The art of being an elite club in European football is the art of forgetting how to be happy. The competitions you don’t win have to sit like a stone in the middle of your consciousness of the competitions you do.

Stoke City (“not an elite club”) were ecstatic this weekend after a 0-0 draw with Leicester City secured their promotion to the top flight in England for the first time in 23 years. Elsewhere in Europe, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich were clinching top-flight league championships by commanding margins, but feeling a bit poignant, on the whole, that they didn’t win their European tournaments. Oh, there were celebrations, songs, and dousings with Weißbier in the gray continental rain, but a faint philosophical melancholy ran through both teams. Together they’ve won 52 league titles, so it takes something special to keep ennui from creeping into the experience. More»

See? See? What have we been saying all this time? You should never mess with Harry Redknapp!

What’s that? Oh, you do want to mess with him? Fine! Why don’t you try charging him with suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and false accounting? Does that sound good to you, “City of London Police”? Well, then, issue a warrant, raid his house, arrest him, and detain him for seven hours—feel free. Just don’t get too comfortable, because this is a man who will absolutely initiate a judicial review hearing in which the legality of the warrant as issued by the City of London Court is challenged on technical grounds that if upheld would render its subsequent execution by the City of London Police totally and completely bogus.

Okay, so the court threw out Harry’s charge that the police tipped off the media before raiding his house. (Sure, because those Sun photographers are always set up on that corner.) Makes no difference. Harry Redknapp will tear you down.

Woah! What the hell was that? Hey, guys? Can anyone hear me?

Man, I wish I knew what was going on. I was just taking it easy down in the swamp, using the water to support my enormous bulk—you know, the way we do—and munching on some of the tree-leaves I was able to reach thanks to my long, dorsoventrally flexible neck. Suddenly, I heard this incredible roar, like a million tons of rock screaming down from the sky and plowing right into the mountains! I guess the shock must have been too much for my fist-sized brain, because the last thing I remember is feeling relieved that my nasal openings were located at the apex of my cranium, so that I wouldn’t drown if I passed out in the water. More»

Here’s the tape of the Buzz Bissinger-Will Leitch contretemps. Watching it again, I wish Leitch had answered more directly in a couple of places (there are some moments that sound like spin, and he seemed to feel that with Braylon Edwards there he couldn’t simply admit that his comedy site mocks athletes). But it was also pretty astonishing to see Buzz Bissinger essentially accuse Leitch of exploiting athletes’ private lives for his own gain. I wonder if anyone in Odessa, Texas ever thought they knew a sportswriter who did that? More»

H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger, the Pulitzer Prize-winner, the author of Friday Night Lights, the Vanity Fair paycheck-recipient, subjected Deadspin blogger Will Leitch to an incontinent tirade about the menace of sports blogging on Bob Costas’s HBO show last night. Okay, maybe too much has been made of the spit that flew from Bissinger’s lips as he accused blogs of “dumbing us down” (us = society, natch) “to a degree that I don’t think we can recover from.” Maybe too much has been made of the profanity that roared from his old-media throat as he accused Leitch of being “full of shit.” The word “incontinent” still applies, simply because no one is fully in control of themselves in the oxygen-starved stratosphere of wrongness that Bissinger’s argument raised him to last night. More»

If it’s true that the tents are about to be packed, the cages broken down, the sawdust swept, the clowns sedated, the daredevils shot, the lions zipped into their traveling sweaters; if it’s true that the circus is about to skip town, on a cloud of greasepaint and diesel fumes, leaving behind only crushed flowerbeds, the odd peanut shell, and three secret broken hearts, then as the last performance begins, it’s only fitting that we take a long look at the ringmaster.

Who is he, the squat, dapper, beetle-browed man in the waistcoat and swallowtails, beneath the teetering stovepipe hat? How does he manage this strange combination of mastery and powerlessness, so that the show seems at once tightly in his control and on the verge of slipping out of his hands? Is it a practiced effect, an attainment of his theatrical person, or is the thrill it induces only amateur and incidental, and perhaps legitimately dangerous? More»

Late last year, when I wrote my “Five Stories You Don’t Have to Care About in 2008” column for Pitch Invasion, one of the stories I said you should care about was the race among Premier League clubs to sign Croatia’s talented young midfielder Luka Modric. At the time, it looked like he’d be going to Arsenal during the January transfer window, so I thought I’d just brush the crumbs off my shirt and stand up looking like a genius. (Waving to the crowd, still chewing the last bit of my sandwich.) But he decided to stay in Croatia, so I assumed I’d been wrong. My one consolation was that no one notices or cares what I say. Also, it was a really good sandwich. More»

Well, that was a nasty piece of fun, wasn’t it? I don’t have room to list all the feral little moments I enjoyed during the Chelsea-Man Utd match: there was Rooney snarling at Nani; the weird bust-up between Drogba and Ballack, which led to the gorgeous comedy of Ballack turning his back on Drogba and Drogba taking it out on Steve Clarke; Giggs snarling at Nani; Sir Alex, billowing and jacketless, purpling at the referee; Avram Grant struggling to get to his feet to celebrate Ballack’s goal, only to be knocked back down when the assistants on either side of him jumped up first; and Shevchenko, of all forgotten souls, saving the match for Chelsea by hacking the ball off the line. More»

Personal websites. People have them for different reasons. For instance, you could use yours to grapple with the conflict between corrosive skepticism and the longing for meaning in a world you never made. Someone else could become famous by insulting a popular brand of breakfast meats, or sell t-shirts with quotes from Plato’s Meno printed on them. “Indeed, Socrates, I do not know,” one might read, in cursive, beside a two-color picture of a donkey on a steam train.

For the Bobby Goalkeepers and Anton McSoccerstars of the world, the personal website offers a way to stay “close to the fans” without exposing their chauffeurs to the temptations of a plebian street scene. The player with outspoken opinions can treat his site as a blank page onto which those opinions can be typed, through a cell phone, at 3 AM, from the cool blue glow of the private nightclub table, while Destiny and Cherise are in the bathroom. The player with a love of early-2000s animated splash screens can offer his site as a canvas where a dying breed of programmer can practice his art outside the restrictive confines of mid-shelf liquor ads. Everybody wins except efficiency.

In the first of what I hope will be a recurring and much-loved series, I’d like to take you on a voyage through a few of my favorite player sites. Let’s go! More»

Maybe it happened in a charity game. Maybe Michael Schumacher is a racecar driver. Maybe Michael Schumacher played in the same charity game, and got three assists. Fine. Just watch this, and tell me it doesn’t count.

This is Ronaldo, playing the double-roulette one-two over-the-body back-heel with Raul, and this is your historical goal of the week.