Athletes, most of them, aren't moral paragons, just people who are good at playing games. Morally, some of them are better than others, just as with anyone, and it makes no sense to treat them, as a class, as though they were exemplars of the virtuous life. We know this; we aren't naive. [...]

Roswitha at Treasons, Stratagems & Spoils has written a really smart post contrasting Barcelona and Milan, looking at each club not just as a collection of players but as a set of accumulated cultural meanings which each club tries to manage and market. It's a fruitful comparison and teases out a lot of subtle [...]

As you may have noticed over the last couple of days, The Run of Play has just completed a move to new (better) web hosting and switched to a WordPress platform. The changes should make the site faster and more accommodating—you might not notice much of a difference now, but believe me, it's [...]

The trouble with Peter Crouch isn't how to describe him, it's how not to describe him, how to stop describing him. You could go on forever. He plays like two paperclips locked in a fight to the death. He has the shoulders of a kangaroo and the head of a quarter-teaspoon. [...]

Chelsea 1 - 0 West Ham — Had you told me, when I was fifteen, that I would one day wake up to a headline reading "Police Investigating Drogba Laser Incident," I would have eagerly looked forward to a war with a race of insectlike alien predators. I would not have imagined a soccer [...]