up twice by Lazio’s youth team.
Continue reading...Coaches, charity workers – and the footballer himself – reveal what drives the man who twice tackled Boris Johnson on child hunger and won
Show me the child at seven and I will show you the man, the old wisdom says. But in football terms, you never know, not really, which kids are going to make it as players at that age and which are not. Still, looking back at his memories of Marcus Rashford, Dave Horrocks, his first football coach, does remember one thing about him very clearly.
Rashford had first come along to Horrocks’s community club, Fletcher Moss Rangers, as a scrawny five-year-old. From the beginning, Horrocks recalls, he was the kid who left absolutely every atom of energy out on the pitch. Whenever the coach gave him a lift home from training, Rashford would get in the back of the car and – unlike other livewire boys – immediately fall into a deep sleep. When the car pulled up outside his house, Rashford would then jump out, refreshed, pick up a ball, and start practising some more on the patch of grass outside.
Continue reading...Burgeoning hopes for a normal sporting and cultural calendar are now in question again as infections increase
As Covid-19 cases rise across the world, hopes that life could get back to some semblance of normality by summer are fading. What chance do we have of going to a festival, flying off for a holiday or attending a major sporting event?
Continue reading...‘I bribed a stadium guard with whisky and got dead close just as he was lifted on to another player’s shoulders. It was like a biblical scene. He looked magnificent’
On the final day of exams at Edinburgh University in the summer of 1986, most students partied, but I flew directly to Mexico City. I was 20 years old and studying business and economics while taking photos on the side. I’d never been to the Americas before, and I wasn’t at all a good photographer; in fact, I was incredibly average.
I arrived at the 1986 World Cup under the guise of being a freelance photojournalist, but I was a Scotland fan first and foremost – they always used to say that Scottish journalists are just fans with typewriters. I did have a press pass that I’d managed to blag off the Times, which granted me access to the media pen, but I was much more interested in watching football than taking photographs of it. There was a moment in the first round of a match with Uruguay when Scotland missed an open goal. Back at the Times they were watching the TV coverage of the game and could see the striker with his head in his hands, and in the background me with my head in my hands and with my camera nowhere near the moment. And they thought: “Well this guy, Yarrow, he’s not focused on the task at all.”
Continue reading...The Rodgers and Hammerstein number became a football anthem via the late Gerry Marsden, bringing euphoric determination to every era of Liverpool FC from Shankly to Klopp
“It never stops creating goosebumps,” is how Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp describes it. “It never stops feeling really special.”
Our team’s anthem – Gerry and the Pacemakers’ You’ll Never Walk Alone – was not the reason Klopp came to Liverpool, but he’s talked about the moment he first heard it ringing out around the ground, and how that reassured him that he’d made the right choice to move to Merseyside. Indeed, if you could condense Klopp’s entire philosophy into one song – sticking together when times get tough, trust in the abilities of others, a conviction that better days are ahead – it would be You’ll Never Walk Alone. It’s been the club’s anthem since it topped the UK charts in 1963, providing joy and comfort during the triumphs and tragedies of the decades that have followed. Fans are now mourning the death, at 78, of the man who sang it – Gerry Marsden.
Continue reading...