The multibillion-pound mirage

While it was hardly Boca Juniors v River Plate at La Bombonera, Sunday’s eagerly anticipated match between Liverpool and Manchester City rated about 8.5 on the official Football Daily feist-o-meter by the Premier League’s comparatively tame standards. The visitors walked out to a loud chorus of pantomime booing and some mildly amusing banners reminding them of their serial cheating, there was some defiant “doing” of the Poznan in the away end and … er, that was about it.

For all the faux media concern, one of the most hyped Premier League matches of all time passed off without anything much in the way of flashpoints. We’ve seen more rancorous, heated physical exchanges at the judging of the best Victoria sponge at the local church fete.

Fair play to Xavi Simons for taking a business course (Friday’s Football Daily, full email edition), but if he’s serious about ‘using his time in the best way possible’ he should read What they Teach you at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton and What they Don’t Teach you at Harvard Business School by Mark H McCormack. As the joke goes, these two books contain the sum of all human knowledge” – Pål Jørgen Bakke.

As José Mourinho has already, in the space of just two months, done his infamous ‘por qué’, printing out a piece of paper to ‘prove’ he’s right to the media and refusing to show up at the press conference after Vinícius Júnior rightly, and hilariously, had a great goal chalked off and was sent off in the same move for...

Read the original report at The Guardian.