On the face of it playing a 24-team finals tournament using 12 different venues spread across a continent in June and July 2020 was always going to be logistically challenging. However, factor in a global pandemic which brought the world as we knew it let alone international travel and football to a halt from which […]
I really did not want to write another f**k*n’ piece on the seemingly inevitable advent of a European Super League. Ever since I started this blog some five years ago, there have been periodic murmurings of the launch of such a money-oriented abomination of the game that we all love. While these have thankfully tended […]
Anyone who has read these pages in previous seasons won’t have found it a particularly tough stretch to draw the conclusion that I am far from being a fan of the seemingly too frequent and often pointless International breaks during the domestic season. As much as I love the major International tournaments in the summer […]
Well call us Nostradamus! No sooner had I concluded in last week’s piece (Football Nerd Weekly Ramblings: Project Big Picture and Pay Per View – some of the Premier League money men reveal their true colours.) and the comments from Keith, Laurence and Roger reinforced the suspicion, that the motives behind ‘Project Big Picture’ were a […]
Last weekend finally brought the conclusions to the European competitions some two and a half months or so later than had been originally planned and in quite possibly the most surreal circumstances we have ever witnessed. The competitions were eventually staged as two concurrent mini-finals tournaments running in Lisbon and Germany and while it was […]
“I truly believe [Financial Fair Play] FFP is gone. I think it’s better to open the circus door and let everybody enjoy.” It is not often that I find myself agreeing with the Premier League pantomime arch-villain and self-avowed “Special One”, nor is it a position I want to find myself in too often in […]
I wrote on this page last week that “Football cannot of course in any way be immune from the impact of the pandemic that we are all facing”, not exactly a Nostradamus-like profound prediction of how things could turn out, more a realisation of the inevitability that football could simply not just carry on oblivious […]
UEFA’s announcement last Friday that Manchester City would be banned from participating in European competition, (in their case the Champions League), for two seasons for breaches of Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations, may have been several years in the making but it was still somewhat surprising as most of us doubted whether UEFA would actually […]
There aren’t many times in my life when a 2:35am alarm is greeted with excitement, but as I got myself up and ready I knew the next 24 hours plus was going to be the maddest and most surreal thing I had ever done in the name of football. Amazingly I was not alone as […]
On Wednesday morning I will board a flight for a mammoth odyssey that will see me cover in excess of 5,000 miles in 24 hours for a European Final in a country that is three time zones away, to which the majority of the season ticket holders at the participating clubs can’t actually get to, […]
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