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“Competitions” such as the International Champions Cup miss the point of pre-season games

8 August ~ Last week I went to a football match in which nothing was won or lost, the pace was slow and the flow stilted by 13 substitutions. I’ve seen Burnley before. I’ve watched Rangers for decades. And I’ve attended more friendlies than most fans would think advisable in one lifetime. But when the post denied Burnley the chance to go 3-0 up after just 23 minutes I realised it could become the biggest defeat I’d ever seen my team suffer and that, consequently, I cared deeply about this match.

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Middlesbrough up, Brighton floundering and Charlton safe – what WSC contributors got right and wrong in their predictions for the previous season

1 August ~ “Automatic promotion,” asserted Burnley fan Kevin Clarke ahead of the 2015-16 Championship season. “It goes against everything I believe in as a Burnley fan to predict this, but there really is no reason why not.” It took them a couple of games to get going but in the end Kevin’s confidence was well placed and his team sealed an immediate return to the Premier League, going up as champions by four points.

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How Chuck Blazer got rich from – and sold out – the most powerful cabal in world sports  
by Mary Papenfuss & Teri Thompson
HarperCollins, £20
Reviewed by Alan Tomlinson
From WSC 353 July 2016

Buy this book

Chuck Blazer: the Father Christmas lookalike whose weight had mushroomed to 450lbs by the time the FBI and the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) nobbled him on the Manhattan pavement outside his Trump Tower base in November 2011. This was just under a year after FIFA’s decision to award the next two World Cups to Russia and Qatar, and while a generation of FIFA powerbrokers and crooks was beginning to shatter the silence of a long-held code of omertà.

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Germany’s five semi-finals in a row and a World Cup have not placated a vocal section critics

14 July ~ On Tuesday, Joachim Löw finally confirmed that he has every intention to honour his contract as Germany head coach, running until the 2018 World Cup. Not everybody is celebrating. In spite of guiding Germany to five semi-finals in a row (six, if you insist on counting 2006 in which Löw served as an assistant to Jürgen Klinsmann), with one World Cup trophy thrown in, Löw continues to polarise opinions: is he the tactical magician responsible for those triumphs, or an addicted tinkerer whose butt continues to be saved by the extraordinarily gifted bunch of players we currently are producing?

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Swedish travel agencies selling up to five times as many package deals to Old Trafford

11 July ~ In spite of both Sweden’s and Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s underperformance at the Euros, the latter’s status and commercial drawing power is just as strong as it was before the tournament. After a decade of pilgrimage to Milan, Barcelona and Paris it is now time for Manchester to be the hottest destination for the relatively well off among Swedish football fans. It’s fair to assume that the weak British pound will also contribute to the stream of travellers.

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