Nicolas Anelka will soon be playing professional soccer in China. This is surprising because Nicolas Anelka is still a talented, effective soccer player who would help all but about 10 teams in the world. This is not surprising because Nicolas Anelka is going to a place where they'll pay him an exponent of a number it'd take me years to count to.

In an era of Galácticos, oil ball, and 300,000-a-week wages, it's easy to view football as a revolution. When something is wrong, blow it up and start over. Avram Grant not working out? Try Ancelotti. Ancelotti not the ticket? Go for AVB. If Ronaldo and Kaka aren't enough to be beat Barcelona, maybe Ronaldo, Kaka and The Special One will be.

It's remarkable how varied soccer teams' attitudes towards possession are. Obviously, no team is more deeply committed to possession in all situations than Barcelona, even though that commitment can cost them, as it did in the recent Clasíco, when Real was handed their early goal via an uncharacteristically dumb and easily-intercepted pass from Víctor Valdés.

Sócrates is dead. It's hard to see how anyone could be surprised. It's also hard not to think that he died because he wanted to, since Sócrates always seems to have done what he wanted to. He smoked incessantly because it gave him pleasure; he seems to have ingested vast amounts of alcohol for the same reason.

A proposal: when we wile away the hours compiling lists of the Greatest Ever Footballers, we are doing a disservice to this form of discourse if we do not take its premises seriously. To pretend that we can go on existing without this genetically-hewn proclivity for reducing the world to an Excel document is both futile and obscene, and we've no interest in arguing as to whether Grand Ranking is really a childish waste of everyone's time.

I've watched Diego Maradona's final World Cup match (a 2-1 victory over Nigeria played in Boston) at least ten times. Nigeria pushed Argentina back early with plundering counter-attacks, one of which led to the match's first goal a sumptuous chip that had more than a whiff of offside to it. Maradona was imperious that day though, Napoleonically strutting around the confetti-flaked pitch, drawing fouls, and making key passes for both of Argentina's goals free kicks finished by Claudio Canigga.

"The goal stands!" exclaims Martin Tyler as the crowd at the Santiago Bernabéu rains exaltations of joy over the pitch. Cristiano Ronaldo shakes his head in frustration; the keeper retrieves the ball, and sets up for a goal kick.

The above sequence has never happened in an actual soccer match, but it happens too often in EA Sports's latest approximation of actual soccer, FIFA 12.

You need not hear what orders he is giving
to know if someone has authority,

you have only to watch his mouth:
when a besieging general sees

a city wall breached by his troops,
when a bacteriologist

realizes in a flash what was wrong
with his hypothesis, when,

from a glance at the jury, the prosecutor
knows the defendant will hang,

their lips and the lines around them
relax, assuming an expression

not of simple pleasure at getting
their own sweet way but of satisfaction

at being right, an incarnation
of Fortitudo, Justicia, Nous.

I begin with a basic and ironic premise: when dealing with racism, we too often think in terms of black & white. No, not black people and white people, but rather innocence/guilt, right/wrong, good/evil. The most dangerous aspect of evil is its ability to snuff out empathy, even for its own evil bad-ass self.

If Arsene Wenger's career was a kung fu movie, we would be in the part where the search is on for the villain who poisoned Arsene's rice. Taking cues from the charismatic Frenchman, all eyes would be on the usual suspects, the media, referees, disloyal players, Roy Keane, Sam Allardyce, and the most obvious targets, those pin-stripe-suited figures throwing around Scrooge McDuck money for fun.

European Championship qualifying group B was a strange one: Ireland beat Armenia who beat Slovakia who beat Russia who beat Ireland (while poor fourth-seeded Macedonia looked on and whimpered). The logical progression would have been for a match to be played out between twenty-two footballs kicking a man around the pitch.

Expressions of regret at missing a chance to score require, in almost all circumstances, contact between (a) one's two hands and (b) one's head. It is never appropriate to employ one hand only to demonstrate one's dismay and/or wrath. Parts of the body other than the head may be touched, but only after manual contact with the head.

Anyone who has crossed from the leafy district of Hertfordshire to that of Brockhall Village will probably have been struck by the sharp difference between the natives of the respective provinces of Arsenal and Blackburn. The peasant of Brockhall is short, stopping, sullen; he looks at you from under his brows, lives in flimsy huts of poplar wood, does labour-duty for his master; never goes in for trade; eats badly, wears pleated shoes.

Like every aspiring plutocrat who loves AC Milan, I sometimes fantasise about owning the club. I have big plans for it. Investing heavily in the youth programme. Engineering unbreakable bonds of affection between players and club. Brokering a creative and generous understanding between our ultras and local government.

There's a odd aspect of history that I'm often drawn to think about. It's the degrees-of-separation game extended through time. Consider this as an example: I know a woman who as a teenager in Jamaica met T. S. Eliot, whose grandmother she lived next door to him in St. Louis remembered her great-uncle John Adams, who once, when living in Paris, met Voltaire at the theatre.