Football

Argentine soccer legend Diego Armando Maradona died in 2020, at that time still the last man to lead his nation’s team to a World Cup championship. On Sunday, in some sense Maradona passed away again, as Lionel Messi lifted the golden trophy and his own legacy as not only the greatest Argentine player of all time, but possibly the greatest to ever lace up boots in the world. Tuesday has been declared a national bank holiday in the South American nation, not that anyone there has stopped partying since the famous win on Sunday. The heroes' welcome will be for this band of players, especially Messi, who snapped the thirty-six-year World Cup drought. But make no mistake, the image of Maradona will also be on display far and wide.

Michael Sheen has had a problem with the royal family for some time – and it’s only got worse since William was appointed Prince of Wales. The actor, best known for playing Tony Blair but somewhat to the left of him politically, has criticised the notion of an Englishman being nominal head of the principality. Sheen has lately carved out a niche as a pound-shop Richard Burton addressing motivational monologues to the Welsh football team, to little effect thus far. And he predictably stepped up his campaign ahead of the World Cup: how could William, he asked, reconcile his role as President of the English Football Association with his position as Prince of Wales – particularly when the two nations have been drawn to play each other tonight?

When England play the USA this evening in Al Khor, Qatar, it will be the twelfth time the two sides have met. England have had the upper hand in most of the previous 11, winning eight and recording scores as comfortable as 10-0, 8-1, 6-3 and 5-0. We easily beat them 3-0 at Wembley just three years ago.  And after their respective opening games in this tournament – England thumping Iran 6-2 in their best-ever start to a World Cup, the USA nervy and stuttering by the end of a 1-1 draw with Wales – most neutrals would expect nothing other than a routine win for England. The bookies make England comfortably odds-on too. But all of this is overlooking one factor: the Americans are English football’s bogey team.

As ocean-going metaphors go, the news that a £1 billion cruise liner (usually charging £2,434.80 – love that 80! – for a nine-night jaunt, complete with a shopping mall, 14 jacuzzis, six swimming pools and the longest ‘dry-slide’ at sea) will host England’s Wags during the World Cup in Qatar could not have been more splashy.  This is a particularly bad time for football. The England players are off to Qatar, along with LGBT-friendly football personalities – led by ‘gay icon’ David Beckham – to shill for a country where migrant workers are treated like chattels, women are treated like children and homosexuals are treated like criminals.

The hapless Washington Commanders can’t do anything right. And I do mean anything. In September, a first-time Washington Commanders season ticket holder won more than $14,000 in a charitable raffle. After about six weeks of pestering the franchise, he finally received the check. It bounced. Of course, Washington’s football team — whose new name I can hardly muster the energy to speak, let alone write — is having yet another lackluster year on the gridiron. The team enjoys a miserable, if predictable, losing record. Coach Ron Rivera, who all things being equal is better than many of his predecessors, earlier this month seemed to throw shade at underperforming (and now injured) quarterback Carson Wentz.

Ever since the Supreme Court's 2018 ruling that allowed sports gambling to explode across the nation, the United States has seen a steady increase in the ready availability of gambling opportunities and apps that are now some of the main advertisers and sponsors for sports coverage of all stripes — from ESPN, Fox, NBC and CBS to the likes of Barstool and podcasts a plenty. Some traditionalists and conservatives are put off by this — gambling, they've long argued, is bad for communities and imposes a tax on working-class Americans. That's certainly true when it comes to the presence of casinos and the regressive taxation of lotteries. But sports gambling, unlike other forms of gambling, has significant social benefits that should not be ignored.

During last year’s European Championship, England football fans switched, for some reason, from ‘Three Lions’ to ‘Sweet Caroline’ by Neil Diamond (‘so good, so good, so good’). If anything can make them switch back it’s the Football Association, who this week said they were thinking of dropping the Baddiel and Skinner anthem as England’s official song, because it could be seen as ‘arrogant’. Football fans are like children, and as any parent could have told the F.A., if you want to make sure someone does something then just tell them not to do it. The F.A. quickly had to issue a statement confirming there were no plans to change. David Baddiel himself feels the F.A. have long disliked the song.