Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged soccer

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Emilio Ergueta

Palestinian Soccer Association Drops Effort to Suspend Israel From FIFA - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • JERUSALEM — The Palestinians dropped their bid to suspend Israel from international soccer competition at the last minute Friday, and agreed to instead form a committee of the sport’s governing body, FIFA, to handle their complaints of racism and discrimination.
  • Jibril Rajoub, president of the Palestine Football Association, called for a vote at FIFA’s annual congress to ask the United Nations to determine whether five teams from settlements in the occupied West Bank should be allowed to continue to play in Israeli leagues.
  • In an emotional speech, Mr. Rajoub said he had been persuaded to abandon the demand to suspend Israel by fellow delegates to the FIFA congress, particularly one from South Africa, who said the vote would be “painful” for the conclave scarred by scandal after Wednesday’s dawn arrest of top soccer executives. He accepted Mr. Blatter’s proposal for a “peace match” between Israeli and Palestinian teams, but also said it “does not mean I give up the resistance.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The FIFA campaign, part of a mounting Palestinian effort to press the case against Israeli occupation in international forums, garnered global attention and incited deep concern in Israel’s soccer-obsessed society.
  • Yaakov Finkelstein, an Israeli diplomat sent to Zurich for the FIFA congress, said any action on the settlement teams would have been “a deal-breaker for us.”
  • The Palestinians contend the settlement teams violate FIFA rules by, essentially, having one member’s teams playing in another’s turf. The amended Palestinian proposal, which the congress passed overwhelmingly, calls on FIFA to ask the United Nations for official notification of its 2012 resolution upgrading Palestine to nonmember observer-state status “in order to prove the territorial issue.”
  •  
    Article outlining how Palestine has given up trying to kick Israel out of FIFA.
Javier E

Germany, Argentina, and What Really Makes a World Cup Team - Allen Barra - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • soccer, really, is not “the world’s game.” Though it has the highest global participation rate of any sport, there are quite a few countries where it is not the most popular game. Those include eight of the world’s 10 most populous countries. On the whole, people in China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia—the top four in population—play soccer but have other sports they prefer. Only in No. 5 Brazil and No. 7 Nigeria does soccer have a clear edge.
  • There were years of painstaking building of teams and leagues before a national squad could be assembled that was good enough to challenge at World Cup level. (For a brief history, I recommend National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer by Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist.)
  • All the countries who have ever won a World Cup have at least one thing in common: Soccer has no real competitor for athletic talent.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Most of the top soccer squads weigh in at about 170-175 pounds a man—that’s the average for the Argentine team, German team, and even U.S. team this year. But a soccer team can embrace numerous body types
  • how can these athletes—especially the ones with great throwing arms and vertical leap—walk away from established American sports where they can make millions of dollars a year? MLS’s new contract with Fox/ESPN for $600 million over eight years is a step up, but it’s dwarfed by the TV deals with the NFL, NBA, and MLB
Javier E

Brain Trauma Extends to the Soccer Field - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • C.T.E. is believed to be caused by repetitive hits to the head — even subconcussive ones barely noted. Once considered unique to boxers, it has been diagnosed over the past decade in dozens of deceased football players and several hockey players. In December, it was found for the first time in a baseball player.
  • “The brain is a very delicate organ, and it probably can withstand some injury, but the whole issue of repeated injury is a very different circumstance,” he said. “When it’s moving, it’s moving with its 200 billion brain cells. And those cells are being, in some way, mechanically deformed, some more than others,
  • Bigler said he would not recommend that players, especially young ones, routinely head the ball. The brain is not fully developed until about age 25, he said, making it more susceptible to injury.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • ome youth soccer organizations have warned against practicing heading until players reach a certain age, usually between 10 and 14. Some scientists believe those ages are somewhat arbitrary
  • The cold, hard reality is that the data don’t exist to address that question,”
  • ipton said Wednesday that there was probably a reasonable threshold below which heading might cause few problems. “Above some level, heading is probably not good for anyone,”
  • In hindsight, Grange’s family said that he showed symptoms of C.T.E. beginning in high school. He struggled to balance a checkbook. He did not understand the repercussions of failing classes.
Javier E

Researchers Find Bellini, Star for Brazil, Had Brain Disease C.T.E. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • more recently, evidence has mounted to indicate that those at risk for developing C.T.E. include soccer players. McKee said that although it was too early to say whether heading of balls was a cause of C.T.E. in soccer, it was becoming apparent that players were at risk of long-term brain trauma.
  • “Do we need to concern ourselves with weekend recreational players? And do children, who have a more fragile neck, have more risk? We do not have those answers yet.”
aqconces

