Wilson's World (of football)

On Thursday evening, Mexico will play South Africa at the Estadio Ciudad de Mexico and the 23rd World Cup will be underway. Most of the world will call it the Estadio Azteca, although these days its actually known, for sponsorship reasons, as the Estadio Banorte.

On Saturday, Scotland will play their first game at a World Cup since 1998, taking on Haiti at the Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. Most people are probably now aware, thanks to the controversy over train prices, that the stadium is not in Boston, but around 27 miles to the south-west. When I went there for an MLS game between New England Revolution and Chicago Fire in 2000, I was not. I’d seen the 1994 World Cup. I knew about the stadium in Boston.

The first season of the American Soccer League, 1921-22, may have been chaotic, but to an extent that was priced in. Very few new professional leagues, in whatever sport, pass off smoothly. Certainly at that point there was no great reason to believe that American football would take off to surpass baseball; soccer had a chance. The National Football League had begun just a year before the ASL.

For all the criticism of Arsenal's approach against Paris Saint-Germain, what else could they have done? This remains a squad with serious limitations. “Journalism,” the Spanish coach Juanma Lillo told Sid Lowe in Issue 0 of The Blizzard, “analyses everything via success — and as a result, journalism always wins. The analysis, the reports, are carried out via success so they’re always right. No one is looking at the process except through the prism of a result.” And not just journalism.

Football is a fluid world. Everything is changing all the time and that means that solutions are always having to change. There is no universal formula for success In football, there are very few absolutes. What works with a particular team in a particular place at a particular time does not necessarily work with a different team in a different place at a different time.

A cautionary tale of how dismal leadership has led a club blessed with enormous advantages into misery and the Championship Caligula’s Palace and Bridge is a painting among Tate Britain’s JMW Turner collection. It shows the ruins of a great edifice and, from it, stretching through the water, a vast, crumbling stone construction.

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Aston Villa enjoyed their night of triumph in Istanbul, but the dominance of Premier League clubs in the two lesser European competitions is becoming problematic It’s the modern world, so everybody’s always upset about something. Unai Emery, even, was unusually sharp in the press-conference after the Europa League final, demanding that a Turkish journalist who had suggested that Aston Villa had won easily show some respect to Freiburg.

There was a climactic game in Britain on Saturday, full of intrigue and drama, that engrossed the nation and will be talked about for years to come. But it was not the FA Cup final. A drab first half yielded to a more interesting second as Manchester City held off a spirited Chelsea to win the Cup for the third time under Pep Guardiola, but the match that captured the imagination was the finale to the Scottish Premiership season as two late goals allowed Celtic to pinch the title from Hearts.

This week saw potentially crucial games in title races in two different countries decided by VAR decisions late in injury time. In both cases the decision was greeted with howls of outrage and allegations of conspiracy. That some people believed VAR would remove controversy from the game seems absurdly quaint and misguided now. To recap, briefly, the two incidents.