Pre-Season: Show Your Support

With this year's FIFA World Cup in Qatar schedule for winter (in the UK at least) the league season will start a bit earlier than usual.  

Teams have already begun their pre-season with many friendly fixtures taking place throughout July.

This can be a great opportunity to see a big club play a smaller club, ok so you might not watch 90 minutes of the entire first eleven, but you can often get a closer and better view of the game, for a less expensive ticket price, and maybe even see the next star as managers try out up and coming players and trialists. It is also a great way for smaller clubs to generate some much needed income.

A good example of this was last Fridays York City v Middlesbrough pre-season game. A number of Boro's top players were fielded for at least half the game, and fans were treated to a five goal thriller, as Boro won by 3 goals to 2. York didn't surrender and pushed for a draw until the final whistle.

So if you are looking for something to do without having the usual four-year summer World Cup to watch, then we suggest checking out your local club's pre-season fixtures as well as the UEFA 2022 Women's Euros. 

UEFA Women's EURO 2022: Predictions and Progress

 

The 2022 Women's Euro tournament kicked off last week and has already proven an exciting tournament with several high scoring games, not least England's 8-0 win over Norway last night.

As usual we have made some scoreline predictions as well as rolling dice to compare our skills with random chance.  As usual we are so far outperforming the dice!

This time round we subscribed to the official UEFA gaming league, which can be found here

Kevin currently leads with Alex a few points behind, scrapping it out with the random dice - for credibilities sake let's hope that he doesn't come last in this three-way league!

England are some people's favourites to win, and we hope that they do. BUT there are some great times, particularly France who have really gelled.

The entire tournament is held in England, which is consistent with the recommendation that we made in our book Foundations of Managing Soccer Events, that the English FA should consider hosting a major women's tournament. You heard it here first folks!

Picking a winner is not an easy task, but one thing we can predict is that this is going to be a feast of football.