In the alternate reality I check into every now and then Bayern Munich won the Champions League last Saturday. Andrea Merkel appointed Bastian Schweinsteiger Minister of Finance and the Euro Zone crisis ended. Chelsea, no longer a viable option for players with Champions league ambitions, hastily signed a 12-year old Malaysian midfielder who had changed his name to Eden Hazzard – two z’s – days earlier.

Alas, we don’t live in this alternate reality. Chelsea are the champions of Europe...

It’s been a long week that has little to answer for it save for the Copa del Rey, and, of course, the League One promotion playoff to the Championship. This latter match has made something of a celebrity of Sheffield United super fan and Footy Show phenom Thomas Dobby, whose trip to see his beloved Blades at Wembley has caught the attention of the club and the city.

Here he is in the Sheffield Star. There he is on...

So, Emile Heskey has left top-level English football for good this time. And yet, strangely, the latest England manager could still be heard urging his players to “look for the big man” in his first training session with them yesterday. Who, if not Heskey, was The Big Man to be looked for (physically and existentially, no doubt)? Ah, it was Andy Carroll. This, I have to say, is not a reassuring realisation.

In Carroll, Roy Hodgson appears to have come...

James & KJ discuss Group C’s Croatia and their expectations leading in the tournament.

I didn’t want to have to do this, but the Sepp Blatter “penalties are a tragedy” comments have spun the web machine out of control. The problem is I can already see a conventional opinion crystallizing in some areas of the webz, which can be paraphrased as—

“Hey, remember those weird NASL 35 yard run-ups where the penalty-takers had only five seconds to shoot? That sounds really weird and from the olden times when everything was retro and...

No, not THAT Barcelona

Some bloggers have made a cottage industry out of criticizing Major League Soccer’s attempt at building a user-friendly website. I’m not really very web savvy (I can barely use basic HTML code without my hands trembling), but it’s come to my attention of late that MLSsoccer.com is kind of annoying.

And not just for user-friendly type issues, although those are plentiful.

Take their Opta Chalkboards feature, which taken by itself is very, very good. MLSsoccer.com goes...

The commute to work today was a muggy mess. Zero common courtesy, my seatmates’s extreme lack of deodorant and the buzz of someone listening to their earphones 80 decibels too loud made 25 minutes feel like an hour.

Thankfully spencercba6′s EPL-centric end of season poem has turned the fortunes of this morning around. Poetic beauty paired with poignant cursing. Is there anything better?

The Lead

So FIFA President Sepp Blatter has gone and said something about penalties:

Blatter told the Fifa Congress in Budapest: “Football can be a tragedy when you go to penalty kicks. Football should not go to one to one, when it goes to penalty kicks football loses its essence.

“Perhaps Franz Beckenbauer with his football 2014 group can show us a solution perhaps not today but in the future.”

This has predictably provoked meaningless debates on the blogs...

This story has been looking at me in the face all day:

Racist abuse will become a sackable offence for professional footballers next season, as part of significant changes being made to every Premier League and Football League player’s contract.

Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, is behind the proposal that he hopes will send out a powerful message on the back of a season when racism on the pitch made an unwelcome return to...

The Guardian’s Raphael Honigstein joins James and KJ to preview perennial favourites Germany ahead of Euro 2012.

You can download the video and watch it here.

If you’re not a fan of video you can listen to the audio here.

Subscribe directly to the YouTube channel here.

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James & KJ take a look at Denmark and their uphill battle in Group B.

Here’s my theory of why Dave Whelan decided to spill the beans on Sir Alex Ferguson’s decision to retire at the end of the 2012-13 season (still unconfirmed, of course) based on an unnamed “little scare”, presumably something involving Fergie’s personal health.

There’s a stock plot device used in so many films and TV shows that it’s both instantly familiar and so overused it’s hard to place. A character has an important piece of information. He or she shares that...

