The Blizzard

"One good season is now usually enough to earn a big move, but football’s current landscape is claiming more and more victims of the game’s Peter Principle – 'everyone in an organisation keeps on getting promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. At that point, they stop being promoted.'"

In Episode Fifteen we look ahead to Rupert Fryer’s ‘The Peter Principle’ from the upcoming Issue Nineteen (available to subscribers now, and on general sale from 9th December)...

"One good season is now usually enough to earn a big move, but football’s current landscape is claiming more and more victims of the game’s Peter Principle – 'everyone in an organisation keeps on getting promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. At that point, they stop being promoted.'"

In Episode Fifteen we look ahead to Rupert Fryer’s ‘The Peter Principle’ from the upcoming Issue Nineteen (available to subscribers now, and on general sale from 9th December)...

“What you see is 90 minutes of action treated almost as a distraction from the real business of sport: the narrative of news… Reality is not enough, so it is expanded, meaning is extrapolated, significance is assumed. And all of it around a structure to ensure maximum exposure, maximum interest.” In Episode Fourteen we bring you ‘Is Football Still Sport? by Rory Smith...

“Xavi’s movement is a kind of reverse sheepdog trick — instead of penning a flock in to an enclosed space, his darting, nipping and barking is about spreading them around the field, into unexplored, unpredictable spaces.” In Episode Thirteen we bring you ‘The Inverted Sheepdog’ by Graham Hunter, which looks in detail at how the Spain international became the creative hub of the all-conquering Barcelona team of the early twenty-first century. As Graham himself puts it “Sublime player, top man...

“Xavi’s movement is a kind of reverse sheepdog trick — instead of penning a flock in to an enclosed space, his darting, nipping and barking is about spreading them around the field, into unexplored, unpredictable spaces.” In Episode Thirteen we bring you ‘The Inverted Sheepdog’ by Graham Hunter, which looks in detail at how the Spain international became the creative hub of the all-conquering Barcelona team of the early twenty-first century. As Graham himself puts it “Sublime player, top man...

“Erbstein’s was an extraordinary life that was characterised by courage and resourcefulness in the face of adversity. That he and his family survived the holocaust was a matter of astonishing good fortune, but just four years after the end of the war, Erbstein was killed with his team, Il Grande Torino, in the Superga air crash...

“Erbstein’s was an extraordinary life that was characterised by courage and resourcefulness in the face of adversity. That he and his family survived the holocaust was a matter of astonishing good fortune, but just four years after the end of the war, Erbstein was killed with his team, Il Grande Torino, in the Superga air crash...

“Erbstein’s was an extraordinary life that was characterised by courage and resourcefulness in the face of adversity. That he and his family survived the holocaust was a matter of astonishing good fortune, but just four years after the end of the war, Erbstein was killed with his team, Il Grande Torino, in the Superga air crash...

“’He describes himself as a ‘fiddler’. I’d say he’s more than that: a born crook. He would attempt and succeed in staging the most abject of blackmails — the blackmail of hope. Dressed in a German uniform, he’d get out of a car seized from the maquis and embark on the following monologue: ‘To what extremities am I reduced, I, a Frenchman, forced to wear the German uniform, these awful rags! [...] They’re going to kill you – but I’ll save you, risking my life. I’ve saved fifty-four...

"It had been foolish of me to blame football for the dangerous passions it can unleash. Turning against football on these grounds would be like hating democracy because people voted for Thatcher." In Episode Ten of the Blizzard Podcast we bring you 'The Lager of Life' by Tim Vickery from Issue Nine...