Football is full of stories about loyalty and unwavering love. But, as in life, there’s always the other side. The side where a person can go from idolized to ostracized in no time at all—simply because they chose to leave one club for its hated rival. In the various retrospectives on football’s greatest traitors, names like […]
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In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Italian football was dominated by defense. Coaches preached the gospel of “keep a clean sheet first, and if a goal happens to come our way, great.” High-scoring matches were a rare luxury. A 1-0 win wasn’t seen as a hard-fought, nerve-wracking victory—it was the national score and a […]
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Picture this: a group of friends has just finished their regular weekly 8-a-side game and is hanging out, drinking beers. Amid the banter and the satisfaction from how the match turned out, someone throws out an idea: “Why don’t we start a real team? We do pretty well in the tournaments we participate in. Who […]
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One day before the first match between Roma and Real Sociedad in the Europa League, the Basques posted a drawing on their social media pages featuring two footballers who became legends of their respective clubs—at a time when players like these are becoming an endangered species. On the left side was Francesco Totti, a widely […]
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Sometime in the mid-2000s, fate led me to become the manager of Wrexham. Back then, the club was competing in the Fourth Division, and most people were unaware of its existence, as Ryan Reynolds was still an up-and-coming actor who hadn’t yet made it big. Through hard work, extensive study, and leveraging my many years […]
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One day in July 1944 Frederik Jacques “Frits” Philips was at the office of the now world-famous company in Eindhoven when someone he knew informed him that the Nazis had decided to arrest him and send him to a concentration camp in Germany. “Frits,” as everyone called him, managed to escape capture by climbing out […]
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