1
Pioneers
Boxing Day, 100 years ago: 53,000 spectators in Stoke (with 14,000 locked outside) watch Dick, Kerr Ladies’ defeat St. Helens. Eleven objects from the National Football Museum tell their genuinely unique story.
And why is football traditionally played on Boxing Day in the UK, anyway? FIFA Museum explains. . .
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2
When the prose fits
Sometimes Barney Ronay’s overwrought writing style is just perfect for capturing a moment in time:
Here they come again, the Arsenal, entombed within their own enormo-drome, manager stalking the fringes like a 19th-century vampire-count re-animated as a Selfridges window mannequin.
This is a ghost ship, a skeleton crew drifting through the doldrums, encircled by YouTube banshees wailing into the night. It’s not even funny or fascinating any more. It’s actually scary.
Sigmund Freud wrote that the root of horror is a confusion over whether an object is alive or dead, and this is what Arsenal are doing to their fans right now, what the howl of Arsenal vlogger-horror is about, the shrieks, the rolling eyes.
Ronay digs in further, and accurately pinpoints the real root of Arsenal’s horror-show: owners failing to be stewards of the club.
3
At least 2020 brought us these
Take a look at the ten best kits of 2020, according to Urban Pitch. Forward Madison FC’s “drip kit” (right) is a tough one to beat (though I’m partial to the classical simplicity of Roma’s myself). Forward Madison’s bold brand and marketing strategy has been driven by the brilliant Jakub Krzyzostaniak, who is about to leave some tough shoes to fill in Wisconsin. How odd (cough) that none of the ten designs come from MLS. . .
4
Revolving door
I didn’t know there was an Italian word for “coach eater”, but there is, and it’s fantastic: mangiallenatore. So explains Rory Smith, in a piece asking whether European football has actually become less prone to mangiallenatore in this wild 2020.
Enrico Preziosi could hardly have held Thiago Motta in higher esteem. As a player, Motta spent only a single season at Genoa, the Italian soccer team Preziosi owns, but he made such an impression that, a decade later, his old boss cited him as his ideal professional. “A smart and empathetic man,” Preziosi said. “He taught me many things.”
Not long after that ringing endorsement, the men were reunited. At the end of his playing career, Motta had moved into coaching and was developing a glowing reputation in Paris St.-Germain’s youth system. Genoa, as is its default setting, was struggling. And so in October last year, Preziosi turned to Motta, the “player of his soul,” to arrest the slide.
And then, two months later, he fired him. Motta, that smart and empathetic man, had lasted all of nine games.
It was vintage Preziosi. This, after all, is what he does: He fires coaches. In the 17 years since he bought Genoa — Italy’s oldest club — he has changed his coach 27 times. He quite often churns through three in a single season. He once fired Alberto Malesani twice in the same campaign. He has fired one coach, Ivan Juric, three times. Italian soccer has a word — mangiallenatore — for owners like him: coach eater.
5
Table top football
Nostalgia for more innocent days past is, not surprisingly, a strong theme of 2020 as a whole. And astute readers of this newsletter might note our icon comes from the wonderful table top football game, Subbuteo. In my childhood, Subbuteo was to the young football fan what FIFA 21 is for kids today (though with more accidentally smashed legless players in the table top version).
But where did Subbuteo come from? Why does it have such an odd name? How many teams has Gianluigi Buffon collected? All this and more is answered in this excellent Outside Write interview with subbuteo blogger and aficionado Stephen Hurrell.
Hurrell mentions that Subbuteo perhaps hit its mainstream media peak in the UK during Italia ‘90, when Channel 4 provided extensive coverage of its World Cup - and passions ran high.
6
Tennessee Titans
One of the marquee success stories of lower league American soccer in recent years, I’m looking forward to this upcoming documentary on Chattanooga FC:
7
Supporting the stars of the EPL, via Indianapolis
It’s not often a new industry - at least one that’s built on positive intentions - springs up in British football these days. Most “innovations” seem to consist of vapid new ways to siphon money out of the game. So it’s cool to see my former colleague Hugo Scheckter launch a new business based around Player Care, an area he’s specialized in recent years at West Ham and Southampton respectively.
Hugo has had an unusual path to his venture, as he reminds us:
Player Care is a new industry, though there have been Player Liaisons for over 30 years in some Premier League Clubs. Lorna McClelland of Aston Villa and Bill Ellaby of Everton were the early pioneers, though I do believe a major turning point was when Haydn Roberts created the first Player Care department at Manchester City in 2009 that the industry changed forever. For the first time, a club had dedicated the resources and staffing to an area that had before been left to either the captain, the players themselves or a single hard working individual like Lorna & Bill. I’m forever grateful to all 3 of them for spending time with me when I was first starting out in the industry, and I’ve tried to emulate them in my approach now.
I remember being hired by Southampton FC to be their first Player/Team Liaison Officer from the American second division club, Indy Eleven, and feeling a sense of awe. My last game for the Indy Eleven was a home game in the US Open Cup vs the Dayton Dutch Lions – within 6 months I would be on the bench at Old Trafford as we beat Manchester United 1-0.
8
Dial it in
Analog football is a project dedicated to film photography of the beautiful game - looking forward to seeing what develops here (get it?!).
9
Glacial change
Yes, this chart looks pretty positive for MLS - a smaller gap between players of color and people of color in management positions than other major leagues. It is worth noting that this is mainly driven by Hispanic/Latino representation, as the Times reports:
This is largely because a high percentage of M.L.S. head coaches identified as Hispanic or Latino in 2020 — 29.6 percent, compared with 18.5 percent of the U.S. population who identified as Hispanic or Latino.
Few players are Black and even fewer managers identify as Black. Data shows that no Black coaches were hired between 2013 and 2018; Robin Fraser changed that in 2019 when the Colorado Rapids hired him.
Still, there has been positive movement this year towards broader diversity, driven by Black Players for Change and most recently, the hiring of Danita Johnson as the first female Black president of an MLS team, DC United.
10
Festive reading
The 2020 Football Writing Festival, which took place virtually last month hosted by the National Football Museum, has a host of interesting “Zoom” interviews with authors whose subjects range from the first Black official in the Premier League, Uriah Rennie, to the history of African players in the Premier League in Ed Aarons’ book, “Made in Africa.”
11
Fashionable football
In what may be the biggest financial deal in the history of English women’s football (outside of Premier League-affiliated teams), community-owned Lewes FC announced a meaningful six-figure partnership with fashion label Lyle & Scott. Lewes famously pay both their men’s and women’s teams equally. In fact, it’s this approach that’s attracting new potential partners to the club.
Lewes have worked hard for years on their gender equality message, which saw them become the first club to pay their women’s and men’s players the same wages.
Dobres revealed that the profile of the women’s team plus their equality message have attracted a lot of interest in sponsorships.
He said: “It is absolutely brilliant. Obviously, it is a fantastic vote of confidence in Lewes football club and confidence in women’s football.
“The deal is for both the women’s and the men’s team, which is fantastic.
“There is no doubt that the profile of our women’s team and our stance on gender equality have attracted a lot of sponsorship interest of which this is one of them.”