Tag Archives: Goals

Why I Hate Messi and Ronaldo

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Ok, well, I don’t really hate them. I don’t think you can be a real football fan if you hate them. For example, some aspects of Ronaldo’s character do get on my nerves from time to time, but I can’t stay ignorant of the fact that the dude is a footballer of a historic caliber, and I feel really grateful that I had the opportunity to follow his whole career.

But still, having said that, I do hate them in a way. Or actually, I hate their truly mind-fucking goalscoring numbers, which really changed the way we look at other players, past and present.

One of the many fetishes that I have is browsing through Wikipedia and looking at the statistics of different footballers. Wiki is a truly great site, and it has much stats-related information. I love looking at the tables with all the appearances and goalscoring data, and in several cases they also have assists data. Unfortunately, in Messi’s case – they don’t :-(.

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Why I am embarrased to be an Italy fan

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No, it’s not because they lost to Costa Rica and were eliminated at the group stage in the last World Cup.

In football, I have three loves. At the club level it’s Chelsea and AC Milan, and at the international level it’s the Italian national team.  My relationship with the three of them started at about the same time, right when I started to become interested in football. Italy captured my heart at the 1996 European Championships, the first time I watched football, and Chelsea & Milan did it in the following season, 1996/7.

Eric Cantona, one of the greatest football players among the philosophers, has a famous saying: “You can change your wife, your politics, your religion, but never, never can you change your favorite football team”. And even though I wasn’t aware of this saying until a few years ago, it makes sense intuitively. How CAN you change your favorite football team? Continue reading →