Village Idiot

He'd need to be rated to begin with. He's a good option, but he just doesn't have the ability to go with his pace. There's a reason why our staff hasn't played him in big games, just to murder s*** defences with pace.

There's got to be something less s*** than Jô, surely? Diego Costa for starters.

Dafuq, Jô's on Brazil's bench

Pity there won't be anything to play for in Netherlands - Spain, would've been a cracker.

David Luiz

Fret not, Real Madrid will buy Cavani or Suárez and Morata will watch it all from the sidelines.

Scolari's tactics seem limited to "pass it to the guys forward and let them figure out something". No movement, nous or anything.

Brazil's attacking play is awful. Never thought I'd ever say that.

Neymar outmuscled off the ball, I'm afraid this gonna happen often; I have seen matchsticks with more bulk than him. Heck, Iniesta will look like a bouncer next to him.

Really looking forward Brazil-France tonight, even if it's just a friendly.

Joining the ManU coaching staff, I presume?

"The little hospital", suppose it's funny for an English speaker, not a weird town name around here. Hope they can win the promotion playoff to Liga Adelante, haven't had a good start though.

Eh? Why?

Radio Marca has tribal football-ish levels of reliability though, it has far less fact-checking and journalistic integrity than the newspaper. People just show up in front of the mike and make shit up. Same with their TV channel.

The Mata rumor originated in England, the Spanish press has just rolled with it. EDIT: I was wrong, just traced it and it was started by Marca. Suits them, I guess.

Would be an amazing signing for Chelsea despite his age, a good playmaker behind all those AM's is something they lacked this season. He only has a couple years left in the tank, though. He's started to have some fitness problems this year already. But it's a standard "old experienced player" Mou signing.

Last year on his contract too.

Real Madrid had a disappointing tendency of sitting back in all their big games. He lost his first two CL semis because of that.

Coaching an u21 team to a modicum of tactical effectiveness is hard actually; we're talking a side that pretty much changes the entirety of its playing staff every couple years, and thus develops even less chemistry than your regular national side.

Apparently we got €2,5m in fees, while the organization donated €35,000 to the Haiti earthquake victims

Kobe Bryant gloryhunting cunt.

I read something the other day about why Norway's youth team is doing so well -- which was a surprise to me, as I don't follow it closely. Or at all. The claim was that it's due to the economic crisis, which for some reason struck Norwegian football hard (which is true), despite the fact that the overall economy is doing spectacularly well compared to the rest of Europe. The result is that instead of clubs bringing in foreign mercenaries looking for a stepping stone toward the bigger leagues, they have to rely on their own youth development. I don't think the same applies to England. Good English players are still more expensive than foreign players, especially at premier league level. Just look at NUFC. Although youth development was one of Ashley's stated goals, the players are mostly French. A similar thing applies to Holland. Foreign players in the Eredivisie have to earn a certain minimum salary (not spectacularly high for a professional footballer, but still. Believe it is around 200k/year), so often it is more attractive to pad the squad with talented youngsters rather than foreign players. The other day I was thinking the same about Spain. In La Liga's heyday in the 90s, even lesser clubs had a bunch of well-known foreigners, now that's just unthinkable, and our NT has improved in parallel.

Courtois announces that he's staying one more year at Atlético. That'll be 3 years, it's almost as they signed him for real

Our FA has a knack for setting up useless friendlies, some South/Central America FAs pay silly amounts for us to play their teams.