Soccer

IT’S A RICO CASE:

How drawn-out saga of Manchester City’s alleged cheating came to this (David Conn, 26 Sep 2026, The Guardian)

On Friday sources confirmed that saga, in which Pep Guardiola’s expensively constructed City teams won five Premier League titles and the Champions League during the years since the investigation began in December 2018, culminated in guilty findings on almost all of more than 100 charges.

There is no precedent either for the scale of these charges: that City failed to provide accurate financial information to the league for nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18 inclusive; failed to provide full details of payment in their contracts with manager Roberto Mancini from 2009-10 to 2012-13; failed to include full payment details in player contracts from 2010-11 to 2015-16; that they breached Uefa’s financial fair play regulations from 2013-14 to 2017-18, the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability regulations from 2015-16 to 2017-18 – and that City failed to cooperate with the league’s investigation throughout, from its inception in 2018-19 to the 2022-23 season in which the club was charged, including the duty to provide “documents and information to the Premier League in the utmost good faith”. […]

This stunning exposure of the modern Manchester City’s insides was precipitated in November 2018 by the German magazine Der Spiegel sensationally publishing internal City documents, leaked to it from a hack of City’s emails. Most damaging in that exposé were emails and financial documents that appeared to show Sheikh Mansour’s ownership group was paying the bulk of the multimillion-pound sponsorship of the club by the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad, which includes bearing the name of the stadium.

The published documents suggested that City’s regime, in its determination to spend the vast money required to attain success in modern football, was circumventing the financial fair play (FFP) rules. Introduced by Uefa in 2011, then similarly by the Premier League in 2013, these rules seek to restrain overspending by clubs, particularly on soaring player wages, by limiting the financial losses that owners can fund. Money must be spent from a club’s earned revenue, including TV and commercial rights, income from supporters and sponsorships – owners cannot use a sponsor as a vehicle for putting more funding in.

It is the systemic nature of the violations that makes them so punishment-worthy.

#FSGIN:

The damage of the Manchester City verdict runs deep. An era of Premier League history is tainted (Oliver Kay, Sept. 26, 2026, The Athletic)

This is what the Premier League has been up against since City’s reputation was shaken by a series of stories published by Germany magazine Der Spiegel in November 2018, where hacked emails indicated that the club had run a concerted and sustained campaign to circumvent financial regulations (an allegation that City have consistently and vehemently denied).

At various points over the past eight years, various people in the football industry have speculated about what a positive outcome for the Premier League might look like. The conclusion? There wasn’t one. Find City guilty on multiple counts? It would tell us that the league had allowed its rules to be flaunted for years, raising serious questions about the competition’s integrity over the period in question and its ability to regulate its clubs in future. The league’s brand, as well as that of its dominant club over the past decade, would be damaged.

But allow City to get off lightly, either with the charges not proven or with a lenient sanction? The league would risk anarchy, the rulebook found to be meaningless, and rival clubs would be furious. Nobody wants a league table pockmarked by asterisks and points deductions, but there is, as the Premier League’s frequently embattled chief executive Richard Masters told Sky Sports News in 2024, “no happy alternative to enforcing the rules”.

Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executiveCarl Recine/Getty Images
Win or lose, the reputational risk to the league threatened to be enormous. In recent months, it has already found Chelsea guilty of breaches of financial regulations relating to payments to agents and unregistered third parties between 2009 and 2022. To put it in context, an entire period of Premier League history — featuring multiple league titles for both City and Chelsea — has been tainted and compromised.

GLOBALIZATION IS AMERICANIZATION:

Football Conquered the United States. Now It Wants to Conquer Global Football: Can the U.S. ambition to conquer football on a global scale and to remake the game in American style be stopped? (George Courmouzis and Stephan Richter, 8/30/26, The Globalist)

The U.S. has done something similar, and arguably better, on the women’s side. It was essentially the key driver of the launch of women’s soccer.

U.S. universities’ varsity teams played a major role in bringing women’s soccer from a total sideshow to a significant sports activity, first nationally and then globally.

