Search: ' La Liga'

Somehow football and rap have rarely hit it off, in spite of some peciliar parallels in the fashion stakes. Al Needham works hard to find what references there are to the game

First, a word of reassurance: just because footballers seem to be getting into hip-hop a good 15 years after everyone else did does not compromise in any way the well loved cliche about footballers having bland and rubbishy musical taste. Ever since hip-hop overtook country and rock to become the most lucrative genre of music in America, it has been successfully defanged of its subversive elements, until what Chuck D of Public Enemy called “the Black CNN” is now some bloke prattling on about what he bought the other day, who he’d like to shoot and generally how ace he is. Again. For 50 Cent, Eminem and Jay-Z, read “George Benson, Shakatak and Steak and Chips”.

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We boast about the Premier League being 'the best league in the world', but  the domestic superiority of England's elite clubs is not reflected in their European form

At least once a year there are rumours of a breakaway “Atlantic League” or some such, a competition for the dom­inant clubs in smaller football countries where the domestic title is only ever contested by at most three teams. The next time it’s floated expect to hear that Arsenal, Manchester United and Chel­sea have been approached about joining, on the grounds that they, too, would get stronger competition from, say, Porto, Anderlecht and Ajax than from any of the other 17 clubs in the Premiership.

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Ian Plenderleith has happy memories prompted by a shrine to Aberdeen's European heroes and toasts some hard-drinking yet non-fighting Vikings, but is distinctly unimpressed by the efforts of the G-14

Certain teams capture a boy’s imagination no matter their colours or home town. I’d never been to Aberdeen by the early 1980s, but the last Scottish team to win a European trophy (the 1983 Cup-Winners Cup) boasted one of those long-lost line-ups – crammed with tal­ented native names that never seemed to change – and rarely seemed to lose.

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They are simple in theory but increasingly contentious in practice, believes Philip Cornwall, because so much more can be at stake when a spot-kick is awarded today

That you have never seen everything the game has to offer was underlined once more in Istanbul on Oct­ober 11. Something as simple, in theory, as a penalty produced a variation that was new to me.

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Qatar is no longer an explanation for someone gobbing on the pitch: the Premiership has a rival as a home for retiring players, as Daniel Anderson-Ford reports

“Our football league features some of the world’s greatest players, many of them working with some of Europe’s finest coaches, and we hope to com­pete with the best at club and national level.”

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