About

It’s paradoxal for me to be doing a football blog as I actually think that the vast majority of football journalism and media are largely irrelevant, generally lame and occasionally inviting of outrage. This revelation came to me when I was on my way to Vienna for the Russia-Spain semi-final of Euro 2008 and overheard two brit journos talking about the game and players: their smug arrogance was so overbearing as they indulged each other’s egos in flattery and self-aggrandizement about how they were in control of public perception and making/breaking players’ careers. That episode made me realize how ugly and pathetic it all was: all these mediocrities, many of which had no idea of the meaning of being a football professional, endlessly blowing hot air of the back of other people’s hard work – and mostly disrespecting it – and thinking that it’s all about them. The culmination of this disgust came in the summer of 2010 as I witnessed with revulsion the French medias’ and politicians’ onslaught on the players of their national squad, which allowed that criminally incompetent idiot who was the coach to pretty much fully divert responsibility for the mess that he had caused. Having been writing for underground website Subfoot (in French mostly) for several years, I decided I wanted no longer to be any part of it.

However as I was recently again confronted with some brutal examples of bloated egotism, arrogance and sheer stupidity, as well as prejudice, I have been compelled to take to the keyboard again.

The purpose of this blog will be to:

1. Call out, ridicule and if possible correct football media’s/journos’ (and especially French & Swiss-French ones, as I unfortunately mostly exposed to those) errors, prejudices and idiocies held out to be self-evident truths.
2. Provide a more comprehensive and holistic vision of football and footballing skill (at a team level) to counter the current general culture of “joga bonito” peddled by brown-nosing Barça/Arsenal (mostly but not uniquely) lovers who promote only one particular form of attacking football play at the expense of other dimensions of the game.
3. Celebrate all that is good about club football and especially the achievements of my personal favorite clubs, which are (so that there is no ambiguity): FC Internazionale Milan, Sevilla FC, and to a lesser extent Chelsea, Red Star Belgrade and Servette FC.
4. Defending football players from stereotyping and cheap negativity.
5. Enjoying, highlighting and reminding the greatness and achievements of José Mourinho, whose work and leadership has been a source of joy and inspiration to me ever since his Porto days.
6. Occasionally have a go at the nonsense and charade that is national football.

P.S. I will try to limit my gloating at the failure of hated clubs but you will occasionally find posts celebrating the defeats of Man U, the Arse, Liverpool, Barcelona, Milan, Juventus, Roma, PSG, Marseille (French version of Man U), St. Etienne (French version of Liverpool), Lausanne and Partizan Belgrade, because there’s nothing like a “hate” game.