Arsene Wenger, now 63, began his tenure at Arsenal in 1996 and he led the club to almost a decade of non stop success. He has since, however, suffered eight seasons without a trophy including two abysmal loses in the Capital One Cup final. Arsenal have won no trophies since 2005, and have now been… Read More »
The Mexican National soccer team has recently fired its head coach Jose Manuel de la Torre, following its world cup qualifying loss to the U.S., hiring Victor Manuel Vucetich to replace him. This is the third coaching change that the Mexican National team has made this past week. The decision to fire coaches as the immediate… Read More »
In the build up to the World Cup, Cesare Prandelli, head coach of the Italian National Team has raised concerns regarding the sales of key Italian players to foreign markets. “We must not abandon our youth, and we’re not going to abandon them. They are struggling and we need to work out why,” he said.… Read More »
Introduction Over the last 20 years European soccer has gone through an exciting but dangerous period of global expansion. When Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV signed the English Premier League to a $115 million television rights deal in 1992, he set the European club sport on a terror of worldwide expansion. The Spanish Empire of… Read More »
Football is part of the creative economy because its value lies in ideas. Typically when we think of football, we tend to think of it as “big business.” Real Madrid made over $695 million in the 2011 fiscal year and the combined net worth of the top five richest clubs for 2011 is over $5… Read More »
The business of a soccer club is to produce a winning team. At the end of the day sports are a form of entertainment. Too often, though, actions taken place in the board room or at the negotiating table take away from the entertainment displayed on the field. At times, the aggressiveness and sometimes greediness… Read More »
“Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good football. I go about the world, hands outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good football happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t… Read More »
During international football competitions like the European Cup, eleven players briefly become their country, for a time, on the pitch. A nation is a difficult thing to grasp: unpalpable, mythic, flighty. Historians might labor away to define the precise contours of a country’s culture and institutions, and even sometimes attempt to delineate its soul, while… Read More »
The headline in El País said it all: “The strike of champions.” As of Friday, August 12, the AFE (Spanish Footballers’ Association) union resolved to strike for at least the first two matchdays of the Spanish professional football season. Their reason is a crisis in Spanish football related to the credit bust that, thus far,… Read More »
On June 7th, the Spanish national team played the second of two international friendlies in the Americas. The first was an energetic 4-0 victory over the United States in Boston; the second, in Caracas, another dominating win against the Venezuelan team. The match was noteworthy in contrast to the previous set of friendlies played… Read More »