Spain may currently hold the World Cup in both the men’s and women’s game, but the U.S. tops the all-time list on the women’s side, with four Women’s World Cups.

And it is the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) that has turned that record into the world’s most valuable platform for the women’s professional game.

Just consider that Denver’s 2026 home opener drew over 63,000 fans, a number few European women’s clubs could dream of.

Whatever else the info of American money may do to football, it has done more than any other market to make the women’s professional game a going financial concern.

The game is only understood because American sabremetrics have been applied to it.

CULTURE CAMP:

Spain’s collectivism, England’s hero worship and how a nation’s societal norms can shape its football (Mark Carey, Aug. 9, 2026, The Athletic)

Football can shape the culture within a city, region or country, but the relationship works in both directions.

As Iraola implies, society impacts football as much as the game impacts society.

Expanding on Iraola’s comments, there are methods to measure how different countries integrate individuals into groups. One method is to look at the sociological differences between ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’.

Individualist societies typically focus on independence within social groups, encouraging personal expression, and are more accepting of differences — and are typically found in Western countries, according to studies.

By contrast, collectivist societies focus more on social harmony and prioritise the group over individual goals, with decisions made based on what is best for the wider community. These have been found to typically be most prevalent among African and South Asian nations.

The research on this topic is extensive and widely debated, but a 2026 study has re-modelled a global individualism-collectivism scale to measure where each country falls.

Across a sample of 102 nations, Nordic ones (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Finland) come out as the most individualist. Spain’s index score still falls within the upper echelons of an individualist culture, but is lower than some of its fellow major footballing nations, including France, Germany, Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and the Netherlands.

If cultural norms do shape footballing identities, that gap may help explain why the Spanish game has historically placed a greater premium on collective structures than some of its European neighbours.

David Winner’s Brilliant Orange is excellent on how Dutch culture shaped the clockwork Orange era of teams

PEP BALL:

Geometry, football and the World Cup final (Conor Boland, July 17, 2026, The Conversation)

Put three attackers in a straight line and one defender can often block both supporting players. But move one supporting player sideways and the passing lines separate.

The defender must choose which route to close. Press the ball and a pass can go around them. Protect the inside route and the outside may open. If another defender steps across, a Spanish player can attack the space left behind.

A useful football triangle does not need equal sides or 60-degree angles. Its best shape changes with defenders’ positions, body orientation, ball speed and the space available.

A narrow triangle is easy to squeeze because one defender may block both lanes. A wide one makes the pass travel farther, giving an opponent more time to intercept it.

In their semi-final match against France, Spain found the middle ground again and again – close enough for quick combinations, but far enough apart to stretch France’s press.

SPURSY VERSES:

The People’s Game: The education of a soccer fan. (Salman Rushdie, May 24, 1999, The New Yorker)

I came to London in January, 1961, as a boy of thirteen and a half, on my way to boarding school, and accompanied by my father. It was a cold month, with blue skies by day and green fogs by night. We stayed at a huge barracks of a hotel, the Cumberland, at Marble Arch, and after we settled in my father asked if I would like to see a professional soccer game. (In Bombay, where I had grown up, there was no soccer to speak of; the local sports were cricket and field hockey.)

The first game my father took me to see was what I would later learn is called a “friendly” (because the result doesn’t count toward anything) between a North London team called the Arsenal and the champions of Spain, Real Madrid. I did not know that the visitors were rated as perhaps the greatest team ever. Or that they had just won the European Cup five years running. (The European Cup is an annual tournament held to determine the champion of all Europe’s national champions.) Or that among their players were two of the game’s all-time immortals, both foreigners: a Hungarian named Ferenc Puskas, “the little general,” and an Argentine, Alfredo di Stefano.

