The men who run English football insist that the Premier League is the biggest, best, most exciting league in the 
world. No single event has done more to reinforce that opinion than the final weekend of last season, when, down 2-1 with only three minutes to go, Manchester City scored two late goals and secured its first league championship. The match was thrilling for all the usual reasons: the crowd went wild, the goal-scorer removed his shirt, and Sky broadcast footage of the despondent second-place team looking despondent.
In For The Hat Trick
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It’s Been A While…
Since I last posted, an Era Has Ended, Borussia Dortmund has reached the Champions League final and,
according to a report I read five minutes ago, FC Sion has sacked Gennaro Gattuso. Meanwhile, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time writing about Jane Austen, the nineteenth-century novelist who I’m 99 percent sure moonlighted as a professional footballer.
Anyway, here’s what you can expect from INFTH over the next couple of weeks:
- A piece about FOX Sports commentator Gus Johnson
- The last installment in my fantasy football series
- General musings on the end of the season
I’m going to leave you with a quotation from Pride and Prejudice, which Austen started writing during half-time of a Southampton match. In honor of Mark van Bommel:
“Angry people are not always wise.”
Why So Dull? The European Run-In
I once wasted a few minutes trying to convince some minor acquaintance that the 2010 World Cup final attracted 
more television viewers than the Super Bowl, and that therefore the World Cup is quantifiably better than the NFL play-offs. The argument approached yes-it-is-no-it-isn’t territory, and the fact that we both walked away more entrenched than ever in our respective positions says a lot about the stubbornness of sports geeks (and about arguments in general). Most serious[1] football fans are totally convinced that the sport they watch and love is superior to every other sport by every conceivable metric, and if you tell them they’re wrong, they get angry and defensive.
This is one reason so few football fans are discussing the Great Big Secret of 2012-13: for the first time in a long time, none of the five major European leagues has produced a genuinely exciting title run-in[2].
Earlier this month, Bayern Munich clinched the 2013 Bundesliga. In Spain, Barcelona is only a few games away from yet another trophy. Manchester United is strolling to title #20, and Juventus has surged clear at the summit of Serie A. In Ligue 1, nouveau riche Paris St. Germain is seven points ahead of its closest challenger.
Too Busy Playing Fantasy Football
There’s a new INFTH piece is in the works. But in the meantime, this should keep you going:
David Yaffe-Bellany’s fantasy football coverage:
And Fernando Torres looking like a total wally.
Age of the Deuce
The usual line on Clint Dempsey is that he’s underappreciated in his home country – that, in the United States, it’s 
Landon Donovan, not Dempsey, who symbolizes a sport many Americans don’t take very seriously. There’s certainly something to that. Donovan’s on-and-off relationship with reality TV star Bianca Kajlich cemented his place in the wider world of American pop culture; Dempsey is an “avid fisherman.” Donovan feuded with David Beckham, then made up with him, then won a couple of trophies; during his last year at Fulham, Dempsey meshed well with Belgian midfielder Moussa Dembele.
In England, it’s another story entirely. Dempsey, regarded as one of the Premier League’s most dangerous attackers, regularly scores goals for Tottenham Hotspur. By contrast, Donovan’s forays into European football have rarely convinced – he performed well during his first loan spell at Everton, but Major League Soccer’s ridiculous transfer rules precluded a permanent move, and Tim Howard is way more fun.
Even Though His Team Lost To Fulham
It’s raining, and Andres Villas-Boas is getting wet. He’s squatting, but rain is trickling down the arc of his back, and
supporters in the stands are mocking the whole pathetic spectacle. He’s wearing a heavy, Wenger-like coat, but it doesn’t matter, because dampness is definitely in this guy’s future – you can just tell.
Watching AVB try to turn stodgy, defensive Chelsea into a genuinely entertaining football team was sad in a way that could’ve been kind of funny – but wasn’t. And it always seemed to be raining.
