Football

Scotland fan ALASTAIR CAMPBELL on his texts with Gareth Southgate, meeting Harry Kane and Raheem Sterling – and why he’s found England so easy to like this summer I wouldn’t overstate my England football credentials, but I have seen Harry Kane naked but for his underpants (more later); and Raheem Sterling has given me a guided tour of […]

Sometimes brooding, sometimes brilliant, sometimes bludgeoning, Roberto Mancini’s remoulded Italy face a Euros date with destiny against Belgium European football is never complete without Italy. Sometimes brooding, sometimes brilliant, sometimes bludgeoning, Roberto Mancini’s remoulded Azzurri will on Friday aim to make Roberto Martinez’s Golden Generation of Belgium suffer and perhaps be suffocated in Munich. The […]

John Blankenstein was back-page news when he took charge of England’s first match at the 1992 Euros – but it wasn’t his refereeing the newspapers were interested in… When England faced Denmark in their opening match of the 1992 Euros, many tabloid-reading fans knew as much about the referee as they did about the Danes. […]

The medical protocols that helped saved Denmark’s Christian Eriksen are partly down to the work of one man, football doctor Michel d’Hooghe It was a Swedish writer, Erik Niva, who observed last Saturday: “Denmark lost but life won”. He reported on the collapse, the apparent death, and then the resuscitation that saved the Danish playmaker […]

Victory for France in the Euros would give Chelsea’s N’Golo Kante the kind of trophy cabinet that even Messi and Ronaldo would envy Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are on opposite sides of the world preparing to lead their countries in tournaments that represent their last chance to win major honours. No-one of sound mind […]

David Baddiel has accused Boris Johnson of playing a “culture war game” as the comedian urged football fans to support the England team in taking the knee during the Euros. Downing Street has not backed the players’ decision to adopt the anti-racism gesture, instead only issuing a statement urging fans to be “respectful” and saying […]

Nothing will better define this European club football season than Diego Simeone’s Atlético Madrid upsetting Real and Barcelona to win La Liga When we come to analyse the European club season that ended with Chelsea’s deserved victory in the Champions League final, nothing will better define the fight against adversity – the empty stadiums, the pandemic, […]

As club football’s strangest season comes to an end, photographer Stuart Roy Clarke shares images of fans taken during the pandemic I started The Homes of Football photography series more than 30 years ago as a love letter to this country, yet I knew that the Germans and Scandinavians and latterly the Americans revere our […]

This all-English Champions League final between Man City and Chelsea is no guarantee of success at the Euros Beware the siren song telling us England will rule the playing fields of Europe in the coming weeks.  It is true that the Premier League is where the money is, and that two English clubs contest the […]

Boris Johnson thought the European Super League was a “great idea” and promised No. 10 would not intervene to stop English clubs joining, a Downing Street insider has claimed. In a Mirror exclusive, those sources claimed the prime minister’s chief of staff, Dan Rosenfield, told him about the proposal after a No 10 meeting with Manchester United’s […]

The FA Cup holds an almost mystical appeal in south-east Asia. Now a Thai family have rewritten its history, as well as the destiny of unfashionable Leicester City If you ever spent time in South East Asia in the month of May you would know that there was one match that had almost mystical appeal. […]

José Mourinho is a busted flush… so why does he keep getting plum managerial jobs? We really should stop doubting José Mourinho when he tells us he is “a special one… .not one out of the bottle.”  A linguist, a persuader, a winner in Portugal, England, Italy, and Spain. But when the trophies stopped and […]

English football supporters are deluding themselves over fan power and the idea that the Bundesliga is more even than the Premier League. What do you imagine upset the Glazer Brothers more – their football team across the pond being prevented from playing on Sunday, or the Monday morning hit to the Manchester United share price […]

If a picture is worth a thousand words – and if you need that picture to assuage the feeling that football is being sold to the devil – study this photograph. The scene is Wembley Stadium last Sunday evening. Moments after the final whistle of this season’s first cup final, Tottenham’s defeated Son Heung-min is […]

The European football super league is not dead – and you can bank on that The Super League, which rightly shocked and angered so many, came as no surprise to me. It was always hovering in the wings, waiting to burst on to the stage of world football like a 1,000-lb gorilla. There was no […]

Downing Street has said the idea of a European Super League was not discussed when the prime minister was introduced to Manchester United executive vice chairman Ed Woodward days before the announcement. Reports suggest Boris Johnson may have given the impression he would back the proposal just four days before its launch following a meeting […]

