Whether it was about money or not, it certainly wasn't about football. The money was our money, subsidising the platforms Ken Bates' megaphone wouldn't reach unless he had the legitimacy of a football club to make people pay attention.
'A lady came up by the name of Louella Harrigan and she said, "Regardless, we got to take back our country from Kenneth Bates, and whatever we’re going to do we’re going to march this morning, and we are going to take our country back! This lease must be revoked, and Kenneth Bates must go!”’
-ista | a specialist, enthusiast or advocate of a belief or principle
Pre-season friendlies are probably the roughest form of football there is, so someone tell Gianni Infantino: if he wants people to feel the love of football, they've got to get through it like this.
Fifa didn't have the authority to extend half-time to 27 minutes but it did. And the people got to see Coldplay telling them to sign up to an email list to save the planet: you do want to save the planet, don't you? Well, that's Fifa.
Where once I suspect rock 'n' soccer could sync, were oppositional rhythms: a band with a beat, a game with none at all.
It was the fashion in Mexico for players to celebrate goals by hurdling advertising hoardings, but when Strachan ran to the crowd the boards were almost up to his chest.
"I had heard the name of Gordon Strachan before," said Eusébio, "but did not know he was that good. He was better than some of the Brazilians."
Harry Wilson's skills should have put him in someone's pantheon by now. Someone more interesting than Fulham. There's nothing else for him to do, at Leeds, but to make it here.
"This was proof that we do have what it takes. We have had a sing song and a cabaret in the hotel to put us all in good heart. I said we would win the World Cup and I do not take a word of that back."
"I was so excited I knocked the glass of water I had been drinking right across the room," Allan's mother Alice told the Walsall Observer.
From Ao Tanaka labouring morning to night to Gabriel Gudmundsson shouting out the wife: it's not a normal World Cup, so it's made for Erling Haaland.