The Archive

Africa's talent looks to foreign shores for success, writes Tom Neate

While Africa’s finest footballers compete in Ghana, 23 13-year-old boys have won the chance to leave the continent behind. They are the winners of a mammoth and controversial talent search undertaken by the Aspire Academy. At the forefront of Qatar’s push for sporting success, the academy provides sporting and educational facilities with the aim of developing future world sporting champions. The centrepiece is the Dome, currently the world’s largest purpose-built indoor sports arena. Incorporated under the roof along with a vast array of sporting facilities is a full-size football pitch; there are an additional seven pitches outside, five of which are natural grass.

Read more…

Non-League crowd-pullers FC United played Curzon Ashton in front of empty stands in late December, after the game was moved so it could be shown live on the internet. Michael Whalley reports

First came the Manchester United boycott. Now the FC United fans who stayed away from Old Trafford as a result of the Malcolm Glazer takeover have boycotted their new team, too. On December 29, FC’s board and all but a handful of their supporters stayed away from their side’s 2-0 victory at Curzon Ashton in the Unibond League First Division North. The reason? A dispute over the league’s decision to move the kick-off time forward from 3pm to 12.45pm, so that the match could be shown live on the internet.

Read more…

December 16’s match-ups of the “Big Four” sent Sky’s publicity machine into overdrive. After six hours of Keys, Gray and Redknapp, the only thing Barney Ronay wanted to slam anywhere was the remote control

Like many other irresistible global happenings, it all started with something very small. The tectonic tremor that would eventually lead to the towering tsunami of Grand Slam Sunday was the announcement of the Premier League fixture list in June. As in 2006-07, the supposedly random computer selection had presented us with two weekends when the top tier’s “Big Four” would play each other. Clearly, this has started happening rather more often than it should. Not surprising, then, that despite the boundless advertising budget, the limitless man-hours developed to styling, tweaking and generally buffing-up, the most recent edition of this gala televised soccer extravaganza should end up looking a lot like the last time we all did this.

Read more…

Alan Brazil has another book out. Taylor Parkes is not impressed

These are frightening times. With politics now driven by personality not policy, and the media fixated on folk devils rather than facts, it can be hard to make sense of the world.

Read more…

The season is not half-done yet relegation is assured, despite the arrival of a new manager. But amid the retail outlets and call centres, there’s no anger – it’s not so much Pride Park as Resigned Park. By David Stubbs

It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve made the trip up north by rail. It matters not that you were actually brought up in the north. No matter, either, that you have resolved not to fall into the usual trap of the condescending London-based writer venturing into the provinces and remarking on the frightfulness of it all, the supreme example of which was a piece written by the Guardian’s Katherine Whitehorn in the 1960s, entitled “You Can’t Take Aubergines For Granted Outside London”. Step off the train at Derby, step outside and the scene that greets you, dominated by a browned-off looking Midlands Hotel, makes you deeply conscious not just that you have stepped outside your home town, but stepped outside your own decade.

Read more…