Christmas truce soccer matches during World War One - ESPN FC - 0 views

  • This is what Zehmisch Senior recorded for Christmas Day, 1914: "A couple of Britons brought a ball along from their trenches, and a lively game began. How fantastically wonderful and strange. The English officers experienced it like that too -- that thanks to soccer and Christmas, the feast of love, deadly enemies briefly came together as friends."
  • for several days -- the enemies made a spontaneous peace
  • "We all grew up with the story of soldiers from both sides putting down their arms on Christmas Day," says Prince William, president of the English Football Association.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The troops had gone to war in August 1914 expecting to be home by Christmas. That didn't happen. Many, in fact, would never come home. By Christmas 1914, stunning modern killing machines had left about 750,000 people dead.
  • In some spots the trenches were barely 50 meters apart. You could see enemy soldiers shaving in the morning.
  •  
    Christmas Truce 1914
maxwellokolo

Jet carrying soccer team may have run out of fuel - 0 views

  •  
    The crash killed at least 71 people during a charter flight to Medellin, including members of the Brazilian Chapecoense soccer squad on its way to the Copa Sudamericana finals. At least three players, two crew members and one journalist survived, Colombian authorities said.
sgardner35

In Trinidad, Former FIFA Executive Seen as 'Our Robin Hood' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad — In one moment, Jack Warner is on TV telling his countrymen he fears for his life. An hour later, he's standing on a packed narrow street at a political rally, boasting that he fears nothing.
  • That's how many in Trinidad see the 72-year-old Warner, now a member of Parliament. If he stole from the rich and gave to the poor, then they see no harm done
  • "If he didn't live so long, he would have died a hero," said Sunity Maharaj, a journalist who has long followed Warner. "He would have been the story of the little boy who grew up to be FIFA vice president."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Warner doesn't hide his hubris and says the world's perception of him is nowhere near the reality.
  • Warner said Wednesday night he has compiled reams of documents to expose wrongdoing, adding that when he heard FIFA President Sepp Blatter was planning to resign, he wrote him and urged his immediate departure.
  • Spending a night in jail after his arrest last week was a good thing, he said, because he got to tell other Trinidadian leaders they should clean up the prisons.
  • "Sometimes I deliberately break my rear-view mirror, because it is not always pleasant to look back," said Raymond Tim Kee, the mayor of Port-of-Spain who also leads the soccer association that Warner once controlled financially. "Since I assumed office two years ago, one of the first things I pursued was rebranding because what I realized was the football federation at the time had lost credibility and there were a lot of questions and fears because of all that was going on that time."
  • "Gandhi once said that all through history, there have been tyrants," Warner said. "But in the end, they fall."
  •  
    Interesting how he says the worlds perception of him isn't close to the reality. 
Javier E

Will 7-1 Traumatize Brazilians? -- Science of Us - 0 views

  • The problem is that soccer dominance is an important part of Brazil's sports identity, and this loss cut to the core of it. As Eric Simons, author of The Secret Lives of Sports Fans, explained in an email, "If you're Brazilian, your identity is based on self-concept that you're always the best soccer team in the world, and you know that everyone else knows it, so you're proud." So the pain of losing isn't, in this case, that of an underdog happy to be there, and for the Brazilians to lose in this manner is to collide violently against all sorts of national expectations and self-conceptions.
  • "What happens when your pride, self-concept, and identity are suddenly obliterated in front of the entire world?" said Simons. "I don't know. I don't know if anyone does; this is, in sports, something of an unprecedented self-esteem catastrophe. Has anyone that good, with that much expectation, every lost that badly before, with so many people watching?" The answer to that question may be no, which would mean we're in somewhat uncharted sports-trauma territory.
Javier E

