User Profile

The coffee houses were jubilant: their way of doing things had prevailed, largely because of Sindelar, a player who was, to their self-romanticising eye, the coffee house made flesh. ‘He would play football as a grandmaster plays chess: with a broad mental conception, calculating moves and counter-moves in advance, always choosing the most promising of all possibilities,’ the theatre critic Alfred Polgar wrote in his obituary

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (16%)

‘Game after game,’ Galeano wrote, ‘the crowd jostled to see those men, slippery as squirrels, who played chess with a ball. The English squad had perfected the long pass and the high ball, but these disinherited children from far-off America didn’t walk in their father’s footsteps. They chose to invent a game of close passes directly to the foot, with lightning changes in rhythm and high-speed dribbling.’

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (10%)

Uruguayans and Argentinians, uninfected by British ideals of muscular Christianity, had no similar sense of physicality as a virtue in its own right, no similar distrust of cunning. The shape may have been the same, but the style was as different as it was possible to be. The anthropologist Eduardo Archetti has insisted that, as the influence of Spanish and Italian immigrants began to be felt, power and discipline were rejected in favour of skill and sensuousness – a trend that was felt across a range of disciplines.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (10%)

Team sports, it was thought, were to be promoted, because they discouraged solipsism, and solipsism allowed masturbation to flourish, and there could be nothing more debilitating than that.

— Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (3%)

What was it Gary Lineker said in 1990, after the Germans had knocked England out of the World Cup? “Football is a simple game; twenty two men chase a ball for ninety minutes and at the end, the Germans win.”

— A History of Football in 100 Objects by Gavin Mortimer (77%)

Eyeing his subjects with barely concealed disdain, Cantona sipped from a glass of water. Then he said: “When the seagulls follow the trawler it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea. Thank you very much.”

— A History of Football in 100 Objects by Gavin Mortimer (73%)

Strictly speaking, Billy is lucky to make it into this list, seeing he’s flesh and blood, but then again he was a horse so forgive us if we bend the rules just this once. Plus he’s long dead so he is an inanimate object after all.

— A History of Football in 100 Objects by Gavin Mortimer (27%)