Jose Pekerman chats with Colombia player as the team prepares to face Brazil in the World Cup. / Getty Images There’s a joke being told in the bars of Rio about how different national teams tried to curry support. Italy put out a press release that if they won they would give free pizza to…
Luis Suarez, right, has been banned from the World Cup for biting Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini/Getty Images In the most dramatic turn of events at the World Cup in Brazil so far, Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez — one of the most talented players of his generation — has been banned from “all football-related activities” for four…
Fans of the British soccer team Tottenham Hotspurs who use the term “yid” will not be arrested, British police said. Constable Steve Payne of London’s Metropolitan Police told a meeting of team fans last week that using the word is no longer an arrestable offense, but that fans could still be charged if accused of…
Getty Images As Team USA carries the hopes of the English-speaking world in Brazil, inquiring minds are wondering why England is so perennially terrible at the sport it invented (and let’s not get started on cricket). It is a question that was surprisingly well answered in 2009, along with the corollary question about how America…
Italy soccer star Mario Balotelli may have put the kiss of death on England with his winning goal at their World Cup opener, but now he wants royal recompense if he becomes their savior. England’s second loss in Group D, to Uruguay on Thursday, left them on the brink of elimination. But there is a…
There are two Jonathan Wilsons writing about soccer in a knowledgeable way. One is Jonathan Wilson from the Guardian, arguably the foremost journalistic expert on tactics in the modern game, the other is Jonathan Wilson, the Tufts University Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, who covered the 1994 World Cup for The New Yorker and…
British Jews have never accounted for more than 1% of the population. And their contribution to soccer has always been obscured. But, in his well-researched and compellingly-written history, “Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?: The History of Football’s Forgotten Tribe,” Anthony Clavane explains the outsize contribution of British Jews to British soccer and their pivotal…
Getty Images Thinkers from Cass Sunstein to Eli Pariser in “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You,” have elucidated the threat to social discourse posed by the Internet. Increasingly able to insulate ourselves from disagreement, we live in bubbles of like-mindedness. From whichever angle, it’s epistemic closure in sociological jargon, “bullshit mountain”…
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