When Villas-Boas signed for Chelsea, he was young, energetic, and so enthusiastic about 4-3-3 that he made the whole notion of an attacking trident seem way more exciting than it was ever going to be. AVB’s treble-winning season at Porto marked the peak of football’s obsession with the Mourinho-esque Euro-snob manager: as Grantland’s Brian Phillips put it, you couldn’t “mow a field in the Iberian Peninsula without finding six or seven sharply dressed and tactically savvy managers under toadstools and rocks.”
Because It’s Been a Bit Quiet Lately
Here’s what I’ve been doing elsewhere:
More fantasy football articles for EPL Talk
- Adventures in the Fantasy Premier League, Gameweek 28
- Adventures in the Fantasy Premier League, Gameweek 29
And some Tottenham Hotspur analysis
And a picture of Jan Vertonghen pretending to grab something.
Is Football Fucked?
If I were gullible and stupid and slightly angry, and if I had just finished reading a couple of weeks’ worth of 
football News And Views, here’s what I would say/think/cry about:
Football’s future rests in the hands of a Singaporean gangster with a rhyming name and a proclivity for avoiding arrest. Within the last decade, he and the rest of his gang have fixed (or attempted to fix) hundreds of matches, including one played in England. Every weekend, greedy, venal, obnoxious professional footballers feign injury in order to gain minuscule advantages. On the sidelines, their coaches wave imaginary yellow cards, the spray-painted boundaries of the coaches’ “technical area” just sort of sitting there, totally ignored. Luis Suarez is racist; John Terry might be. I don’t know whether Sepp Blatter exists, but I’m pretty certain that a zombie with Sepp Blatter’s voice is running FIFA and that Michel Platini has spent the last decade plotting his murder. FIFA, by the way, has faced intense criticism in the wake of allegations that the process by which it selected hosts for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups was just as corrupt as Europol’s 680.
Yaya Toure makes more than 200,000 pounds a week. Yaya Toure makes more than 200,000 pounds a week. I think it’s fair to say that Portsmouth has almost gone out of business more times than is healthy. The guy with the drum, tattoos and wig owns a bookstore – they just don’t make hooligans like they used to. Only, they kind of do: in Holland, youth players kicked a linesman to death. A few months later, AC Milan midfielder Kevin Prince Boateng abandoned an exhibition game because the Italian crowd made monkey noises every time he touched the ball. According to Grantland’s Brian Phillips, “Soccer. Is. Fucked.”
Except I’m not gullible, etc., and football isn’t fucked. Not by a long shot.
You Should Watch The Africa Cup of Nations
The Africa Cup of Nations is profoundly confusing. Take, for instance, the star-studded Ivory Coast team: it entered 
the last few ACONs as the heavy favorite, only to lose dramatically to feel-good teams like Zambia, which won the 2012 ACON in Gabon, the country where several of Zambia’s greatest players died in a tragic early-‘90s airplane “accident” that may or may not have been orchestrated by the Gabonese military.
Typically, football fans refer to the ACON – which used to be held during World Cup and European Championship years, but which is adjusting its rotation in an almost certainly futile effort to garner more prestige/viewers/Jonathan Wilson columns – as a “festival of football,” a term that’s rooted in the utterly erroneous, semi-racist perception of Africa as a place where tribe members chant exotic chants and bang exotic drums and just generally have a good time. (For reasons that don’t make very much sense, the whole concept of this, like, giant football party! gained popularity during the South African World Cup.) Of course, African football is nothing like that. After the first wave of Cameroon-got-to-the-quarters-and-Pele-thinks-Africa-will-win-a-World-Cup hysteria passed, Africans spent more than a decade dealing with corruption and white elephant stadiums and teenage stars whose “burgeoning talents” (or whatever) turned out to be figments of some gossip website’s imagination.
This Is Leeds
Last week, Leeds United signed Habib Habibou, best known for a YouTube video in which he manhandles a duck. Just thought I’d share that.