Labour is demanding Boris Johnson explain whether he signalled his backing for the ill-fated European Super League. The plan by the so-called Big Six Premier League clubs for a breakaway competition dramatically unravelled within just 48 hours after it was vehemently condemned by fans and government ministers – including Johnson – alike. However, the Sunday […]

The football genius’ nomadic decline after Manchester United is a tale well told. But his brief stint in apartheid South Africa is less familiar. As NATHAN O’HAGAN reports, his spell there set the tone for all that followed He was one of the greatest footballers ever to grace a football pitch. His natural ability and […]

The New European editor-in-chief and Liverpool fan MATT KELLY on the pain and confusion caused by his club’s actions My wife doesn’t understand me.  The events of this week threw me into a deep funk from which I have yet to recover. The unprecedented headaches I began to suffer on Monday can’t have been just a coincidence. […]

The Super League farce may be over, but the conflicting interests of owners and fans mean more trouble ahead. Not even Niccolò Machiavelli, the grandmaster of deception, could have foreseen the manner in which English, Spanish and Italian clubs attempted to carve up European football. “I’m not interested in preserving the status quo,” Machiavelli wrote […]

Journalist Rob Hughes was ignored when he claimed a link between heading footballs and dementia nearly 50 years ago – and the authorities are still to act properly Pardon the cynicism, but when the UK parliament in February finally set aside time to listen to doctors and former professional footballers about dementia in our national […]

Boris Johnson intervened after a Saudi bid to buy Newcastle United ran into difficulties, it has been reported. The Daily Mail said the prime minister asked one of his top aides to investigate after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman warned a row over the sale of the Premier League club could damage relations between […]

Our football correspondent hails the departing Manchester City striker, the Premier League’s highest non-British scorer. In the Netherlands, club legends leave with a garland of flowers. At Manchester City, they are stacking up the statues. Three are on commission right now because in successive seasons Vincent Kompany, David Silva and now Sergio Agüero have retired […]

Rob Hughes on the financial calculations that mean the ball must keep rolling during a pandemic... if only to keep the money rolling in.

The world is on its knees in a pandemic that is close now to killing three million people. Yet the games go on, albeit as a ghostly, ghastly version of sport in stadiums without spectators. For a year, club football has soldiered on while communities have closed around them. In Europe we have the scarcely […]

A Porsche 911 convertible which the footballer was caught driving through a red light at 111mph just after buying fetched a huge price at auction A Porsche 911 convertible which Diego Maradona was famously caught driving through a red light at 180km/h (111mph) just 30 minutes after buying has sold for €483,000 (£414,000) at auction in Paris. […]

Should modern football – particularly the gegenpresse fußball coached by Jürgen Klopp – carry a health warning? Liverpool, the runaway English champions less than a year ago, look a broken team, physically and mentally. Their defence is cursed by injuries, their attack appears a wearied parody of what it was last spring.  But more recently, […]

ROB HUGHES on the very different goalscoring talents of Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland and whether Premier League transfers lie ahead for them. No-one knows how Covid will drain the finances of football, but everyone rates two talents that Europe’s richest and most powerful clubs will scramble to buy. They are, of course, goalscorers. Kylian Mbappé was […]

Barcelona pioneered a fusion of finance and football. Others are now playing the same game while the Catalan club itself is embroiled in a crisis. The jailing, even for one night, of the former president of Futbol Club Barcelona is not the first, and will not be the last, time it has happened in this club’s […]

JASON SOLOMONS on a new Netflix documentary which places the footballer’s rise amid his country’s oppressive regime. Talk about finding a new angle. I’ve seen that Carlos Alberto goal, the fourth for Brazil in the 1970 World Cup Final against Italy, over a hundred times. Maybe we all have – but never from Alberto’s point of […]

The case of Manchester United’s talented young winger Amad Diallo highlights awkward questions for football about the way it procures young players from abroad, says ROB HUGHES. Bill Shankly, the sage of Liverpool FC, once corrected a misconception of mine. “Listen son, coaches do not make good players,” he said in that familiar rasping Scottish pitch. […]

Our new football correspondent ROB HUGHES on the symbiotic relationship between Barcelona and Lionel Messi, its mainstay, that must one day come to an end. No player has better displayed the joy of football more sustainably than Lionel Messi. I first saw him at La Masia, Barcelona’s academy, when he was 13, and still feel […]