It’s about here where I would insert the “images say more than a thousand words,” but this in essence capped off what for Fernando Torres must have been a difficult final. There is an element of “last straw” in here, but Torres’ number with Chelsea is almost certainly up with the departure of Didier Drogba.

Five memorable games that helped secure Didier Drogba’s status as one of Chelsea’s best ever players:

Chelsea 3 Liverpool 2, Carling Cup final, February 27, 2005

This was the first piece of silverware that Chelsea won in the Jose Mourinho era, and it was Drogba’s extra-time close-range strike that gave the Blues a 2-1 lead. More than anything, though, this game showed the close bond between Drogba and his coach: Mourinho was sent off for winding up the Liverpool fans...

To which I say…meh. First, this isn’t the debut; it was first testedin the Hampshire Senior Cup Final on May 16th between a team and another team. Second, the rather important question of just how it might be used by match officials in the event of a goal incorrectly denied/given is still off the table. As the Beebs reports, “…the match officials will have no access to data and the trial will have no impact on any contentious goal-line...

We’ve been hearing about Brazil’s stadium development problems for over a year now. The hosts of the 2014 World Cup drew the ire of the faultless organization that is FIFA for repeatedly missing deadlines. An unorganized campaign suffered another blow when Ricardo Teixeira – chairman of the 2014 organizing committee and CFC – stepped down in March.

Last week FIFA stated only half of the 12 stadiumswill be ready in time for the tournament. The end date for construction...

The Lead

There seems to be a ‘too soon’ ettiquette on taking a dump on a bad team’s outlying success, either in a single match or in a cup “competition” involving four teams. So it was through gritted teeth that I read on Reddit how this was the first “trophy of the season to be lifted in USA/Canada” and how Toronto FC are now “Canadian champions.”

GRITTED TEETH.

Anyway, congratulations Toronto FC, who won the Voyageur’s Cup after beating Vancouver...

ESPN announcer and Polish-born former US International Janusz Michallik joins KJ and James to chat about co-hosts Poland and their Group A rivals Greece ahead of Euro 2012.

You can download the video and watch it here.

If you’re not a fan of video you can listen to the audio here.

Subscribe directly to the YouTube channel here.

New! Subscribe to the video podcast on iTunes here.

Subscribe to the audio version on iTunes here.

Toronto FC probably isn’t the worst team in the world.

Protests by Danny Koevermans aside, it seems likely that the Reds could beat up on a few clubs near the bottom of the Albanian, Irish or Macedonian loops. Hell, they’ve proven they are up for the challenge of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama too.

Major League Soccer seems to have their number though. If you are reading this you probably don’t need to be reminded that the Reds are 0-0-9...

With the club season coming to a close let’s take a trip through memory lane – quote style. Thanks to GB’s Jake Goldsbie for the inspiration.

Abidal told my son: ‘Come, come, brother, I am here to give you courage. I am also fighting against this disease and will set up a foundation that gives joy and helps all the sick children. He was affectionate, tender and friendly, and for 10 minutes he never let my son out of his...

“All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

As the tournament edges closer, we’ll give you previews of each of the competitors.

Here are two quotes from two different articles appearing in two different newspapers:

From the Guardian’s David Conn:

The Premier League’s 20 clubs collectively made a loss of £392m last year, after spending all of their record £2.2bn income. Of the clubs which were in the Premier League in 2010‑11, the year of most clubs’ latest published accounts, only five, 25%, made a profit, of £71m in total.

Of the other clubs, 14 made losses, totalling £463.4m. Manchester City,...

In polite company, they’re referred to as “intangibles.” Determination. Teamwork. Togetherness. Grit. The kind of thing Henry Winter likes to write about Sir Alex Ferguson.

Not that these aren’t important qualities. The controversy comes about when discussing whether these are necessary antecedents to success in club football, or whether they’re the result of a team blessed with individual talent and a sound tactical approach. It’s a chicken-and-egg kind of thing, but if I have to choose between good proven players...