This sport might live forever, but we doubt it will ever become a good business. And it's so much the better for that.

There was a landmark moment in 2009 when the Champions League final overtook the Super Bowl as the world's most watched sporting event: 109 million viewers versus 106 million

Over the last thirty years, sports have been the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment business…

When the former goalkeeper Osama bin Laden visited London in 1994, he watched four Arsenal matches, bought souvenirs for his sons in the club shop, and remarked that he had never seen as much passion as among soccer supporters.

Besides the 10,000-hour rule, there is another rule that explains sporting success: the $15,000 rule. That's the minimum average income per person that a country needs to win anything. There is only one way around this: be Brazil.

Meanwhile, Iceland's legendary handball captain, Olafur Stefansson, seemed to regard himself primarily as an existentialist philosopher.

There was the man who, when asked by Tapp's team what he would save if there were a fire in his house, replied, "Oh, my [match] programs and tapes. No question. And my wife and kids, of course."

“Chained” is a very Hornbyesque word for a Fan's feelings for his club. Ofen, the Fan uses metaphors from drugs (“hooked”) or romantic love (“relationship”, “fell for”).

He added, "I keep referring to the NFL, which has equal sharing...In the US, the most free-market country in the world, they understand that equal distribution of money creates genuine competition."

William "the Refrigerator” Perry, the supersized Chicago lineman, became a cult hero in Britain.

“You can say England is a bitch on Friday night, and on Saturday afternoon you go to a sports pub to watch English soccer."

ln fact, when American troops in Afghanistan wanted to woo natives, they were reduced to handing out soccer balls. (The exercise failed: Allah's name was found to be printed on a ball, a blasphemy for an object designed for kicking.)

We already know that the World Cup didn't make Brazilians richer. It also probably wasn't an efficient way to make them happier.

It's reasonable enough to want to throw the world's biggest party. But you generally don't throw a party to make money. You do it because it makes you happy.

He was a man of extraordinary appetites. Weighing in at 450 pounds, he lived on an entire floor in Trump Tower in New York, with one apartment exclusively for his cats. But as the FBI had worked out, Blazer financed this grand life by taking bribes--typically 10 percent of any deal.

The raising and dashing of hopes of an economic bonanza became as integral a part of a modern soccer tournament as the raising and dashing of hopes that England would win it.

Well, economists certainly respond to incentives. Anyone hoping to persuade taxpayers to pay for a stadium in the US commissioned an economist to write an "economic impact study. By a strange coincidence, these studies always showed that the stadium would make taxpayers rich.

The Scottish case is a pretty strong piece of evidence against the apartment-building theory of soccer suicides because if there was ever an excuse for soccer fans to try to kill themselves, it was Scotland's disastrous performance at the World Cup of 1978.

"Not you," the aide replies. “Egomaniacs don't do that kind of thing. You wouldn't do anything you couldn't live to write about, would you?" You're probably right," says Thompson. As it later turned out, his ashes were fired from a cannon in Aspen, Colorado.

Decades later, a German marketing company showed that the knee-jerk response of the countrys fans to the word counterattack was still Gladbach.

The legacy of the Industrial Revolution still shapes English fandom. Today the combined population of Greater Merseyside, Greater Man- chester, and Lancashire County is less than 5.5 million, or a little over 10 percent of the English population.

The Hague's only professional club, ADO, traditionally plays its games in front of a few thousand people, a large proportion of whom are nuts. Little happens on the field beyond the occasional smoke bomb or plague of rabbits. This is the curse of the democratic capital.

The same phenomenon was at work in the communist countries as in the fascist capitals before them. Dictators send resources to the capital because that is where they and their senior bureaucrats and soldiers and secret police officers live. So the dictators do up the main buildings, boost the local economy, and help the soccer club. That’s totalitarian soccer.