time for another quick glance around the world’s football landscape.

reina plays down liverpool’s title chances – soccernet.com
i honestly would love to see liverpool finally end their 20 year wait for their 19th english top flight championship, for two reasons: 1) it would put an end to this mundane run of manchester united and chelsea titles , and 2) it would finally shut up all of the liverpool faithful and their whining and bitching. but sorry ‘pool fans, this doesn’t look to be your year either. especially when you’re starting keeper doesn’t think it’s “realistic” to talk of titles with the current squad. ouch.

political football – times.co.uk

the debate about tapping up youth players continues, and this piece argues against the ideology that fifa and uefa are using in their approach to prevent another kakuta incident from happening. the author argues against michel platini and sepp blatter’s “french socialist model of football,” which looks to prevent young players from leaving their small clubs for europe’s elite level clubs. not exactly defending the european powers’ policies, the articleshows the danger of preventing those very policies might pose for the game.

brown admits tigers strikers could depart on loan – soccernet.com
the biggest assh**e of a coach in england, hull city manager phil brown, has admitted that he will likely loan out some of his strikers after some successful summer signings, including american starlet jozy altidore. good news for jozy. those rumored for loan moves include club record signing daniel cousin and caleb folan. i’ll admit that this isn’t even really that big of news, so why did i include it? the story includes the quote of the season so far from brown:

if you look around most clubs are rounding their squads out to about 25. you can only play 11 so that means 14 unhappy bunnies.

thierry henry pulls the strings of france’s puppet leader domenech – guardian.co.uk
an interesting theory that i think accurately describes the current atmosphere in the french national team camp. seriously, domenech has to be a moron. to have a group of players so talented and be so unsuccessful seems impossible (although, i think we can all remember steve mcleran and his england squad). i mean to have only scored 11 goals in world cup qualifying with the following attacking players seems even treasonous: henry, benzema, ribery, gourcuff, trezuguet, etc. it’s a miracle really that he hasn’t been fired yet. so i can’t really blame henry for criticizing him and taking control of the team one bit.

inside the nike boot room – youtube/nike
though this video is a year old, it’s still gives a really an awesome insight into how nike hand-makes the custom boots of the world’s best players. a few years back nike made the intelligent decision to hand-make all of their top-end shoes in italy, and though i’m not getting custom boots, i can attest that it’s made a world of a difference. a very interesting clip.