The future of Spanish football is looking bright indeed. Its under 21 team has just won the European Championship this year against Switzerland and it can be expected that from this team a number of players will progress to the senior stage and enlighten the international football stage in the years to come. The final…
Almost all European leagues have finished, one European Cup Final has already been played, with only the Champions League Final to come this Saturday. It is time for a conclusion of this season’s results across Europe. Due to events in Zürich leading up to the FIFA election, this review comes a bit later than it…
Mark the date: June 1 will be the day when FIFA finally admits that it is a corrupt and morally bankrupt organization that is either in need of disbanding or a thorough cleansing process. The reason for this is a simple and obvious one: on that day the FIFA Executive Committee will “elect” a new…
Corruption, Quotas, El Clasico that did not deserve to be called Clasico or presidents that need former internationals to bolster their reputation. There could easily be more “incidents” added to this to highlight the state of the game in the early twenty-first century. On top of that there are ongoing accusations of bribery within FIFA.…
The last three weeks have seen Real Madrid and Barcelona play each other three times with a fourth to come tonight, which might be meaningless as Barcelona have won the first leg of their Champions League semi-final 2-0 at the Bernabéu and are practically through to the final at Wembley where we might witness a…
Besides the Clasico madness of the last few days, a few thoughts on the dominance of teams from the Iberian peninsula and England. It is astonishing to see that teams from Spain and Portugal as well as England (Schalke being the exception here as they are neither Iberian nor English) are so strong in the…
There could hardly be any better occasion to open the year of international football with this game: France took on Brazil at the Stade de France, the venue where the former beat the latter in the 1998 World Cup Final with two magnificent goals by Zinedine Zidane and Emmanuel Petit securing the tie with a…
In an interview with German weekly paper Die Zeit the project manager Stefan Klos (not the former German goalkeeper!!!) and an architect Joachim Schares involved with the World Cup bid for Qatar 2022 answered a few questions regarding the bid and the decision making process. Of course they sound very convinced about their work and…
Two recent visits to Parc des Princes brought up the question about the pricing of tickets and the direct result of that as well as the causes for this. Certainly €40 for a Europa League match does sound okay if it doesn’t mean to be seated in the upper stands but in the better seats…
a short overview of the first seven, eight or nine matches in Europe’s top five leagues. Read more →