Sport

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 […]

France might be rugby league minnows – as their World Cup campaign has demonstrated – but, as MICK O’HARE explains, the sport in the country has had to fight for its very survival You don’t need to know much about rugby to know that the two codes of the game – rugby league and rugby […]

Few footballing powers have fallen as far as the Dutch. NEIL FREDRIK JENSEN asks if there is any way out of the downward spiral For all the pessimism surrounding English football and the gaping void that exists between its current state and its golden era of global domination in 1966, there are some positives. The […]

The world’s most successful show this year – beating the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Justin Bieber – is a Swiss figure skating performance. Could the British warm to it, asks WAYNE SAVAGE? The UK’s mild weather is perhaps to explain for our uneasy relationship with ice. Despite an intense, if short-lived, fascination with Torvill […]

STEVE ANGLESEY explains the surge of protest in America’s biggest professional sports league The sensation of being stranded in darkness while facing insurmountable odds is nothing new for Colin Kaepernick. In February 2013, his San Francisco team were trailing by 22 points in the Super Bowl when the lights went off in the New Orleans […]

Between them, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe provided one of sport’s greatest ever rivalries. But, as JASON SOLOMONS reports, a new film centred around their most famous clash is really all about unravelling the Swedish enigma Tennis was never the same after the fourth set of the 1980 Wimbledon final. Upstart, foul-mouthed American John McEnroe […]

His stricken condition fuels macabre speculation, but Michael Schumacher's real legacy is the remarkable run of Grand Prix dominance which began in 1992. ROB BURNETT reports