You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘football’ tag.
On the day I was born Hibs won 1-0 in a Scottish Cup tie. I’ve followed them ever since.
Those intervening four decades haven’t returned much in terms of silverware. Three League cup wins, none of which I witnessed, and no league titles. And most painfully, no lifting of the Scottish Cup.
It’s true to say that no man alive has seen Hibs won the oldest trophy in world football. The last time Edinburgh’s finest lifted the Scottish Cup was in 1902.
This weekend we play Edinburgh’s second team Hearts in the cup decider. It will be the first time we’ve met in the final since 1896 and it is the most hotly awaited derby of all time.
I wrote a piece for Reuters on my long overdue wait to see Hibs win something. Here’s a slightly modified version.
The Scottish Cup gets under way in January and my birthday is in February and so every year I make the same wish when I blow out the candles on my cake.
I never told my dad what that wish was but he’s a Hibs supporter too and he’s not daft. One year, not long into my teens, I puffed loudly and he couldn’t stop himself. “You can keep wishing, son,” he said, “Hibs are not going to win the cup.”
It was a fairly safe prediction given that Hibernian hadn’t lifted the Scottish Cup since 1902.
This week, though, I am Edinburgh, having flown 6,000 miles from my home in Brazil in the hope of seeing my dad’s prediction proved wrong. For just the ninth time in more than a century, Hibs are in the final.
I know most people think I am mad and I have to admit, as Saturday’s big match gets closer I do sometimes question the sanity of my decision. Because as losing streaks go, ours is a belter. Forget Manchester City and their 44-year quest to win the English league title. Forget even the Chicago Cubs and their 103-year pursuit of baseball’s World Series. The last time Hibs won the cup, the Boer War was still raging and the Titanic hadn’t even been thought of.
The maddest thing is that I broke the bank to come home and we’re not even favourites. We made it to the final despite having our worst team in 30 years. We’ve only won 14 of 47 games this season, narrowly avoiding relegation. And we’ve not beaten our cup final opponents for three years.
But I can’t help it. I can’t bear the thought of Hibs finally winning the Scottish Cup and me not being there to see it.
If I supported Celtic or Rangers, or Chelsea or Manchester United, or any one of the other ‘big’ teams who rely on sectarianism or oligarchs or dubious Third World ‘investors’ to buy them cups and trophies then this wouldn’t be such a gamble. The chances of us winning would be pretty high.
But this is Hibs, a club whose rich and storied history is matched only by its inability to honour that with silverware.
Sure, we’ve made our mark since we being formed by Irish immigrants way back in 1875. When football was a sport and not a business and people turned out to support their local clubs, Hibs were one of the most exciting teams not just in Scotland but the entire world.
In the 1950s we boasted the Famous Five, one of the greatest forward lines the game has ever seen. Since then we’ve beaten Barcelona and Real Madrid, spanked Sporting Lisbon, and murdered Man. United and Arsenal. We can proudly say we were once champions of the world (albeit in 1887 before the rest of the world had discovered the game).
But then Hibs were always ahead of the curve. We were the first British team to play in Europe, taking part in the inaugural European Cup (later to be the Champions League) in 1955. We were the first team in Scotland to wear a sponsor on our shirt, the first to get undersoil heating, the first to have an electronic scoreboard.
We just never won very much.
Since the heady days of the Famous Five – a team so good Sir Alex Ferguson said it was forever “etched in his mind” – we’ve never come close to winning the league.
We’ve been to the Scottish Cup final three times in my life but we lost each time. And while we’ve lifted the relatively unimportant League Cup on three occasions I contrived to miss each one; the first took place when I was only five, the second and third came after I had moved abroad.
I was in Mexico in 1991 when my mother called to give me the bitter-sweet news of our victory. “They finally go and win something and you’re not here,” she said over a crackly phone line, her sobs lurching between sadness and joy. “After you followed them through thick and thin.”
Thin and thin was more like it.
My mum isn’t around anymore but my dad will be there with me at Hampden this Saturday when we take on Heart of Midlothian, Edinburgh’s second team, in the most hotly anticipated final in decades.
He doesn’t remember telling his young son we’d never win the cup. But I do know he’d love to be proved wrong.