This is the way I remember the game: in the first half, Real Madrid tore the Arsenal apart. The London team was renowned for its tough defensive style of play—“Boring Arsenal” is a label it was stuck with for years—but Real Madrid went through the Arsenal’s defense almost at will, and at halftime led 3–0. Then, because this was, after all, just a friendly game, Real took off its star players and replaced them with a bunch of kids. Arsenal stubbornly kept all its first-team players on the field, and the game ended up tied, 3–3; but not even the most diehard Arsenal fans could pretend that the result accurately reflected the quality of the two teams.

On the way back to the hotel, my father asked me for my views. “Well, I didn’t think much of that English team,” I told him. “But I liked that Spanish side. Can you find out if there’s an English team that plays like Real Madrid?” Unknown to me, I had asked for the near impossible; as if, in Michael Jordan’s airborne heyday, I had asked, “Can you find out if there’s a team that plays like the Chicago Bulls?” My father, almost as much an innocent in these matters as myself, said, “I’ll ask at the front desk.” What he learned from that long-forgotten hotel clerk changed my life, because a few days later we went to watch the other famous team of North London, Tottenham Hotspur, and I lost my heart.

THE GOAT:

Shep Messing and the 1972 Olympic soccer adventure that turned into tragedy (Michael Lewis, 6 Oct 2015, The Guardian)

A non-conformist who spoke his mind, Messing walked to the beat of his own drum, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

“I had no money, so I hitch-hiked from New York to St Louis,” he said. “I was not told anything by the coaches. I had scrounged up the money for a flight to get back, but I had not money for a hotel room. I was literally sleeping at the airport at the gate. I woke up and picked up a Sunday newspaper and saw that I had made the team.

“From zero to a hundred and then it’s off to qualifying. Concacaf was not really not that much different then, in terms of how difficult it is to play in Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador. Those way games were probably just as difficult as they are today. That qualifying process was long and tough. We had no expectations.”

There was no grand master plan in US soccer back then.

“It is so hard to compare eras and generations for US soccer,” Messing said. “You’re not talking about guys who were playing in a stable, professional league. This was really amateurs. So to go to play at Azteca against Mexico and to Jamaica and Trinidad and the Central American countries, we did not have that body of experience. Our experience was, in my case, Harvard-Yale or Harvard against Columbia. We had no preparation, nothing to prepare. It was brutal. But we didn’t have any pressure. We were a bunch of college bandits.”

ONLY DONALD…:

The World Cup Is Undressing the Myth of Trump’s American Homogeneity (Andrew Lawrence, 7/02/26, The Guardian)

The same countries that see immigration as an existential threat are bearing witness to a World Cup that makes the opposite plain – underscoring not only the short-sightedness of exclusionary political movements, but the dereliction of leadership within Fifa itself. If the governing body wasn’t so busy kowtowing to authoritarian regimes and fleecing workaday fans, it could be the greatest force for global good since, well, the advent of international flight.

This tournament has proven that soccer, when politics and cultural posturing are set aside, can indeed be the great unifier – turning Japanese fans on to the wonders of chips and salsa, sparking a bromance between the people of Scotland and the city of Boston, and keeping Brazil’s supporter mob in a mood to party with New York Knicks fans. It’s kept the nation’s big box stores and fast food joints humming. At an Oakland watch party for Cape Verde, Jill Tucker – who taught English in the country as a Peace Corps volunteer – was stunned to find one of her old students among the cheering section. Together, the connections are a stark reminder that sharing a flag doesn’t mean sharing a worldview, least of all one imposed from on high.

Therein lies the frustration for this administration: even as it seeks to rewrite the rules on who can and can’t be an American, diversity remains inseparable from national identity. In a country that owes so much of its cultural and economic strength to diversity, equity and inclusion – from Einstein to Oprah – soccer is no different. European and Latin-American newcomers established the game in industrial hubs and mill towns in the US midwest and southeast. Sustained immigration over the better part of a century turned soccer into a national pastime – one with staggering participation, impressive TV ratings and seemingly limitless potential for growth. The fact that US viewership for this year’s World Cup is as robust on Telemundo as it is on Fox speaks to the millions of American soccer fans who have long been comfortable following the game in Spanish.

…could make a World Cup more unifying than the 4th.