Mazzocchi’s nightmare debut sums up Napoli’s crumbling title defence | Nicky Bandini

Last year’s runaway Serie A champions are ninth and their new signing’s debut lasted four minutes during the defeat at Torino

Pasquale Mazzocchi spent a lifetime building up to this moment. One of six kids born to his parents in Barra, a suburb of Naples, he could easily have gone down a dangerous path. “In some neighbourhoods on the edge of the city, when you struggle to make it to the end of the month [financially], with a big family, unfortunately you might do the wrong thing,” the defender told La Repubblica in 2022. “Young people tend to go this way.”

Football offered him a different direction, a road that would take him far from home. By nine years old, he had started working for a fruit stand after school to save up for boots. At 11, he joined Benevento’s academy system, moving an hour’s drive from home and seeing his parents just once a month. His next club was Hellas Verona, 440 miles away to the north. Continue reading...

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Vivianne Miedema’s Manchester City WSL debut just had to be at Arsenal

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All eyes will be on the league’s record goalscorer as she returns to the club where she spent seven successful years When the fixture list landed for the Women’s Super League season and the standout “Arsenal versus Manchester City” glared conspicuously on the opening weekend page, one player’s name was on almost everybody’s lips: Vivianne Miedema. The WSL’s all-time leading goalscorer spent the past seven years of her career at Arsenal, so where else would her new team be travelling to for their first league game of the season other than the Emirates, to face a club whose fans have adored her since she arrived from Bayern Munich in 2017? Continue reading...
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Increasing diversity among leaders in football is more than a moral priority | Jason Stockwood

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Diverse businesses perform better – so why is sport so slow in appointing leaders from across every section of society? On Thursday 22 October 1992, I attended an event in Crewe to hear Simon Armitage, a newly published poet, read his work. I remember the date because I still have the ticket and poetry recitals were not a normal night out for those of us who grew up in the pubs and clubs of Grimsby in that era. It was a night that changed my life as I glimpsed a possible world that could coexist alongside the heavy-drinking, sometimes scrapping, football-loving culture and the constraints men set themselves back then. Some constraints were self-imposed, others were rooted in the ignorance and prejudice of the time. This was typified when, years later, my mum found out I liked the creative arts and her response was to ask if I was gay. A bizarre conclusion, unthinking and uneducated, but not unusual then. Simon was one of the first poets I saw – a cool young Yorkshireman who wrote a...
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Football Daily | Cup final day is no longer unmissable, but this one means all in Manchester

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Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now! Saturday, Wembley Way. The tribes will gather, demarcated by red and blue – though Mancunian fashion by-laws dictate all adult males must wear white ankle socks below thigh-revealing shorts, should temperatures top 15 degrees. It’s likely to be bad-tempered; it always is between these two, but rail strikes and lengthy motorway delays from Congleton downwards are hardly likely to ease the mood. Continue reading...
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