Sport

A tale of two Jurgens and the power of German coaching

Images of Ian Botham with his bat aloft and the pageantry of the Royal Wedding have created a popular memory of 1981 as a summer of national pride for Britain. But the reality was quite different

As he approaches 70, the veteran coach is ready to make the orange brilliant again

Boris Johnson’s role in wrecking the Rugby League World Cup might rank low in his long list of offences, but should not be overlooked.

Rob Hughes asks how long Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi will stay at the top before they finally retire from football Some day, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo will cease being the most extraordinarily gifted among more than 250 million men and women playing football around the world. Their body clocks are ticking. They face […]

A 13-year-old skateboarder, a German policewoman, an Afghani woman cyclist attacked for daring to ride her bicycle... some of the most absorbing European stories at this Olympic Games.

Instead of watching England in the Euros, WILL SELF went walking around London… and noticed something interesting about his fellow football sceptics Errol over the park coaches local lads in football – most of them black British. He’s pretty successful, and has placed at least 20 over the past decade or so as juniors with […]

ROB HUGHES examines England’s near-miss at the Euros and finds that for all their advantages, a change of mindset is necessary at the top So near, and yet so far. England released itself from the European Union, but remain far from the world-beaters some fans imagine it is their birthright to be as the motherland of […]

England's footballers have brought joy to the nation. Nonetheless, ROB HUGHES explains how our opponents still have much to teach us

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 […]

With over 84% of Japan still waiting for their first jab, why are the Olympic Games being held there? Is the sporting world, and compliant politicians, playing fast and loose with the pandemic? The European football tournament across 11 countries, the Copa América in Brazil, the fast-approaching Tokyo Olympics, might all be seen as brave defiance […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

ROB HUGHES on Captain Tom Moore and Marcus Rashford, two Englishmen united in their service. Captain Tom Moore and Marcus Rashford are two of a kind. Separated by three quarters of a century – and last week by death – they epitomise salt of the earth Englishmen, inspiration to the rest of us throughout the hardest of […]

For years ROB HUGHES wrote one of Europe’s best-read and most influential sports columns – the now-defunct International Herald Tribute’s Global Soccer. Today it is born again in the pages of The New European. This week we look at an unedifying clash between two of football’s most forceful players. Researchers at the University of Salzburg last […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY tells all about Dutch professional football player Johan Cruyff. People with the surname Inglis are usually Scottish. That might seem rather strange, because the name is the Scots-language word for ‘English’ – and why would Scottish people have been called Inglis? But actually of course there would be no point in calling someone […]