A quick note about this month’s When Saturday Comes, which features a piece on ticket prices in lower league football and the economic consequences for both fans and clubs.
I’ve also written a different piece on this issue in the past for The Two Unfortunates.
Will be interested to see what response this provokes, given the further belt-squeezing we’re seeing across the country. Football normally lives in its own little financial bubble. Not sure that will be so viable over this decade.
Watching the truth about Hillsborough finally come out today was at times gut wrenching. The story may be known well by now, but that didn’t stop the revelations shocking, nor the sense of shame that it has taken 23 years to get to a point where the incompetence that led to 96 deaths was finally laid bare and that those 96 finally had their names cleared.
I was a bit too young to understand what Hillsborough was at the time although I remember well the coverage of the death of (check) several years later and finally realising the extent of the horrors of that day. And it made a lot of sense that my mother, in 1990, was horrified at the idea of me attending a football match.
That BT won some of the rights for the Premier League might have been a bit of a surprise (albeit not a total one), but that it wasn’t a traditional broadcaster should have been expected.
At the start of the year, I wrote for both When Saturday Comes and Pitch Invasion that it made a lot of sense to hear both Apple and Google’s names linked with the Premier League rights, and how we should expect the nature of sports broadcasting to change significantly with technological developments over the coming years.
Predictably, as we’re now at the end of the football season, I decided it would be an excellent time to get back into recording the odd football podcast or two.
For twofootedtackle, we headed down the pub for a special two-parter with the Sound Of Football team as we reviewed the season just gone, tackling all the five top leagues in England, Germany, Italy and France and what’s currently happening in MLS and the Russian Premier League. It was originally going to be an hour but we were having so much fun, we extended it to about 90 minutes. It’s best listened to in chunks. Click here to listen to it.
It’s not often that I use this place to hawk out my football-related work (you’d all get bored quickly, I’m sure), but the latest podcast I’ve recorded is about more than just sport.
For the last two months, I’ve been working on a special one-off twofootedtackle podcast on attitudes to homosexuality within football and what the authorities are doing to tackle homophobia in the game.
I’m not generally a huge fan of cross-promoting football writing on here, as I know what all five readers really want is another fish pie recipe. I’ll make an exception for the last piece written for twofootedtackle though.
The title’s Why the Premier League has failed every one of the League’s 92 clubs. The content is exactly that. To me, it’s increasingly clear that the road the Premier League is currently going down is storing up a lot of problems, financially, not just for the 20 clubs in the top flight, but all the way down the league (and even into the non-league game as well).
September 4th. Mark that date in your calendar. There’s no Premier League or Championship football that day due to the international break, while England play the night before.
A football free weekend, right? Wrong. There’s still hundreds of non-league matches being played up and down the country that day, and James Doe has come up with a fantastic idea to support them.
James has declared September 4th Non-League Day and is urging football fans who’d normally watch a higher league game that day to head to a non-league match and show their support for grassroots football.
Ding! Another day, another poorly worded and conceived pitch arrives in my personal inbox, and my heart sinks a little further towards despair. If it weren’t for the Germans, and Portugal’s goal fest against the North Koreans, I’d have received more useless pitches than goals this World Cup.
Quite simply, judging by the majority of pitches than have landed in my inbox, general PR from companies looking to take advantage of the World Cup has ranged from poor to truly shocking. Most have made no attempt to remotely engage.
For the first time, and quite possibly the last, I’ve written that an action in a football match erred on the side of a utilitarian rather than a deontological (in the strictest Kantian sense) decision. Well, that and other stuff.
Luis Suarez’s handball on the line in the dying moments of Uruguay’s quarter final against Ghana struck me as fascinating in so many ways that I sat down and wrote a rather large essay on it.
That essay can be found at Pitch Invasion. It contains ruminations on moral philosophy and football, economics and football, and what the sport can learn from rules from other sports.
EDIT: Since posting this last night, The Sun have since dropped the World Cup blogger sweepstake after Who Ate All The Pies and other blogs complained.
Look at the screenshot of The Sun’s World Cup Blogger Sweepstake above. If you were a PR who’s been pitching football bloggers recently you might skim the blogs and think “Wow, that is a pretty impressive line up of bloggers. They’ve even managed to get some notoriously hard-to-reach, popular and high-class well respected blogs on board. I wonder how they managed that?”
Short answer: They didn’t.