One bookmaker, Sky Bet, told The Associated Press it paid out 4.6 million pounds ($6.8 million) to bettors who picked Leicester to win the title, with 128 putting money on the team at those enormous odds.
.. This year’s Premier League title is the first top-division championship for Leicester City, which was founded in 1884 and joined the Football League in 1890. Its previous high-water mark was a runner-up finish — in 1929.
Only in a truly demoralized conservative movement could the crass materialism of Donald Trump find a foothold. That kind of nihilistic energy reflects more than just economic anxiety. It evidences a deeper sense of despair about the moral and cultural trajectory of our society.
.. They loved Manchester United but seemed to have little interest in Uzbek soccer. Midway through my service I got an idea of why that might be. Some soccer-loving American friends started going to local games. As longtime fans of the sport, they were strongly under the impression that at least some of the games were fixed. A match would proceed normally for awhile, but in the last few minutes the leading team might start making obvious, clownish mistakes that would ultimately lead to a loss. My friends found it hard to believe that this phenomenon was natural.
.. On the other hand, a society that demands fair football games is positioned to navigate these other problems. We still have a strong sense of fair play, a zeal for excellence, and the kind of political foundation that can sustain a free society.
And there’s the rub. The men’s national team does not play on artificial turf. Even when it schedules a game in a stadium that has it, sod is laid down for the game, no matter the cost. The women, however, were to play eight of the 10 games of their current World Cup victory tour on artificial turf.
The indictment alleges that at least a hundred and fifty million dollars in bribes changed hands—and that number is just a starting point. It doesn’t even really get to Qatar’s now notorious bid for the 2022 tournament. There are now criminal investigations or serious questions about every men’s World Cup from the past two decades.
.. The division between soccer’s ideals and its realities is perhaps best exemplified by the surface on which the women will be playing in this month’s supposed world-class event: artificial turf, rather than grass. That would be unheard of in men’s games at anything approaching this level. Turf increases the likelihood of injuries, including career-ending ones. It makes dives and tackles inadvisable. It renders play choppy and poorly paced, by increasing the number of times that the ball bounces out of play.
.. on Friday, Die Zeit reported that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder allegedly approved an arms sale to Saudi Arabia as part of the price for buying the kingdom’s vote to give Germany the 2006 tournament)
.. A few years ago, Blatter suggested that the way to encourage the sport’s development would be to have the women wear tight shorts.
.. To keep players from keeling over from the heat, the 2022 World Cup will be held in November and December, which will wreak havoc with the players’ professional schedules. Even at that time of year, temperatures are in the eighties, and so the plan is for the games to be played in air-conditioned stadiums that are currently being built in the desert by migrant workers who have few rights and who labor under conditions that are, as the BBC put it, “appalling.”