I have a post over at Pitch Invasion about the issue of referee abuse in football and the ways in which the media and fans perceive the problem differently. Mostly, I’m asking readers (that’s you!) for their own opinions on the subject, as for some reason I have very little sense of what other [...]

I’ve written a post for Pitch Invasion about the association of Bristol Rovers and the old American suicide ballad “Goodnight, Irene.” It’s a kind of parallel history of Bristol Rovers and the American musician Leadbelly, who popularized the song in the 1930s and ’40s before Rovers fans took it as their anthem:
Black [...]

This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature looks at the way Fabio Capello has been portrayed by fans and the media in England, and wonders about a style of characterization that relentlessly depicts him as a mob boss or a bloodthirsty dictator—but in a good way:
There’s a fascinating process at work here, because [...]

This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature asks whether an American-style revenue-sharing system would be better for European football leagues than the current laissez-faire approach. Two fairly obvious potential benefits:
1. Smaller clubs would be able to compete in the transfer market and, as a result, to challenge for trophies. This would [...]

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 [...]

This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature finds me traveling to a suburban Red Lobster in order to have dinner with FIFA President Sepp Blatter and UEFA President Michel Platini. Our conversation touches on matters ranging from the cartographic largess of the American Denny’s to the break-up of the G-14.
ME: So [...]

This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature is—you might want to sit down for this—an exclusive interview with Newcastle owner Mike Ashley about his decision to sack Sam Allardyce. Ashley is notoriously reclusive and suspicious of the press, but I don’t know, I guess he decided I was different, probably when he [...]

This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature looks ahead to some of the stories the football media will be covering in 2008, and chooses five that you can safely ignore. There are only so many minutes in the day, and New Year’s is the perfect time to clear the clutter out of your [...]

This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature looks at the problem of communication in the globalized world of contemporary football, and asks how, with such a wide range of languages in use at any given moment, players, managers, fans and the media are ever able to understand one another.
When an average club contains [...]

This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature looks at Fabio Capello’s imminent appointment as England manager and asks whether he’ll be able to give the England team an identity apart from its air of constant crisis:
Giving a team a personality is one of the least-well-defined skills in football management. You can talk about [...]