On a slow news day in football (and they’re almost all slow news days, unless you like transfer gossip and hearing that Y has backed Z) nothing beguiles the hours like imagining the next World Cup, when a new generation of players will come together to prove their greatness by savagely headbutting one another. Most [...]

Brazil will host the 2014 World Cup. Oddly, since the news will mean any number of opportunities for him to smirk into a television camera and declare that he “is football”, Pele doesn’t seem to care. (Bangkok Post)
Juande Ramos went on to insist that he never left Sevilla, claiming that “this whole press conference” was [...]

Michel Platini, who has brought pleasure to so many in his career as a football bureaucrat, took the opportunity afforded by an interview with BBC Online today to criticize Arsène Wenger for his tendency to buy young players and…you know, brilliantly develop their talents. “I do not like the system of Arsène Wenger,” Platini [...]

He looks, anyway, most of the time, something run-of-the-mill or only a very little above it, with his scowling sudden lurches for the ball and his dropping back to hunt for it in midfield. In the middle of the pitch he’s too determined, too intent on the one bright place where he wants to put [...]

FIFA pass an overdue Joorabchian Restriction. (The Guardian)
Glenn Roeder: a fine coach for a fine city. (TeamTalk)
Rio Ferdinand may be sort of hurt. UPDATE: Apparently isn’t. (Football365)

I would worry about this Paul Scholes injury if I were a Manchester United fan. Now there are only 11,997 things that can go wrong before their season is in serious jeopardy!

Harry Redknapp has signed a new contract at Portsmouth. I guess he isn’t too worried about those aircraft carriers, then.

We love stories. We more than love them, actually: we have a natural need to hear them and to tell them; we use them to help us understand the world in ways we still can’t fully explain. Stories are driven by conflict, and sports, which is built on conflict in the abstract, is thus a [...]

Every single player at Liverpool is hurt. (Football365)
Gus Poyet signs for Spurs as Ramos sets to work. (BBC)
Quique Flores is fired at Valencia, never liked bats anyway. (The Guardian)
Chelsea’s interest in Pellegrini will surely have cooled, however, after Avram Grant brought down the changing room with his post-match rendition of “Stardust”. (TeamTalk)

Liverpool 1 - 1 Arsenal — It took Jens Lehmann exactly 0.21 seconds to lean over and tell someone that he would have blocked that free kick. There’s a special official who times this. They have a stopwatch for it and everything.
Tottenham 1 - 2 Blackburn — The greatest test facing the managerial acumen of [...]