True Football Stories, Part 3: The Hurricanes

Stavros Garkos: A vile, vile man

Not many will remember the ill-fated World Soccer League. Adam Bushby reminds us of the world's biggest sporting clusterfuck.

When a 12-year-old girl inherits a football club in the World Soccer League after her father mysteriously disappears, it’s a recipe for disaster really isn’t it. It’s also a recipe for repeated kidnap, annexing entire towns for enterprises such as paper mills or just for fun, attempted murder, robbery, assault, more kidnap... in short, it’s a fucking shit storm, it really is. Not that the young Amanda Carey could take much, if any, of the blame. Little did she know when she got the deeds to the Hispanola Hurricanes that she would have to overcome a daily war of attrition against one of the most evil men to have walked the earth. After all, why would she, she was only 12.

True Football Stories, Part 2: Harchester United

Some or all of these men may kill each other

It’s now been seven bewildering years since Harchester United’s light went out. Rob MacDonald pays tribute to perhaps the greatest dream team of them all.

Has ever a team burned so violently and tragically as Harchester United? As rich in history as the vibrant purple that adorned their La Viola-inspired kits, perhaps the most remarkable factor was that the club only truly existed in the national consciousness for a fleeting ten years. But what a ten years – seemingly a lifetime’s worth of ups and down compressed into a relatively tiny space, like a neutron star, or a tin of corned beef.

True Football Stories, Part 1: Shaolin Soccer

Yet another straight red.

Our True Football Stories series kicks off with a remarkable piece of coverage from John Dobson...

TEAM EVIL STRIPPED OF TITLES IN DOPING SCANDAL

In a frank confession on Oprah Winfrey's chat show, head coach and former star player of Team Evil, Hung, admitted widespread doping offences during Team Evil's long reign as Hong Kong Open Cup champions. Hung has already been stripped of his chairmanship of the HKFA and is now likely to be subjected to criminal trials for corruption, fraud and drug offences. Prosecutors are likely to accept plea bargains and a five-year term, but Hung is likely to receive a life ban from all football activity. Additionally, Team Evil players will also face doping tribunals with the possibility of sine die bans being imposed.

Charity begins in Munich

Bayern fans pay less for tickets so they have more money to buy shite like this

If there’s one thing that makes for a popular feel-good story in football, it’s the ‘gesture’. Not the Theo Walcott-style ‘gesture’ for, though very funny, it incites small-minded idiots and that would never do, but the grand sort of gesture that generally ends up in players or clubs giving fans money.

A (very selective) review of the year

Oh boy...

It was most refreshing to see 2013 become the year in which football finally started to move away from the hysteria over managerial movements, controversial on- and off-pitch incidents, minute scrutiny on even the tiniest perceived slight or indiscretion, ridiculous transfer fees and generally threatening to disappear forever up one of those particular proverbial arseholes at any given moment. EXCEPT THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN, DID IT.

Second (manager of the) season syndrome

'This is going to be a piece of pi- oh'

Following the undignified scenes at the weekend (we haven’t heard ‘you’re getting sacked in the morning’ sung with such venom since a Christmas party we were at a couple of years ago), it was good of Tim Sherwood to prove that the new dawn at Spurs is going to look suspiciously like the dusk that preceded it. SHERWOOD OUT!

A Load of Balls

World cupping

It’s perhaps one of football’s greater ironies that FIFA spend a great deal of time trying to make the game produce more goals and excitement to the general detriment of draws, only to spend an inordinate amount of other people’s time and money on one that is so pointless and overblown that from an initial level of anticipation at the start, viewers are forced into to a general state of torpor and indifference by the close. A bit like this paragraph.