Corruption, maimings, murder – football is a risky business in some countries. As Dan Brennan explains, success can come with an unbearably heavy price in Tbilisi
Football, for Georgians, is the source of extreme and conflicting emotions. On the one hand, this country of barely five million people, with an economy still struggling to find its way out of the doldrums 12 years after independence, has a remarkable track record of producing wonderfully skilful footballers.
Coming to a ground near you – a broadsheet journalist who knows little about football and less about hooliganism, but is still writing about them, to Barnay Ronay's fury
Football is in the grip of a new and terrifying menace: journalists writing articles about hooliganism. Not to mention low-budget British films about hooliganism, journalists writing articles about low-budget films about hooliganism – and now a new and even more sinister threat: football magazines publishing articles about newspaper stories about hooliganism.
Should books about football violence be on the top shelf? Rob Chapman believes that the success of ‘hoolie porn’ is due to some men’s rather odd obsession with crime
About 20 years ago I used to work in one of Britain’s hardest and most dangerous borstals. I mentioned this fact to the husband of my cousin one day at a family get-together. “Oh good, tell me more,” he said, fetching me another drink. “I love villainy tales. They give me an erection.” Yes, that’s what he said. These people do exist. He wasn’t the least bit discouraged when I told him that all I did was teach remedial English to a standard whereby the average semi-literate car thief or burglar might at least be able to grasp the rudiments of a Sun editorial. I haven’t seen him for years but I bet he reads hoolie-books. I imagine most of the commissioning editors who publish the stuff are a bit like him, too. They love a bit of rough and they’ve created a veritable industry out of “literature” that documents the exploits of former, and in some cases not so former, football hooligans.
Bill Shankly was not just a football manager: he was a communicator. Barney Ronay listened to his words come to life and was reminded of a thousand pale imitations
In 1997 a plaque was unveiled in Glenbuck commemorating the 55 professional footballers the Scottish mining village produced during the last century. Among them was Bill Shankly accompanied, even here, by what have become his defining epithets: “the legend, the genius, the man”. This seems to be more than just a localised view. “I watched his genius unfold,” wrote Tom Finney in 1993. “A great man, a great manager and a great psychologist,” enthused Kevin Keegan. No mention of Shankly, it seems, is complete without a magisterial turn of phrase. The legend, the greatest, the granditudelissimus – when it comes to Shankly we all turn into Don King.
Laws in Argentina have been changed to protect badly run clubs. Martin Gambarotta examines the peso, the dollar and the 'inflation effect'.
The president of Argentina, Néstor Kirchner, has a difficult job. The country owes bondholders from Tokyo to Milan $90 billion (£50bn). That’s a debt no football club can equal. Argentina defaulted on that debt in 2001. Back then the entire debt of the 20 first division football clubs amounted to $291m. The country was about to go up in flames and beloved football clubs were on the verge of burning with it. Boca Juniors, arguably the biggest club, had debts of 40 million pesos. But by 2002 people were asking: “Forty million what?”