Inside Sport is a promising new blog, by David Conn, from the Guardian. Promising, because it is part of an emerging trend among intelligent sports writers to look past the money and PR-driven hysteria to which much of the modern game, not least football, has surrendered.
In his introduction, Conn writes:
(Football) is not, as I have tried to document, quite the happy clappy, Football’s Coming Home, unabashed marvel which Sky would have you consume. Many of the top clubs are sunk in debts or financially reliant on an international buffet of owners. Some still desperately seek a billionaire; lower division clubs from Southampton to Stockport are in administration and the FA has cried to the Government for help in governing the game. Where on earth would football be if this wasn’t its greatest ever boom?
Football lords it over the other sports for money, popularity and coverage, but the same fundamental issues strain at the fabric of cricket, rugby union and league, tennis, athletics – the same tension, between the thrill, human pleasure and values all sports seek to embody, and the calculating, sometimes corrupting, business of money.
So, no junkets to crest-kissing rituals in the Bernabeu (or Sunderland) for him then, but a worthy link in the FP blogroll.
RTÉ- Extratime
- loi.ie
- Eleven-a-side
- Soccer Republic
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- The Big O betting
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