1. “Money’s tight. You’ve got a club lotto, the jackpot is decent, but it’s a throwback to a bygone age, as are the three sellers you’ve got left. Great clubmen, but they’re getting on and you question if it’s right that they’re out in this weather. Younger volunteers don’t want to sell Lotto tickets [neither do you if you're honest, asking for money from strangers makes you feel like a chugger].”
John O’Sullivan writes a heartfelt piece on behalf of the downtrodden League of Ireland club administrator.
2. “It is fashionable to cast football as the last bastion of all sorts of horrors, as though to walk into any ground were to step back into a past from which all the rest of society has moved politely on. Clearly, that’s partly down to the ugliness of the race rows that have played out over the past few seasons, from Luis Suárez to John Terry by way of Roy Hodgson’s impenetrable monkey joke. It certainly hasn’t been pretty – but at least it’s been spoken openly about.”
For The Guardian, the great Marina Hyde explains why football should set an example and address the lack of black managers.
3. “He gets around in a wheelchair, having lost his ability to walk almost three years ago. He wears a gold chain around his broad neck, which bears a deep and long surgical scar that runs from the bottom of his hairline to somewhere past the neckline of his white undershirt. It’s not clear he knows exactly what ailment has left him in a wheelchair. “I have a hole in my neck,” he said. “But I ain’t gonna die in this motherfucker. I’m getting out of here.”
Buzzfeed’s Joel Anderson goes to meet Michael Sam Snr, to get behind the convenient caricature.
4. “The identity of Jack’s stoutest defender in the media in those early days will surprise anyone under the age of 30. It was the aforementioned ‘fucking troublemaker.’
“Before the campaign even began, Dunphy wrote that Charlton will ‘try and achieve a balance between skill and aggression’ and damned all the talk that Charlton would ‘have Ireland kicking long hopeful balls in a crude attempt to emulate Wimbledon, Watford and Sheffield Wednesday, the New Barbarians of the English First Division.’”
Conor Neville of Balls.ie looks back on a defining moment in Irish football, courtesy of Scotland.
5. “Despite a quarter century of hullaballoo, very little in the way of data has been used to inform this debate. So, to find out just how costly the triple punishment might be, I took a look at the past four seasons of the English Premier League. Through a series of regressions and other statistical estimates, I tried to figure out how red cards and penalties were related to final scores. All of the data I used were publicly available.”
6. “At 6 p.m., Max emerged through one of Washington Hall’s sally ports, raggedly marching onto the thick grass of the venerable parade ground, The Plain, with more than 1,200 other plebes, hair tight, uniform just so, his past unknown to everyone but the two white men who could barely glance at each other without losing it… “
Sports Illustrated’s SL Price masterfully brings you the story of Army basketball captain, Max Lenox.
7. “In a country where soccer wasn’t just niche, but often anathema, the internet gave fans of the game a place to gather that was free from the invective and ignorance that prevailed in the outside world.”
Jason Davis, for Backheel.com, charts the rise of Soccer in the US and why they have the internet to thank.