World Cup 2014: The Pleasures of Rooting Against Brazil | New Republic - 0 views

  • There are very few things as enjoyable as hating another soccer team and everything it stands for. Because it ends up being (mostly) harmless yet poignant, hate derived from soccer—be it from a legendary rivalry, a personal grudge or any other reason—is the best kind of hate. It might actually be the only acceptable kind of hate.
  • What I resent are teams who believe winning is their exclusive privilege before the referee (chinga tu madre!) has even started the game.Enter Brazil, kings of entitlement.
  • The elegant talent of Zico and Eder has been replaced by the robotic muteness of Hulk or the overestimated antics of Neymar, a sort of puffed up Woody-Woodpecker. Even Brazilian extravagance has lost its class: Where before roamed Romario—beautifully defined by Jorge Valdano as a “footballer straight out of an animated cartoon”—now one can find Fred, who has the charisma of a chloroform soaked rag. And there’s more. This Brazil can become violent in an instant. The rough game (the antifutbol) was never part of the Brazilian repertoire. It is now and it has been for a while (ask Tab Ramos if he remembers Leonardo’s elbow). In the 2014 squad, even Neymar carries an axe. This is far from a joyful team.
sgardner35

Tensions Simmer as a Small Town Seeks Answers in a Boy's Killing - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Garrett Phillips, a popular and outgoing 12-year-old, was strangled in his home in fall 2011. The murder set off a mad, all-consuming pursuit for a killer in a region where such crimes are extraordinarily rare.
  • It took more than 30 months for prosecutors to charge him with second-degree murder, in May 2014 — and months more to secure a second indictment after the first was thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct. Despite the long pursuit, the case that a jury will hear this summer is far from perfect: There is a distinct lack of hard evidence, according to police testimony — no fingerprints, no witnesses, no hair or tissue samples, seemingly no conclusive forensic evidence at all connecting Mr. Hillary to the crime.In the long lead-up to the prosecution of Mr. Hillary, his supporters have highlighted not only the absence of physical evidence but the lack of any plausible motive or history that would suggest he was capable of murdering a child. They have also said that another man, a local sheriff’s deputy who once dated Garrett’s mother, was removed from suspicion too quickly.
  • “I can’t think of any other person who would want to hurt Garrett,” Ms. Cyrus said in a statement to the police after her son died.Like the Raquette River, which splits Potsdam in two, the case has divided opinion and tested residents’ patience in St. Lawrence County, a rural and job-challenged region where 94 percent of the population is white. But the emotional impact on Potsdam is raw and evident: Garrett’s former teachers and family friends cry at his memory, while the village’s elders echo one another, saying such terrible crimes simply do not happen in places like this.“It was like a meteor hitting,” said Ron Tischler, the mayor of Potsdam, home to around 9,600 residents that is about 25 miles south of Ontario.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Mr. Hillary has also accused the county prosecutor, Mary Rain, of forsaking justice in the name of keeping a campaign promise: Ms. Rain was elected in 2013, in part on the strength of campaigning with Ms. Cyrus and promising to focus the energies of her small office on Garrett’s murder.
  • The suspicions and repercussions surrounding the boy’s death have rippled through time and distance. A key defense witness, for instance, suddenly discovered “Justice for Garrett” signs posted near his new workplace and home — each hundreds of miles from Potsdam. Mr. Hillary, now free on bail, found himself rearrested in September for allegedly violating an order of protection by using a drive-through A.T.M. at the bank where Ms. Cyrus worked.
  • Garrett Phillips was an ebullient child despite an early-life tragedy: When he was a toddler, his father, Robert — an amiable grounds worker at the State University of New York at Potsdam — suffered a brain aneurysm and never recovered. He died before Garrett was 3.Though Garrett never knew his father, the boy emulated him as he grew. Like his father, he hunted and fished; played any sport involving a ball; and balanced his rowdy and respectful sides, rambunctious sometimes in public but polite to family and strangers.
  • On the afternoon of Oct. 24, 2011, Garrett was playing basketball at the middle school with some friends as rain fell intermittently. A little before 5 p.m., Tandy Cyrus called his cellphone and told him to go home to do schoolwork.
  • Garrett got on his caster board — something of a cross between a skateboard and a snowboard — and headed home, his progress captured by a series of surveillance cameras and later described in a police timeline.
  • Combing the apartment for evidence, investigators found a possible clue: The screen of the bedroom window, about 20 feet off the ground, was “bent outward,” according to the incident report. A tile seemed to be broken on the roof of a lower section of the building, about 10 feet below, and there was a gash in the grass
  • His appeal, as both a coach and a person, is evident: His energy is intense, but his smile is unencumbered. He said he had always loved the North Country region’s rural mountains and summertime greenery — when it was warm it reminded him of Jamaica — though he was aware of the cultural boundaries beyond campus.“You’re a black person,” he said in an interview. “You were viewed as such.”A year after being hired by Clarkson, Mr. Hillary found that his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Stacia Lee, the mother of his three children, was struggling. At a bar called Ton’s, he became acquainted with a bartender, Tandy Cyrus.
  • “I go, ‘Listen. Help me understand. Are you and Tandy together?’” Deputy Jones said.Ms. Cyrus, 37, declined to be interviewed for this article, but Mr. Hillary said he had been harassed because of his relationship with her. “It’s not a community with a lot of interracial relationships,” he said, adding that he had “to be mindful” when he was out. “I would go to the local restaurant,” he said, and Deputy Jones’s “friends would come up to me and like, ‘You know you’re not supposed to be dating John’s girl.’”A few months after they met, Mr. Hillary and Ms. Cyrus moved in together, forming a household of five, including his teenage daughter, Shanna-Kay, and Ms. Cyrus’s two sons.
  • Lieutenant Murray saw Mr. Duff as deeply credible.“I just can’t bring myself to fathom why a collegiate person playing on a Division III soccer team with his entire future ahead of him would lie and perjure himself on a sworn statement for no reason,” he said.On the evening after the murder, Lieutenant Murray went to watch Clarkson’s men’s soccer squad and videotaped Mr. Hillary coaching the penultimate game of a rough season. (The 2011 Clarkson squad had more losses than goals.)According to a search-warrant application, as Mr. Hillary strode along the sideline, he seemed stiff and sedate and had a “significant limp in his right leg,” something the detective inferred would have been caused by jumping from a second-story window. Last year, though, The Watertown Daily Times posted a clip from Lieutenant Murray’s video: In it, Mr. Hillary appears to walk unhindered along the sidelines.
  • As the men were being questioned, detectives searched for damning evidence. They seized Mr. Hillary’s phone and examined the contents of his pockets and his socks. Nude photographs, fingerprints and palm prints were taken. Mr. Hillary’s car was searched. (The timing of the seizures, and of the subsequent search warrants, has been a focus of Mr. Hillary’s civil suit.) The police also obtained his DNA from a coffee cup and the butt of a cigarette.
Javier E

