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Football is dead Honestly, the 2024 Euros was the worst football tournament I have ever watched. Negative play, frightened players, lots of extra times and penalties, but most of all, I kept falling asleep every night. I kept hoping anyone would score so that it was over and not another thirty minutes of dirge. I didn’t care whether it was the team I was up for, just someone to score to put an end to my misery. Arteta is the king of the new football To be honest, that is the way football is going. Now, the objective is to squeeze the life out of the opponent, give them no chances to score, and get one or two yourself. And Arteta is the master of the new football. His statistics show that Arsenal concede the fewest chances and XG goals. You have seen the stats, I am not going to go over them again. Dead ball equals dead football? Dead balls are now key and Arsenal are the masters of them too. Outwit your opponents enough times at these and you will get some goals. Every player at every set piece goes on a different run, making it harder for the defence to mark them. The players must follow Arteta’s instructions to the letter. By getting all players to do different runs he brings the unpredictability that the old style great players would do. It also means that there is a good chance one will be in the right place at the right time to score. Does Uefa President Aleksander Ceferin care that the football is boring? I suspect that that was Kieran Tierney’s weakness, in Arteta’s eye. He would sometimes make his own decisions, take on players, or run where he wasn’t told to. That and his penchant for injuries, meant he was no longer required. If I understand correctly, reading between the lines of an interview Tierney gave, that is what Arteta wanted from him, to do as he is told. We don’t want you, Pele And it makes sense in one way. If all players follow a plan, they will know how to find each other, they will be running into dangerous positions that their colleagues know about, and they can do it without thinking. It does mean that the old style, unpredictable geniuses, would have no place in the modern game. Pele, Maradona, George Best, Hristo Stoichkov and others would always want the freedom to sniff out a chance and score a goal their way. Maybe a pass is the most logical option but that instinct to score, to beat your opponent, to have the crowd mesmerised by your aplomb, is what made those players great. You couldn't stop watching Maradona One can see it with Ronaldo at Portugal. He wants all play to come through him but that stops the other top players in the squad from showing what they can do. They weren’t good at the Euros. He doesn’t have the ability he had in his prime, but his aura stops the manager from telling him what to do. It means Portugal cannot play the modern way where all players have their roles and must carry them out, and instead have to try to find their king. It’s all over but we don’t know it? Marcelo Bielsa has come out publicly to say that football is dead. Players are overcoached and everything is predictable. You stop the opponent playing, and squeeze their options so they can’t score, and keep the ball until a scoring chance comes for you. Is Marcelo Bielsa right? "I am convinced that football is in decline," he said. "It is becoming less attractive because what made it the world's greatest game is disappearing." Bielsa is, of course famous for believing in attacking football. At Leeds, when he had top players in the Championship, they bamboozled their way into the Premier League by thrilling football that allowed players to make mistakes as long as they attacked their opponents. They scored lots and conceded lots. Defend teams onto submission, not attack His problem came in his second season in the Premier League. Leeds started losing heavily and they got rid of him in February. He refused to change his ways, to make up for the fact that some teams simply had better players than he had, and kept trying to steamroller teams into submission. He paid the price. "This sport is unique; when it becomes too predictable, it loses its charm," "As fewer footballers worth watching emerge and the game becomes less enjoyable, artificially inflating viewer numbers will eventually falter." These two quotes from him are worth heeding. I agree. The concentration on not losing, on chasing every possible margin in your favour, is bad for the game longterm. We need players we want to watch. Players who dribble past several opponents at a time but often then losing the ball is becoming increasingly rare because they are not allowed try it. Find your player is the requirement. They make the runs, you know where those runs are, and you give them the ball. A nervous Arsenal One twos, give and go, keeping the ball, going backwards, going forwards again, hoping for a mistake or a dead ball. That is modern football. Above all not making a mistake. That was the Euros but also the Champions League for Arsenal was like that. We played nervously, no matter who the opponent was. I wanted us to grab them by the throat, score goals and send them home crying. And the Premier league? Against Sheffield United we demolished them. Against Chelsea we were far better than them in the first half but it took the second half to score the goals that sent their fans home crying. After the first half, Chelsea still had a good chance if they started to play well. The game against Liverpool, as well was a good one for us. Liverpool got nothing, All stats were in our favour. Why not all the time? But in so many other matches I just wished we would turn it on. We had the better players in most matches, including Bayern in my opinion, but we didn’t unleash our attacking players. Instead it was boring, predictable, tippy-tappy football that went nowhere. Boring extra time matches seemed the norm Arteta quite rightly wants to win. He knows that there are teams out there willing to spend more money than Arsenal. He believes that the way to win is first not to concede goals. He has found a way to make his team the second best over the past two seasons. He will believe that a slight margin in his favour will bring him titles. That will not involve flair players doing their own thing. We, as fans, will have to live with a small number of games per season where we win by thrilling football. I doubt if Infantino cares about the direction football is heading Can we accept that? We won’t have a choice. And we probably won’t have a choice either at international championships either. The football will stink but when will it drive the fans away?

