On Fabrice Muamba and how athletes fall:
There’s no gentle way to put this, so I’ll just say it: I think everyone who watched this unfold believed that they had just seen a player die. Muamba had had a heart attack, was the (correct, as it turned out) assumption. On Twitter, in forums, and I imagine in a thousand conversations, there was optimism, but it was mostly of the hoping-against-hope variety. Something to cling to when you know that no one’s supposed to die on a sports field.
After the Zambian soccer team perished in a plane crash, a new team rose to bring hope to a troubled nation.
On Kiryat Shmona, currently 11 points clear of second place in Israel’s top soccer league:
When The New York Times recently contacted Adi Faraj, the club’s 26-year-old press officer, about doing an article about the team, he was initially convinced the phone call was a hoax.
“Why would The New York Times want to write about us?” he said.
Making the case for a new, Brazilian rival to Barcelona’s Argentinean star:
Rivalry is about talent, that’s for sure. There has to be a creative friction that comes from competition. But that’s not all. It’s also about a narrative, and with that in mind, maybe Neymar’s story pits him against Messi more so than Ronaldo’s does him.
Remembering the Brazilian soccer legend:
Sócrates is dead. It’s hard to see how anyone could be surprised. It’s also hard not to think that he died because he wanted to, since Sócrates always seems to have done what he wanted to. He smoked incessantly because it gave him pleasure; he seems to have ingested vast amounts of alcohol for the same reason. When people die from alcoholic poisoning — which is in effect what killed Sócrates — it’s usual to speak of their “demons”: he could never escape his demons, he could never conquer his demons, in the end his demons destroyed him. Few will use that language about Sócrates, in part because, according to much testimony, drinking didn’t really change his personality. He drank because he liked it, probably.
This is why we need to tread very carefully around the death of Speed. People do get ideas, particularly people who are in despair, and sport and suicide have been establishing unnervingly close ties of late.
Players who become full-fledged lunatics in the media almost always wind up fulfilling a deeply strange sacrificial-wish-fulfillment impulse in sports fans. We collapse the distinction between celebrating them and mocking them so that we can simultaneously fantasize about a life without boundaries and punish the players for apparently living the fantasy.
Each year, the English Premier League brings in more than £1.1 billion in television revenue, but all that money is changing the face of the game.
It should be one of the greatest rivalries in the history of the world’s most popular game. Why hasn’t it happened?
Unpublished documents show the striker is at the centre of a legal battle between oligarchs exiled from their homelands.
You could rave about Messi’s slalom run which made it 2-0 to Barca in the first leg of the semi-final, or about the move which saw Real player Angel di María set up Cristiano Ronaldo’s match-winning header in the cup final, or about the magic of Barcelona’s incredibly fast passing between the 30th and the 40th minutes of the semi-final second leg. You certainly could rave about those things.
But the true story of these games is told by the numbers. Math and geometry, with angles and diagonals, must be applied to the game in order to grasp why Barcelona won the Champions League and La Liga while Real Madrid only took home the Copa del Rey. It is something many football coaches occupy themselves with before and after the game, and some even during halftime.
José Mourinho is obsessed with modern match analysis, like many other coaches in Spain and England. Since his time at Chelsea, and then at Inter Milan and now Read Madrid, he has trusted stats company Amisco supply him with match data collected in 60 stadiums all over Europe. Every little movement of every player is captured by sensors, then analyzed and sent to him.
