Search: ' La Liga'

Michel Platini is trying to level out football’s financial playing fields. It’s a big task, as Ben Lyttleton reports

As Michel Platini knows only too well, timing is everything in politics. It is one of the reasons why, of late, we have heard an increase in the UEFA president’s complaints about one of his biggest bugbears, the signing of foreign players at a young age. Platini wants to implement Sepp Blatter’s plan of a six-plus-five quota to the game, which would limit foreign players but currently does not conform to European employment laws.

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Roger Titford ponders what football can learn from previous financial downturns and what fans can expect in the current credit crunch

English football has become much more efficient at gathering its harvest early and therefore should be cushioned from some of the most immediate effects of the credit crunch. TV deals are wrapped up for years to come – the ITV Digital fiasco notwithstanding – sponsorships are in place and season tickets sold. Things can go wrong in the world of high finance, though, as West Ham have found, having an Icelandic owner and losing a shirt sponsor.

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The murky cycle of sponsored news articles by Ian Plenderleith

It sounds like a late-night conspiracy theory to maintain that corporate interests dictate the news agenda, especially when we’re talking about something as relatively unimportant to human destiny as football. But it’s not untrue to say that the internet has allowed the game’s major sponsors to have a say in the way that news is generated. A closer look at one of October’s headlines demonstrates why.

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Media reaction to the violence that followed the north-east derby

In the aftermath of crowd trouble at the Stadium of Light following Sunderland’s derby win over Newcastle on October 25, the comments made by Northumbria police were at distinct odds with the majority of press reaction. There were 29 arrests on the day, 11 of which were prompted by a pitch invasion at the final whistle. A police spokesman said that more arrests would follow based on CCTV evidence, suggested that drunkenness played a major role in the disturbances and expressed concerns about behaviour outside the ground. He believed the pitch invasion was not premeditated violence but a “spontaneous celebration which spilt over into confrontation”.

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Dear WSC
I write to you concerning Simon Creasey’s fascinating article Parting Shots (WSC 259), in which Ignacio Palacios-Huerta of the London School of Economics describes that, in penalty shootouts, the team that taking a penalty first wins 60.5 per cent of the time. He then goes on to say that the team kicking first “has a 21 per cent greater probability of winning the shootout”. I don’t cast doubt on Mr Palacios-Huerta’s abilities as a statistician, but it is possible that he meant 21 per cent more probability of winning. If Team X has a 60.5 per cent probability of winning, then Team Y therefore has a 39.5 per cent probability. Team X’s probability is [(((60.5 / 39.5) -1) x 100) =] 53 per cent greater than Team Y’s of winning the shootout. Or, in other words, that Team X wins 21 per cent more matches means that their chances are 53 per cent better than Team Y’s for any given shootout. We can be sure that this is precisely what was going through Rio Ferdinand’s head after extra time in Moscow.
Patrick Finch, Eskilstuna, Sweden

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