Better than all the rest, better than anyone Pelé was the best footballer ever for me. He cemented my love of football at the 1970 World Cup. I was 12 years old. The Brazil team that won were extraordinary, and he was accompanied by such flair as I have never seen before or since. It was a magical time, watching Gerson, Tostao, Jairzinho, Rivelino, Carlos Alberto and the illustrious squad play a different type of football than I had ever seen. When we played football in our local fields we all chose our favourite Brazilian, often not Pelé, they were so good that we would have loved to be any of them. The ball just seemed to move like sorcery and I wish all my readers today could have been alive at that time to see the majesty of a team that for me will always be the best of all time. An unprecedented collection of players The kids that were good footballers would adopt a name of a Brazilian and we would all call him that, and sometimes the name stuck for a long time. I want to put that into perspective, English football was king when I was growing up, we watched British television and read British newspapers and magazines. Irish football was popular too and we would watch Shamrock Rovers and Bohemians but generally the top players would migrate over to England. It was a restricted worldview with a very Anglophone media. The players of Manchester United, Liverpool, Leeds and Celtic were worshipped. When I was young I knew no Arsenal supporters. But all of us cast that aside in favour of the magnificent Brazilians, led by the astonishing Pelé. He made football If he had that impact on a small island on the edge of Europe, you can only imagine what impact he had on the whole of football and the kids to come. He was one of the key elements to football being the biggest sport in the world and the huge salaries paid today owe a gigantic debt to the man who made so many love football. The 2 greatest He could head the ball as if with spring heels. He could shoot with right or left, he could dribble, lead the line, inspire, find an astounding pass or a wizardly interplay, had an amazing twist to his body that bewildered opponents, and most crucially, he could score tons of goals. And except for an occasional dive, was no cheat or kicker of men. He was a gentleman then and he became much more of one when he retired. Everyone’s greatest day was meeting Pelé He is, I feel, the most admired and respected man ever in football. He would turn up everywhere, and the special qualities he would bring to any occasion meant that everyone had a smile on their face matching his wonderful one. They had met Pelé, their life was complete. I will not do so now, and that is sadness for sure, but at least I got to see him play live at Dalymount Park, the crumbling home of Bohemians, as his Santos team played a team made up from Bohemians and Drumcondra. Santos won 3-2 in a match played in a great atmosphere. You could see the players were thrilled to be on the same pitch as the man who made football. He made everyone happy Celebrities from all walks of life say their greatest delight was in meeting him as he became football’s greatest ambassador, traversing the globe backwards and forwards, greeting, enhancing and sharing that special charisma he embodied. Muhammed Ali shared a similar sporting timeframe and the 2 of them were for sure the major sporting superstars of my life. We don’t have now, nor have we since, such greatness that transcended their game to become so recognised, respected, admired and loved by those that cared little for sport. I guarantee you that if you showed a photo of say, Lionel Messi or Roger Federer, there would be a lot of people unable to put a name to them. Not so with Pelé, everyone knew who he was, and I reckon most soccer supporters today who grew up a long time after his playing career know all about him. He was football, and you know little if you don’t know about Pelé. And hey, his real name always stuck in my mind and it got me a guaranteed point at any pub quiz that asked it, which happened a few times. Sometimes we only won by that one point. Thank you very much., Edson Arantes do Nascimento. Some people really are irreplaceable He never stopped appearing at football events, even turning up at the Arsenal in the 80’s to create an enchanting and never to be forgotten day for all of Highbury. It would stay forever a highlight of your life and yet, for him, as everyone says, he was just as happy to see them. John Devine's biggest achievement in football, holding Pele's leg One thing is certain, the world is poorer for his passing. So few ever manage to rise above their profession as he did to encompass the whole planet in his arms. Muhammed Ali was another and it is hard to think of anyone else. I have lived through special times, that their times were my times, I saw them when I was very young and their sporting achievements made my life exciting whilst connecting me to the entire globe. Maybe Jack could have been the second greatest number 10 And so Pelé’s smile is gone. I owe him a massive amount for lighting up my life and all of my little area of Dublin - Whitechurch and Ballyboden. We grew up wanting to be Pelé, every time we kicked a ball we imagined we could mimic his movement, his grace, and if we slammed in a goal then we could, for an instant, be the entrancing Brazilian who defined football. Tchau, tchau Pelé e muito obrigado.