Oh! H-hello. I didn't see you there. I've been sitting here in the d-dark, thinking about selling N-newcastle. Would you like to b-buy Newcastle? Do you have three hundred million p-pounds? Man, I am so d-drunk right now. What h-happened to those Africans? There were some Africans here who had three hundred million p-pounds. Click to continue reading...

Taking a quick glance down the towering inferno of the Barclays Premier League table, I see clubs with crippling debts, clubs with feuding owners, clubs with outraged fans, clubs with moldering Victorian stadiums that they can't afford to replace, clubs with unhappy players, clubs with imploding sponsors, clubs hanging by a thread over the chasm [. Click to continue reading...

The new FIFA World Rankings are out, and I think they might be just what the world needs to take its mind off the fact that "money" is apparently no longer a good idea. Take America, for instance. Yesterday, this country was hurting. A man walking down the street wore the tight-mouthed, care-eaten look of [. Click to continue reading...

If you search it for the word "football," Google returns results that are dominated by NFL sites. If you search it for specific football topics football tactics, say, or economics Google returns results that jumble American and world football together. This is pure speculation, but since searching for "soccer" doesn't produce that kind of confusion, I wonder [. Click to continue reading...

Read Dave on MLS's isolationst foreign policy. Read Fredorrarci on Mark Lawrenson, the football pundit most likely to defend Sweeney Todd on the grounds that "getting your hair cut used to be a contact sport." (Also, let's not forget his literary work. Every time I finish one of the microparagraphs of distilled conventional wisdom that make [. Click to continue reading...

Start with his motile, princessy, yielding and absolute face, which is never only itself, but always itself smiling, itself sulking, itself exulting, itself wincing, itself coming apart in some goofy expression of praise. Look at the strange lacquer of serenity that shines on him, that mutes his nervous vitality and creates the odd illusion that everything [. Click to continue reading...

Thanks to everyone who wrote in last week to say things like, "I'm sorry you went to prison", "Why did you go to prison?", and "You're a disgrace to this country, you greasy freeloading scofflaw." Actually, only one person sent in that last one, and my mom and I have had some productive talks since [. Click to continue reading...

I still don't understand how this works or how it happened or what bizarre experiments have to be performed on a human body to make it bend this way, but here it is: Ibrahimović's shocking goal in Inter's 2-1 win against Bologna today, a first-time, backward, back-heel roundhouse kick with his back to the goal [. Click to continue reading...

From Portsmouth's 2-1 win over Stoke City today: the marking was not what you'd call "tight" or...um..."marking", but still, seeing Peter Crouch score from an overhead kick is like watching Niagara Falls run upward. Terrified 1950s honeymooners run screaming, trying to put as much distance as they can between themselves and the monstrosity. Click to continue reading...

According to completely unsubstantiated reports in North Korea's entirely state-controlled media, supposedly gravely ill dictator Kim Jong Il has emerged from his cocoon of secrecy in order to attend...a soccer game. No one knows what soccer game, except that it was purportedly played to celebrate the 62nd anniversary of the founding of Kim Il Sung University, [. Click to continue reading...

We're a team of mavericks over here at The Run of Play, which is why, doggone it, games we like to watch, and just the passion we have for the blessing to be enjoying of these players we've got out here. Again, good fortune. It's an honor and a privilege to know this opportunity of [. Click to continue reading...

I don't care about this. I don't care that Joe Kinnear said "fuck" fifty times in a press conference. I guess it clears the bar for a stupid internet sensation that an angry man said swear words, and I like imagining the world's football writers all looking up from whatever they were doing at the [. Click to continue reading...

It's been the firm conclusion of our very occasional series on footballers' websites that, of all players, goalkeepers have the friendliest and most welcoming approach to presenting themselves online. Maybe this is because their professional lives are largely based around not being welcoming, or maybe it's just that strikers gobbled up the most merciless and [. Click to continue reading...

David Davies, a former executive director of the FA, is in the press today with a bombshell claim that England were offered votes for cash during their failed bid to host the 2006 World Cup. According to Davies, "an individual well-connected in footballing circles" made the offer over the phone to Adam Crozier, then the [. Click to continue reading...

Steven Gerrard has just scored his 100th goal for Liverpool, late in their Champions League win over PSV Eindhoven, and it was a beauty, a blistering 30-yard free kick that somehow hit the top corner of the net after spending ninety percent of its flight path at roughly two and a half feet above the [. Click to continue reading...