Football

A gastropub in Manchester is a fitting venue for the latest corruption sting on England manager Sam Allardyce. While his poncey European counterparts are busy nosing the bouquet on a glass of dry white wine, Big Sam, who only took up the top job back in July, is laid back in his seat, the buttons on his shirt bulging as he swigs from a tall pint glass. This is the image that you’ll see on the front cover splash of today’s Daily Telegraph. A 10-month undercover operation has concluded with the brassy headline: ‘England manager for sale’. Allardyce, it is claimed, has conspired with a couple of ‘businessmen’ to concoct methods

For football fans, today is a special day: it’s Transfer Deadline Day – a branded, almost to Hallmark levels, moniker. It’s a day of bathos and unfulfilment. Your club will miss out on a top target, sign some underwhelming alternative, and clog up social media with pictures of them holding a shirt in a car park. Transfer Deadline Day is the great dance of performative capitalism for the working classes. We call it a ‘window’ because it is supposed to be a ‘window of opportunity’ for clubs and fans, but there is also a voyeuristic element. We spend the summer hidden in the bushes, watching the attractive Athletico Madrid winger

With parliament in recess, silly season is in full swing. In fact, silly season would be an apt name for the transitional period between the dying days of the previous Premier League season, and the Bacchanalia that greets the opening weekend of the next one. Football’s silly season is a time when Slovenian journalists can sentence Jose Mourinho to three years in jail, when Wales can become (arguably) the third best team in Europe, and when Manchester United can decide that a player – any player – is worth €100 million. That last, silliest of silly season traditions, is the essential contradiction that greets the start of a new season.

Finance firms love taking football fans for suckers. The latest is Virgin Money which has this week launched a Manchester United savings bond. It pays just 1.25 per cent for 12 months which is roughly two-thirds the interest you could get at the current best buy account. So far, so rubbish. But it has a neat gimmick designed to reel in optimistic fans. If Manchester United win the title next season, the interest rate paid doubles to 2.5 per cent. Sound attractive? It’s meant to. But in reality it’s a total con. And it’s just the latest in a long line of football-related finance deals that take fans for mugs.

The invitation to supply a report on a Uefa Euro 2016 match written in the florid style beloved of some sportswriters produced entries of inspired awfulness. How about this, from Mike Morrison: ‘The craven defence unravelled like cartoon knitwear, enabling Dottirdottir, the archetype of stoic strategy, to blithely torpedo the decider through the enmeshed architraves of triumph.’ John O’Byrne, Josh Ekroy and Derek Morgan were on impressively toe-curling form too, but were pipped to the post by those entries printed below which earn their authors £25 each. Adrian Fry pockets the extra fiver. Adrian Fry Spain’s three-nil defeat of Turkey demonstrated how, in Spanish hands at least, soccer is a

Football, unlike cricket, has for the most part been ill served by its writers. For every Brian Glanville and Ian Hamilton (the latter having employed his critical authority to become a first-rate reader of the game), the purveyors of hackneyed analysis are legion. In recent years there has been a propensity to celebrate tactics and formation (i.e. pedantry) over poetry. Latin Americans, however, have always fared slightly better with their writers — as they do with their players — who tend not to make the distinction between literature and sports writing. Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, both Nobel laureates, took to writing about the game early on in