College Admissions Scandal: FBI Targets Wealthy Parents - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Charges are also being brought against 13 college coaches, including Yale’s head women’s soccer coach, who allegedly accepted a $400,000 bribe to admit a student as one of his recruits even though the student had never played competitive soccer.
  • “Every year, alumni contribute to their alma matters with the expectation of special treatment for their children,”
  • “This more genteel form of bribery is considered perfectly legal. Not only that, the donors get a tax break to boot, undercutting the fundamental legal principle that a charitable donation should not enrich the donor.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • A famous example involves Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor whose father, then a wealthy real-estate developer, in 1998 pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University. Kushner—who, the investigative reporter Daniel Golden notes in his 2006 book The Price of Admission, was described by administrators at his high school as a mediocre student—was admitted to the school shortly after that
  • fraud and bribery’s lawful cousins—legacy preferences, athletic recruitment, and other admissions practices that lower the bar for progeny of the rich and famous—are ubiquitous.
  • Today, legacy students account for an estimated 14 percent of Harvard’s undergraduate population, and applicants who enjoy such alumni connections are accepted at five times the rate of their non-legacy peers (a nearly 34 percent acceptance rate, versus just under 6 percent for those lacking those coveted alumni connections)
  • as 40 percent of Harvard’s white students are legacies or recruited athletes.
  • At elite colleges, athletic recruitment is arguably another form of affirmative action for the wealthy. As my colleague Saahil Desai has written, Harvard’s admissions office, for instance, gives a major boost to athletes with middling academic qualifications. Athletes who score a four (out of six) on the academic scale Harvard uses to score applicants were accepted at a rate of about 70 percent, Desai reported; the admit rate for nonathletes with the same score, on the other hand, was 0.076 percent.
  • the U.S. attorney perhaps unintentionally emphasized this irony when he said: “We’re not talking about donating a building … We’re talking about fraud.”
  • His comment highlighted the mundanity of admissions favors for upper-crust children—when executed legally
yehbru

Copa America Chaos After Brazilian Officials Say Decision To Host Is Not Final : NPR - 0 views

