July 10, 2006

Goodbye, Zizou

I'm sure everyone knows this story by now, but I'm going to inflict it on you one last time. Once upon a time, there was a child born into an Algerian/French family, in a poor part of Marseille. He grew up to be a muslim, though he describes himself as "non-practising". He turned out to be pretty good at football, and after a few years in the French league, moved to Italian giants Juventus, then got bought for €66,000,000 by Real Madrid. For France, he played over 100 games, and scored two decisive goals in a World Cup final, against no lesser team than Brazil. 3 times he was elected as FIFA's world player of the year. But as he retires from football (his final game was today) he gave the world something much less impressive to remember him by.

It's a real tragedy, but this is now Zidane's legacy. What a terrible end to a great career. Football fans across the world will miss this great talent, I'm sure.

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April 19, 2006

"Football, innit, wot syndrome" syndrome

I have very diverse social circles. But among some of my friends, there is this tendency to want to show disdain for something purely on the basis of popularity. The general MO is to see that something is popular, not make any effort to understand the thing in question, and at every opportunity criticise the thing, and all those who are interested in it. In particular, it is very popular to associate being a football fan with stupidity, racism, violence, or anything else bad, really.

Can someone explain to me why this is? JCM, I'm looking at you in particular, though you're far from alone. Just what the hell does football have to do with voting BNP?

Posted by James at 00:34 | Comments (3) | TrackBack
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February 16, 2006

Many ways to determine richness

Everybody knows that Chelsea are the richest club in English football today, right?

Obviously there are many ways to determine richness, but according to this one, they're not.

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May 22, 2005

A bit of a joke

[Warning: may contain traces of football. If you find football mind-numbingly tedious, you might want to look away now]

I've come close to posting an entry like this for months, and UEFA's current crackpot scheme, which has only just come to my attention, finally swung it. Modern football is rapidly becoming completely insane.

Take the Scottish Premier League. There are 12 teams in the division, and they play each other around 3.5 times a season. After everybody has played 33 games (3 fixtures against each possible opponent), the league is arbitrarily divided into 2 halves, between 6th place and 7th place, and the remaining games are played solely against clubs in your own half of the table. So, it's quite possible for the team in 7th place (Kilmarnock, 49 points) to end up with a better record than the team in 6th place (Motherwell, 48 points), purely by having "easier" matches towards the end of the season. If anyone can tell me why on earth this is considered a good idea, I'd be interested...

Or how about the somewhat ironically named/branded "Champions' League"? The English FA (among others) now gets to enter 4 teams into the competition each year, making it more like a "highly-placed teams league"; perhaps the old name, the European Cup, was more fitting. This season's final will be contested by last season's Italian league champions, AC Milan, and a team which finished 4th in the English league, with 60 points, 15 points short of 3rd place, and 30 short of the league champions. Of course, it's somewhat disingenuous for me to complain about this, since I'm delighted that Everton have qualifed for next season's tournament, but it still seems a bit of a joke.

And then there's the away goals rule, as used in the Champions' League and UEFA Cup. In this season's Champions League semi-final, AC Milan won the first leg, at home, 2-0. In the second leg, away at PSV Eindhoven, they lost 3-1, making the score 3-3 on aggregate. I can't see why this means AC Milan played better, and deserved to go through to the next round, but apparently it does. (Non-football fans may be confused by this — hell, I am. Milan went through because they had scored more of their goals away from home than PSV.) Even more crazily, in the 2003 semi-final between AC Milan and Inter Milan, two clubs which play their home fixtures in the same stadium, AC Milan once again won on away goals, following a 0-0 draw in the leg designated as their "home" leg, and a 1-1 draw in the leg designated "away". Because, you know, that's really sensible. What ever happened to extra time and penalties? (Hmm. Looking at these 2 anecdotes alone, the rule seems to favour teams that are good at not conceding any goals at home. Is that really the intended effect?)

Is football alone in all of this? I don't follow other sports closely enough to see all the big hairy warts in the rules, but my hunch is that any sport which has become heavily dependent on television revenue, and so has its rules partly dictated by the television networks, will have strange, arbitrary seeming rules, intended to enhance the "spectacle" at the expense of sanity. I'd love to hear any examples of this in the comments. I'm also wondering if football has actually always had rules like this, and I've just only noticed the recent ones...

Posted by James at 17:26 | Comments (17) | TrackBack
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