The World Cup is dead to me. Fucking money grabbers have ruined the best thing about the summers when it’s on
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Never though I’d witness a world cup game on my birthday considering it’s late November…
Fucking ridculous.
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Whoever wins the world cup this year is the last of a dying competition. Winning the competition won’t mean the same to me from 2022 onwards
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So all the leagues are gonna be suspended. Big problem.
It’s an absolute disgrace, not even sure I will watch much of that world cup.
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You people are crazy. There will be Christmas day and then competitive PL football a week after the World Cup final!
The worst thing about the World Cup is it makes you fall in love with football again and then makes you wait a month to see any.
Also all our players are from deprived countries like like Armenia and Wales so we’ll be fresh as fuck mid season!
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And Gabon 
Wasn’t there a winter world cup before?
No
Hyde Park in November for the fanzone will be fun. Should have had Moscow for a winter world cup.
They’re some bunch of cunts. Two days before the final and we’re already talking about the next fucking tournament.
Well now Eric, Kieran and the rest of the boys are out the entire world no longer cares about the current world cup.
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Ha, would have been great if the scorer celebrated the goal.
I like Valdano because he’s a true lover of football who also is about as erudite as it gets for someone involved in football, very much in the Wenger style (and tbh, I could see Wenger writing an article like this), but I’m not a fan of this article at all, tbh.
He’s not really offering any insight; what he “dispels”–that statistics alone, especially statistics like how much a player ran, are not useful without context, is really more of a platitude than what he’s trying to dispel.
Tbh, there’s a reason why people like he and Wenger have failed as managers in the modern game, it’s because beneath all that erudition and would-be open-mindedness there’s actually a real closed-mindedness, a resistance to change and evolution (which is what open-mindedness should be all about), and a basically old school mindset where you make a false dichotomy out of science/analytics vs. mystery/aesthetics/beauty. There are parts of the article that really read as kind of anti-science/advance, to the extent that it could be applicable to an argument about faith/science, another false dichotomy of course.
In short, he comes off a bit like an ornery @shamrockgooner when VAR or technology in football is brought up 
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Nah I’m pretty in favour of technology (goalline tech is pretty brilliant really) in football and despite my sepcific reservations about VAR itself and some/most of them coming to pass I still think overall it’s been a success in this world cup.
And I’ve been known to be pretty ornery at times myself. 
It’s very telling that the longer the World Cup went on, the less VAR had to be used.
Gary Neville in a passionate attack on plans to sell Wembley Stadium.
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