  • South America's greatest soccer contest may be moved to Brazil in a last-minute maneuver to save the troubled tournament less than two weeks before kick-off, but Brazilian officials say there is more to consider.
  • He added that if it goes ahead, teams and their staff will have to follow health guidelines, including being vaccinated. Ramos also said that the competition, which is being called the Cornavirus Cup by critics, would be held in empty stadiums without spectators.
  • The confusion on Monday is just the latest chapter in the chaos leading up to the tournament as much of South America, including Brazil, is in the grips of the global pandemic with some of the world's worst infection and death rates.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Colombia was dropped on May 20 due to anti-government protests sparked by proposed tax raises introduced by President Iván Duque. And on Sunday, the soccer federation, CONMEBOL, removed Argentina as co-host due to the "present circumstances" there.
  • On Sunday, Argentina officials reported more than 39,000 new cases after a week that included a record number of cases in a single day, with more than 77,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the World Health Organization.
  • there have been 16,391,930 confirmed cases with 459,045 deaths — the second highest number of deaths registered, the WHO reported.
  • On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters across more than 200 towns and cities marched in anger, demanding Bolsonaro be impeached for his catastrophic handling of the health crisis
  • The tournament attracts huge audiences in South America and globally, and it represents a significant financial windfall for CONMEBOL.
maddieireland334

In France, government vows 'no retreat' from labor reforms amid growing unrest - The Wa... - 0 views

  • France’s government vowed “no retreat” from planned labor law reforms Thursday even as unions called for wider strikes that have choked off fuel supplies and created chaos on highways blocked by barricades of burning tires.
  • Union members overwhelmingly oppose President François Hollande’s new labor law, which would relax some of France’s famous worker protections — among the strictest in the world — in order to curb unemployment and stimulate economic growth.
  • The government has offered no hint of compromise as the country struggles with unemployment over 10 percent and near historical highs.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Similar waves of protests in the past successfully halted a government plan to cut the French pension system in an effort to curb its spending deficit.
  • In addition to fuel shortages, which that have created huge lines at gas stations, the unions have also called for nationwide strikes in the public transportation sector, including air traffic controllers and at many of the 19 nuclear plants that provide electricity for much of the country.
  • With approval ratings below 20 percent, Hollande is the least popular president in modern French history.
  • The tumult raises the possibility that Hollande may not be chosen to run for re-election in 2017, which would be the first time in more than 50 years that a first-term incumbent was not tapped to pursue a second term.
  • Protests could grow until then, when France will have already begun hosting the Euro 2016 soccer tournament.
  • Many are concerned that the disruptions to fuel supplies — and possibly even electricity — could affect the tournament, a major sporting event with millions of viewers that will place France, yet again, in the international spotlight.
Javier E

If Not Trump, What? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The better course for all of us — Republican, Democrat and independent — is to step back and take the long view, and to begin building for that.
  • This election — not only the Trump phenomenon but the rise of Bernie Sanders, also — has reminded us how much pain there is in this country. According to a Pew Research poll, 75 percent of Trump voters say that life has gotten worse for people like them over the last half century.
  • This declinism intertwines with other horrible social statistics. The suicide rate has surged to a 30-year high — a sure sign of rampant social isolation. A record number of Americans believe the American dream is out of reach. And for millennials, social trust is at historic lows.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own. It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and go where you feel least comfortable. But this column is going to try to do that
  • We’ll probably need a new national story. Up until now, America’s story has been some version of the rags-to-riches story, the lone individual who rises from the bottom through pluck and work. But that story isn’t working for people anymore, especially for people who think the system is rigged.
  • I don’t know what the new national story will be, but maybe it will be less individualistic and more redemptive.
  • We’ll probably need a new definition of masculinity, too. There are many groups in society who have lost an empire but not yet found a role. Men are the largest of those groups. The traditional masculine ideal isn’t working anymore. It leads to high dropout rates, high incarceration rates, low labor force participation rates. This is an economy that rewards emotional connection and verbal expressiveness. Everywhere you see men imprisoned by the old reticent, stoical ideal.
  • We’ll also need to rebuild the sense that we’re all in this together. The author R. R. Reno has argued that what we’re really facing these days is a “crisis of solidarity.” Many people, as the writers David and Amber Lapp note, feel pervasively betrayed: by for-profit job-training outfits that left them awash in debt, by spouses and stepparents, by people who collect federal benefits but don’t work. They’ve stopped even expecting loyalty from their employers. The big flashing lights say: NO TRUST. That leads to an everyone-out-for-himself mentality and Trump’s politics of suspicion. We’ll need a communitarianism.
  • at the community level we can listen to those already helping.
  • Then solidarity can be rekindled nationally. Over the course of American history, national projects like the railroad legislation, the W.P.A. and the NASA project have bound this diverse nation. Of course, such projects can happen again — maybe though a national service program, or something else.
1 - 20 of 52 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page