Football

Last night, a tiny and almost penniless Swedish football club beat Arsenal 2-1 at home. The story of Östersund Football Club is quite unlike any other in sport: I wrote about it in my Daily Telegraph column a while ago when they hadn’t really featured on a British radar. This morning, with Arsene Wenger in despair at his team’s complacency, a lot of people will be wondering what happened. The answer is an inspiring one, full of lessons for politics and life in general.  Östersund is a tiny vodka-belt town in the frozen north of Sweden with a population smaller than the capacity of the Emirates stadium. It has no football tradition, or didn’t

They’ve got this new thing in football. It’s called the Video Assistant Referee and it is designed to make the game, at the highest level, pristine and free from human error. This is, to my mind, a mistaken aspiration in a game that relies on human error for its excitement, especially when the England goalkeeper Joe Hart is playing. Anyway, what happens is this. When the referee isn’t sure about some crucial incident on the pitch, he summons another referee via a headset to help him. The other referee is many miles away, watching the match on the television. The ref stops the game and wanders over to have a

On this week’s episode, we examine Twitter’s mob mentality, get to the heart of PTSD, and look at how Russia is preparing for this year’s World Cup. First up: At the end of 2017 it would’ve be hard to guess that the name of everyone’s lips during the sunrise days of the new year would be Toby Young. But thanks to a government appointment and a series of ill-advised tweets, his brief stint at the Office for Students has dominated the news cycle. In the magazine this week, Lara Prendergast writes about how our digital footprints could come back to bite us, whilst Rod Liddle laments the rise of trial

Authoritarian regimes love grand international sporting events. There’s something about the mass regimentation, the set-piece spectacle, the old-fashioned idea of nation states competing for glory that appeals to leaders who wish to show off the greatness of their country to the world. Berlin ’36, Moscow ’80, Sochi ’14 — nothing says ‘we’re here, get used to it’ better than a giant sporting jamboree. The 2018 football World Cup doesn’t offer quite the same degree of validation as an Olympic Games. But for Vladimir Putin, it’s still a major opportunity to demonstrate not only Russia’s new-found greatness but also its continued membership of the civilised world. For what Putin yearns for,

England, Belgium, Tunisia, Panama: it doesn’t make an acronym as alluring as the ‘England Algeria Slovenia Yanks’ headline The Sun ran at this stage in 2009, but English football fans will have breathed a sigh of relief after being placed in a group we might call BTEC – Belgium Tunisia England Canal folk (Panama) – because it certainly wasn’t the hardest option out there. A cautious optimism must now seep into the England set-up. Encouraging draws against Germany and Brazil proved that this generation are more dour and pragmatic than the extravagant ensemble that preceded them. Even at managerial level, the contrast between unfashionable Gareth Southgate and his predecessors is stark:

What a privilege it is to watch Manchester City in the age of Pep Guardiola. I can’t recall a club side so lauded so early in the season, but the lavish praise seems justified. Could his Midas touch be young England’s best hope in Russia? Noel Gallagher, yes him, has been speaking about the ‘cosmic’ football City are playing under Pep, and who are we to argue? Guardiola seems to be getting the best out of Stones, Walker and Sterling. These three plus the Tottenham backbone of Kane, Dele Alli and Dier bringing their club form to the national team, along with the young England talent that did so well

In my Daily Telegraph column today, I write about the incredible story of Östersund football club. It hasn’t quite been picked up in Britain yet, but I suspect it will one day be made into a Moneyball-style film: about how a small-time English coach was hired to move to a small subarctic town in Sweden with a small budget, and assembled a team of misfits on £600-a-week. But his tactics, and his faith in his ability to get the best out of people, saw them not only win the Swedish Cup but they are now taking on the biggest clubs in Europe. So this town, the size of Inverness, a

A few years ago, I was sitting at my desk late at night, frustrated by the latest sports financing project which I was working on at a large investment bank. Despite the iconic brand, large international fanbase and its many trophies, it was extremely difficult to find investors for this top-20 global football club. Time and again, potential investors struggled with the club’s volatile cashflow profile and uncertainty about its future revenues and performance. I asked myself: ‘If it’s this hard for this glamorous club to raise money, how are less fortunate teams coping?’ However, contrary to normal businesses, sports clubs have one major intangible asset which the institutional market

On this week’s Spectator Podcast, we discuss Britain’s obesity crisis, the upcoming German election and the England team’s footballing woes. First up, Britain’s obesity problem is worsening, says Prue Leith in her Spectator cover piece. The UK is the sixth fattest nation on earth and more than a quarter of the population is obese. Yet despite this worrying epidemic, precious little is being done. So how can we fix this crisis? Spectator Health’s Christopher Snowdon, Professor Graham MacGregor, Chairman of Action on Sugar, and Professor Francesco Rubino, from Kings College London, have some answers. In her cover piece, Prue Leith writes: Part of the UK’s problem is that we see