So if it’s your birthday this week, do us a favour. When you blow out your candles, think of Hibernian and 110 years of hurt. I know it won’t guarantee our victory. But after this long every little helps. Me, my dad, and tens of thousands of other Hibs fans would be much obliged.
I’ve been to hundreds of football matches in my life but without doubt the 2006 Copa Libertadores match between Corinthians and River Plate was one of the most unforgettable.
Kia Joorabchian’s Corinthians had Javier Mascherano and Carlos Tevez in their ranks and were favourites to overturn a 3-2 deficit from the first leg.
Instead they went down 3-1 amid sensational scenes at the Pacaembu stadium. Several irate fans invaded the pitch to remonstrate with Corinthians players and as frustration boiled over into fury police fired stun grenades to hold back angry fans.
I was in the press box and watched open-mouthed as fans hurtled down the terraces in waves to try and get on the pitch. It was like those scenes you saw on British TV in the 1970s from Liverpool or Manchester before crash barriers went up.
There were a dozen or so police with batons hitting everything that moved as fans on the other side of the fence tried desperately to tear it down and get on the pitch (see the footage below). It was incredible.
I realized there and then just how deep Corinthian’s obsession with winning the Libertadores is. I also realized that desperation can do more harm than good.
(I try and explain the phenomenon in more detail here in my Reuters piece.)
As one Corinthians fan said to me yesterday outside the Pacaembu, Imagine you have thousands of people looking at you as you do your job just waiting for you to screw up. You’d be too scared to do anything.
Corinthians play Emelec tonight in the second leg of their last 16 Libertadores tie. The score stands at 0-0.
I fancy Corinthians to squeeze into the quarter finals with their usual struggle. But if they don’t, their fans probably won’t lose it like they did in 2006. That game, given the participation of Tevez and former Corinthians manager Daniel Passarella, was very highly charged.
But if it all goes wrong there will be a lot of unhappy campers. And I wouldn’t rule anything out.
When Brazil won the right to host the 2014 World Cup a friend looked at me and through his big grin declared: ‘Let the robbing begin!’
He was not wrong.
It’s the same story elsewhere, as the big construction companies take advantage.
To cite one quote in my story:
“This is all just a chance for the big construction firms to get their hands in the till,” said Christopher Gaffney, a visiting professor at the graduate school of architecture and urban planning at the Fluminense Federal University. “Society is not going to benefit in any way.”
I think Brazil thoroughly deserves the right to host the World Cup. As the only team to win the trophy five times and as the home of many of the world’s greatest players, FIFA had a certain duty to take the tournament to the game’s spiritual home.
I truly believe that the tournament will be a great success. Fans will come from all over the world and be treated well by Brazilians. They will encounter a great climate in a beautiful country, populated by welcoming locals, and they will have an unforgettable experience.
But then they will leave and Brazilians will be left with the hangover. Few new roads. Few new airports. Not enough new hotels. Arenas that will be white elephants. Inadequate infrastructure. All at a cost many times more than it was supposed to cost.
It was all so predictable.
Socrates, in 1986
A few years ago, Time magazine had me call Socrates to ask him if he would pen a short piece on Kaka.
The magazine’s editors – perhaps the same ones who suggested last month that Lionel Messi was better than Pele – had chosen Kaka as one of the 100 most influential people on the planet and they wanted Socrates to write an eulogy.
Socrates had one question for me. Is this about Kaka the footballer or Kaka the man, he asked. Kaka, the man, I replied.
To my delight, Socrates dismissed the idea out of hand. He had great respect for Kaka with a ball at his feet but not with a bible in his hand.
Time got Casey Keller to write the piece instead.
I thought of this last night when I saw that Neymar had described Ricardo Teixeira as “an excellent president” of the CBF. The young Santos star made the comments on the same day that Edmundo declared that he “loved” Ricardo Teixeira and a few days after Ronaldo and Bebeto both lauded Teixeira’s work.
(See the Neymar comments in Portuguese here, and details of Ronaldo and Bebeto’s nonsense here in my Reuters piece from last week.)
Socrates was not just a brilliant footballer. He was an intelligent and highly principled man who fought hard so that players like Neymar could have more of a voice, both inside and outside the game.
