Unless you’ve been living under a rock, then you should know about the Chilean miners who are quite literally living under rock. The 33 men have been trapped nearly half a mile below the earth in a 500 square feet emergency shelter ever since the mine in Copiapo, Chile collapsed last month. It’s going...
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Two of my favourite things in football combined not once but twice in yesterday’s international games, as a goalkeeper’s goof was met with a striker’s slide tackle in two separate games.
The most embarrassing of the two errors came from Spain’s Pepe Reina, deputizing for the World Cup winning Iker Casillas in the friendly against...
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European Club Association chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge had some harsh words for FIFA ahead of today’s Euro qualifying games.
“It is no longer acceptable that we have to give up our players, taking the risk that, in case of injury, we still have to play their salaries,” Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, president of the European Clubs’ Association...
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Have you ever wondered why Barcelona and Spain midfielder Andres Iniesta is so pale? Well apparently he spends a lot of time indoors watching video of his own games, and as a result has seen his World Cup final winning goal 1,000 times.
“I watch all my matches many times,” the 26-year-old Barcelona playmaker told...
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You’ve probably read the Wayne Rooney in Not Very Good Role Model Shock! stories, detailing how the Manchester United and England striker (allegedly) paid prostitute Jennifer Thompson for sex while his wife Coleen was pregnant. Click that link if you want to read a story that’s part Rooney exposé, part advertisement for said prostitute.
Obviously...
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FIFA has released its World Cup 2010 Technical Report in the form of a 9.28 megabyte pdf document. Which might sound impressive, but only if you haven’t read it. Because this thing is 289 pages of fluff, in four different languages.
The document basically contains a lot of pictures, a lot of over-simplifications, and a...
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Euro 2012 qualifying gets underway in a few days, and – if you haven’t noticed already – the scheduling may come as something of a surprise. In a break from tradition, games will no longer follow the familiar Saturday afternoon/Wednesday evening pattern, but will instead be played on Friday and Tuesday evenings. The Tuesday...
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Seems those recent Jürgen Klinsmann to coach USA rumours were as baseless as, well, as a story with no identifiable source. Because current coach Bob Bradley has now signed a contract extension to coach the US national team until the end of 2014. I know that this probably will not be popular with a...
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ESPN started a rumour this weekend, and I can’t help spreading it. Apparently Jürgen Klinsmann has been talking with U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati about replacing Bob Bradley as coach of the U.S. national team. That’s “according to a source with knowledge of the discussions” anyway. As opposed to a source with no knowledge...
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The World Cup is very much over. Which means the complaints about vuvuzelas are also very much over. Or at least they should be. So who better to have the last World Cup Blog word on the whole topic than plastic horn inventor Jeff Vuvuzela, appearing ...
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I officially heart this. Because the only personal honour better then receiving the World Cup Golden Ball for best player – as Uruguay’s Diego Forlan did – is having a cartoon/song combo made to immortalize your achievement. According to The Spoiler, the celebratory song is by The Golden Vuvuzelas and features the line “his...
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There are plenty of World Cup best XIs floating around. Mr. David Beckham did one just before the final, and we did two ourselves, split between semi-finalists and non-semi-finalists.
There’s only one XI that goes in the history books though, and that’s the FIFA one. The FIFA World Cup All-Star Team was decided by the...
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That headline might be overstating things, but not by much. The ESPY Awards were created by American sports broadcaster ESPN in 1993. A little like the Oscars, if everyone was a lot more relaxed. Various sporing achievements from the year are honoured, with more than a little ESPN self-promotion thrown in. The important thing...
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Diego Maradona will apparently be offered a new four year deal to stay on Argentina coach when he meets with Football Association president Julio Grondona next week. At first I thoughtn the BBC were just making things up to fill a slow news days. But a bit of Googling and translating reveals that the...
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The game recreations at Lego Fussball have been one of the small joys of World Cup 2010. Of course they did one of the final, so if you want to see Spain 1-0 Netherlands, complete with Lego Mark van Bommel slide tackles and Lego Nigel de Jong delivering a Lego kick to the Lego...
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World Cup 2010 gets a little smaller in the rear view mirror every day now, and the next big show isn’t until 2014. But if you find yourself in need of an international football tournament fix, then don’t worry. There are plenty of events scheduled. Below you’ll find an extensive (but not complete) list...
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He’s not really of course. The World Cup Blog/Offside legal team has asked me to state very clearly that Nigel de Jong will be playing for Man City next season, and will definitely not be coaching girls to execute dangerous high kicks on opposition players. That’s more of a World Cup final move than...
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As predicted before the tournament, World Cup 2010 was a tweet-tastic social media behemoth. Huge. Online PR & social media people Simply Zesty picked out some of the relevant social media related statistics, especially those related to World Cup sponsors, and compiled the numbers into the infographic you see above.
Some interesting stats in there,...
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FIFA has released its first post-World Cup 2010 rankings, and – as you’d expect – there’s been plenty of movement. Nnew top dogs are World Cup 2010 winners Spain, obviously, with losing finalists the Netherlands in second. Former #1 Brazil is now third.
The big big movers are Uruguay, whose run to the World Cup...
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There are many many ways to measure the success or failure of World Cup 2010:
We could judge it on the quality of the football played and the excitement of the games: Was it enjoyable? We could judge it financially: How much did FIFA and/or South Africa make/lose? What were the TV ratings like? How...
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