The Court of Arbitration for Sport has ruled in favor of Andy Webster in his landmark contract case against Heart of Midlothian, in a decision that means players will be able to break their contracts after two or three years (depending on the age of the player) with no compensation due to the club except [...]

There must be times when Damien Comolli, sitting on the side of his bed with one sock on and one sock off, drifts into a reverie in which excerpts from the Wikipedia page of Jonathan Woodgate come spinning toward him like nightmare newspaper headlines:
A serious injury saw him end his final season somewhat early…
Woodgate never [...]

What do you look like, Dimitar Berbatov?
A pumpkin, a ploughshare, a sullen boy, a sheaf of corn, a furrow, a scarecrow, a farm.
What do you mean, “a farm”?
I am moving on the pitch while a horse, broken from labor, gingerly walks around a split rail fence whose uppermost rail is sodden. It blows steam [...]

I mentioned this passage from The Pickwick Papers not long ago in a post on The Far Corner as an example of the comedy that can arise when sports and language put pressure on one another. It’s about cricket, it was written in the mid-1830s, and it’s completely fictional, but I still think this [...]

OVERTURE
A television commercial in which the burden of meaning is carried by a shot of a large silver and black map of the world on which the land is full of tiny holes of slightly varying diameters as though it had been stuck with pins only there are beams of brilliant light shining up [...]

It’s Friday (still, barely, in some parts of the world) which means it’s time to gaze out from between the bars of your cell window and plot your escape through the football matches ahead. The chase will be fierce, but the cover will be exquisite. I’m thinking of hiding in…

This isn’t a “bicycle kick” or a “scissor kick.” This is a scorpion kick. There are creatures in Egyptian mythology who shattered kingdoms with strikes like this. This is Trevor Sinclair, eleven years ago today, scoring for Queens Park Rangers against Barnsley in the fourth round of the FA Cup, and this [...]

This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature takes you inside the Clericus Cup, the Vatican-sponsored tournament whose teams are made up of priests and seminarians. The competition was conceived as a way of using soccer to promote Christian values, but it hasn’t exactly worked out that way:
What no prophet foretold, though, as [...]

I’m in the middle of a long post about the football audience and the internet (which may or may not ever see the light of day), so for now, here are a few scattered thoughts. You might get a wish if you throw one in a fountain.
• Scotland have appointed George Burley to be [...]

Here are two beliefs which seem to be widespread among intelligent soccer fans online.
1. That football is too much in the pocket of business interests whose treatment of the game as a commodity weakens its ties to local communities and takes it away from its traditional fans.
2. That racism and regional prejudice have [...]