He must be rolling in his grave.
It’s been 17 years, almost to the day, since I last wrote for Reuters.
When I left Port-au-Prince in February 1995 to go to Mexico City I cut my ties with the news agency and moved on.
Today I saw my name under the Reuters logo again, this time from Brazil. I will be writing about sports, and particularly football, in the months and I hope years to come.
My first piece today was about Ricardo Teixeira, a man I’ve written about many times before. The lead promises more news on the CBF president very soon.
The president of the Brazilian Football Confederation and the man charged with organising the 2014 World Cup was reportedly close to resigning on Wednesday after a local newspaper implicated him in another corruption scandal.
Ricardo Teixeira, who has headed the CBF for 22 years, could step down as early as Thursday, O Globo newspaper reported.
The news came on the day another newspaper, Folha de S.Paulo, reported that a company linked to the football boss overcharged the organisers of a November 2008 friendly match between Brazil and Portugal in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia.
For more on Ricardo Teixeira see this earlier post.
Here’s the new Brazil strip, launched today by Nike just one year after it launched the last new Brazil strip.
The desperate attempt to make this version different from the last one means it has broad green cuffs.
They’ve thankfully taken away the green bar across the chest, which was last year’s attempt to make it different.
The national team will wear the strip for the first time on Feb. 28 when they play Bosnia-Herzegovina. The match will take place in Switzerland.
Nike’s marketing team don’t seem to have cottoned on yet, which is odd as marketing is what they’re good at. The Nike web site still features the old strip.
They haven’t mucked about when naming their price, though. A shirt exactly the same as that worn by the players is to cost 239.00 reais, or $137, while a cheaper version will be available for 189.90 reais, or $108.
Here’s a pic of manager Mano Menezes holding the new shirt. Unsurprisingly, he approves. “It’s more traditional,” he said, “and I like more traditional.”
There are a few great statistics knocking around that illustrate just how the strong real is enabling Brazilian footballers return from Europe and how that football is becoming better managed.
For example: In 2005, 804 Brazilian footballers left the country to sign for foreign clubs. In 2008 that number had risen to 1,176. It started to fall the year after and has been falling ever since. At the same time, the number of athletes coming home has risen every year since 2006, when 311 returned.
Here’s another: Corinthians are seriously offering around 40 million pounds to sign Carlos Tevez from Manchester City, one of the richest clubs in the world.
Just three or four years ago it would have been unthinkable that a Brazilian club could afford to sign a player at the height of his career like Tevez.
Of course, this could not happen with any top star. It is only possible because Tevez supposedly wants to be in South America, where he is closer to his family and where standards of professionalism are not as high as in Europe.
But it would be fantasy if Tevez wasn’t able to earn almost as much in Brazil as in England or Spain or Italy, thanks to the strength of the Brazilian real, which earlier this month reached its highest level against the dollar since 1999.
It is also because at long last serious administrators are replacing the corrupt dinosaurs who ran Brazilian league clubs as I point out in today’s Financial Times.
The new generation have put into place season ticket schemes that guarantee them income, struck new deals that in some cases have tripled their annual revenue from television, and signed significantly bigger sponsorship deals with companies that bank new signings.
Sponsors, for example, pay 75 % of what Ronaldinho Gaucho earns at Flamengo and 800,000 reais of Neymar’s 1 million-real-a-month deal with Santos.
“Of that 1 million, we pay 200,000 and the difference comes from image rights,” Alvaro de Souza, a former Citibank executive who now works for Santos, told me. “We get companies interested in using Neymar to sell their products and that goes towards paying his salary. He gets 70 percent of the contract and Santos gets 30 percent. The consumer market is bigger now and that means more brands looking for a piece of the market. Our shirt is very valuable because we have more exposure than before.”
Having said that, clubs like Santos and Flamengo are still a long way from earning the kind of money made by Manchester United or Barcelona.
Brazilian teams pay little attention to potential overseas income and are largely unknown in markets such as the US and Asia, even compared to neighbours Argentina. (Walk through the centre of any major city outside Latin America and there’s a decent chance you’ll spot someone in a Boca Juniors or River Plate jersey; there’s almost no danger of seeing a non-Brazilian wearing a Brazilian club shirt.)
The moment is also dependent on the continuing strength of the real, which many economists believe is overvalued (see this excellent Bloomberg piece). If it weakens, clubs will once again find it harder to match their European rivals.
Nevertheless, the structural changes taking place today are similar to the revolution in English football in the 1990s after Sky TV injected hundreds of millions into the game and stadiums were modernised following the Taylor report.
There is still a long way to go. But they are heading in the right direction.
Corinthians’ still to be built Itaquerão stadium will host the opening match of the 2014 World Cup.
FIFA are yet to formally make the announcement but it seems like a done deal, with SP Mayor Gilberto Kassab confirming it was imminent.
So, Itaquerão it is. (See images of the proposed stadium here.)
Questions still remain. Will it be ready in time and just what are the chances it will come in on or under its stated budget of approx. 820 million reais?
Slim, and none, if you ask me.
More details here in my Financial Times piece.
Ricardo Teixeira doesn’t give many interviews but when he does, they’re worth waiting for.
The all-powerful head of the Brazilian Football Confederation and the man in charge of organizing the next World Cup allowed Piauí magazine to accompany him to Switzerland last month for the election of FIFA’s president.
The resulting profile is one of the best pieces of journalism I’ve read in years.
Teixeira hates the press but reporter Daniela Pinheiro put her considerable charm to work and simply let him talk.
He couldn’t resist and her piece has a dozen delicious anecdotes and quotes from the man who could well succeed Sepp Blatter as the most powerful man in football.
Teixeira, who has been head of the CBF since 1989, has resolved not to run for president again when his current term ends in 2015.
The article closes with this quote (my translation):
“In 2014, I can get up to whatever nastiness I want. The most excessive, unthinkable, most Machiavellian nastiness. (Like) not giving out credentials, (like) restricting access, (like) changing kick off times. And you know what will happen if I do? Nothing. And you know why? Because I’ll be gone in 2015. And that’s that.”
The piece is now available online to subscribers and in English too. It is a must for anyone interested in football or great journalism.
Photographer: Ronnie Macdonald
It’s always entertaining to hear Diego Maradona whining that he was a better player than Pelé.
No matter that almost everyone who seen them both play rates Pelé higher.
Now, however, Maradona is updating that age-old dispute between Brazil and Argentina by claiming Neymar is not as good as Lionel Messi and probably never will be.
So far, he’s right. Messi has not only won much more than Neymar, he has done so with elegance and poise, both on and off the pitch.
But what was most interesting about Maradona’s latest rant was him targeting Neymar for his bad attitude. “That boy is ill-mannered and he respects no one, just like Pelé,” Maradona said (according to this story on ig.com.br).
Now, aside from the obvious, ‘black, kettle, pot’ aspect of Diego Maradona criticising another player’s attitude, it’s illustrative how Neymar has so quickly managed to acquire an image as a cheat, an arrogant boor and a spoilt brat.
Take this opinion last week from O Globo’s Fernando Calazans: “I am a bit sick of seeing him rolling around on the ground and then inventing stories about the referee threatening to send him off. The only person threatening to get Neymar sent off is Neymar himself, with his spoilt child antics and his addiction to being a star.”
That damning indictment from one of the most astute football columnists in Brazil is no isolated criticism.
Opposing manager Rene Simões called Neymar “a monster” last year and said he had seldom seen a player “as ignorant or unsporting.”
Several opposing players have accused him of cheating.
And after he scored both goals in a 2-0 win over Scotland earlier this year, amid lots of rolling around and feigning injury, former Chelsea winger Pat Nevin said Neymar “lives in an alternative universe where the slightest brush leads to mortal pain that looks like it is going to kill him and then 20 seconds later he is magically better.”
Neymar accused the Scotland fans of racism in that match but even after it was revealed the banana thrown on the pitch came from a German teenager, Neymar stubbornly refused to apologise for the accusation.
He would do well to grow up and show some humility and he could start by looking at some appropriate role models.
That doesn’t mean Pelé and it certainly doesn’t mean Maradona.
Neymar should spend more time trying to be like Lionel Messi. Both on and off the field.
P.S. Good luck to Santos (and Neymar) in the final of the Libertadores match tonight against Peñarol.
