Innehållsförteckning för FourFourTwo Annual 2024 från FourFourTwo UK

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t meant to be a story of freezing northern nights beneath the harsh glare of floodlights; of 50,000 Geordies racked with nerves as the men in black and white line up to the strains of Handel, the daunting prospect of tussling with a giant just seconds away. But then Newcastle were never expected to gatecrash the top four in Eddie Howe’s first full season in the St. James’ dugout. In this latest collection from the world’s leading football monthly you’ll discover how the Magpies reached the Champions League for the first time in two decades and what the future may hold for a state-backed outfit with seriously big ambitions. In the following pages we will also delve into Brighton’s remarkable ability to…

Boos rang around the Parc des Princes as soon as the final whistle blew to confirm Paris Saint-Germain were Ligue 1 champions. Mauricio Pochettino never imagined his first ever league title as a manager would be quite like this. Finally, six years after missing out on the Premier League crown with Tottenham, his dreams dashed on an incendiary April 2016 evening at Stamford Bridge, Pochettino had the championship that his managerial career deserved. In truth though, it wasn’t the start of something great, but an ignominious end. PSG would win the 2021-22 league title by a margin of 15 points but, knocked out of the Champions League by Karim Benzema’s dramatic hat-trick at the Bernabeu a month earlier, it wasn’t enough. Fans had grown so restless that many walked out…

Sarina Wiegman steps out onto the dew-soaked grass. Tracksuit on, stopwatches primed, it’s time to go to work. Her players stand, ready; a bag of balls awaits the morning workout. Wiegman has that serious expression she wears every morning, but being so focused, she doesn’t notice the faint sniggering from those who call her ‘boss’. Here at Dutch club ADO Den Haag, Wiegman’s second as a manager, players have planned a practical joke. Merel van Dongen, a brilliant full-back and future international, has a twin sister. That morning, her non-footballing sibling Sanne has put the training kit on, jogged out in her twin’s place and will partake in the session. It’s a risky ploy. Wiegman is all about success. Football is serious. Winning titles is serious. Training begins. Before a…

A sense of bemusement crept into the room as Paul Barber addressed Brighton & Hove Albion’s 300-strong workforce. The Seagulls’ chief executive had gathered his staff together to lay out his and owner Tony Bloom’s vision for the future on the south coast, and it wasn’t being met with universal agreement. Albion had just completed their first season back in the Championship, finishing a credible 10th in 2012, their highest league position in more than 20 years. But Barber wasn’t in any mood for backslapping and talk of consolidation. Instead, he was discussing what needed to be done for them to become an established Premier League side. It was a display of ambition that inspired some of the assembled group, although the headshaking and facial expressions among the cynics in…

If you were a manager and had Declan Rice in your team, what would you say to get the best out of him on the pitch? Express yourself, go out there and show everyone how good you are. A lot of coaches gave me similar advice when I was at West Ham – before games, Kevin Nolan was so good at that with me. He’d say some lovely words, then I’d head out and not think about anything other than playing well. When you say express yourself, do you mean on the ball? Yeah, because the Premier League is such high pressure, and it’s not worrying about that. In the early stages of my career, when I was 17 or 18, I was going out trying not to fail or…

If you come by car, you may spot it from the motorway. Milan’s landscape is flat, its buildings low, so the enormous beams that criss-cross the stadium’s roof, 80 metres from the ground, are easy to see from afar. If you come by tram, you’ll catch a glimpse somewhere along the Via dei Rospigliosi. Between the heads of your fellow passengers, you’ll see the easternmost roof beam as the ground draws nearer. It may be the trusses of the middle section or the tapered end that juts out over the Curva Sud, a wine-red blade slicing into the sky. Your first sight of San Siro will be most dramatic, however, if you come on the metro. Arrive in daylight and you’ll be met with a tantalising semi-reveal as you ascend…

BOLTON 2-0 WEST HAM 1923 When Wembley Stadium was first built, it was only due to remain open for a year. Officially known as the Empire Stadium, it was constructed amid the fields of Wembley Park for the 1924 British Empire Exhibition but was ready ahead of schedule, and so it opened for the FA Cup final on April 28, 1923. The showpiece fixture had previously been held at various venues including The Oval, Crystal Palace and Old Trafford, and Stamford Bridge for the previous three seasons. Around 53,000 people had turned up to Chelsea’s ground to watch Huddersfield beat Preston in the 1922 final. This time, an estimated 250,000 wannabe spectators flooded to the new stadium in north-west London – far more than the official capacity attendance of 126,047,…

Thirty years on, Tom Stone remembers the conversations at EA Sports ahead of them launching the very first edition of FIFA. It’s hard to believe today that there was ever any doubt the world’s most renowned video game organisation would make a success out of football. Back in 1993, though, before the birth of the Xbox or PlayStation, there was plenty of cynicism among EA’s top brass. “The Americans just didn’t get it,” reveals Stone, who was appointed as the company’s vice-president of European marketing that year. “They were like, ‘Soccer? What is that?’ They asked how many units this game was going to sell; they said football wasn’t very popular. We countered, ‘Actually, it really is’.” In the end, even EA’s European division, who had argued the case for…

MARTIN KEOWN The youth-team product made 27 appearances before being flogged to Aston Villa, unable to secure the extra £50 per week he wanted on his Gunners contract. “It was a matter of principle,” he said. Brought back from Everton in 1993, he won three top-flight titles over the next 11 years. SOL CAMPBELL An ‘Invincible’ in his first spell, the centre-half came up from League Two for a second go with Arsenal in 2010, after just one game for Sven-Goran Eriksson’s Notts County. He contributed 14 outings and even a goal in the Champions League – better than losing away at Morecambe, all told. JENS LEHMANN The German goalkeeper, also a member of the 2003-04 ‘Invincibles’, decided to retire after a shift at Stuttgart and, aged 41, was due…

“YEEEESSSS!” screamed Eddie Howe, thrusting a clenched right hand high into the air, on a late May afternoon at Stamford Bridge. A sweaty, sunburnt, occasionally topless Newcastle United away end responded in kind. On the final day of the 2022-23 campaign, Howe was punching a full stop to a remarkable journey in which the Magpies’ boss and the club’s new owners had transformed them from winless relegation fodder to a League Cup final and fourth in the Premier League. Howe & Co had unlocked the door to the Champions League in just 18 months. He had spent most of that time straight-batting tough questions about the club’s investment from Saudi Arabia, staying balanced through the highs and lows. As he walked across the pitch to applaud the supporters after the full-time…

It was a call that will remain with Mick Harford for the rest of his life. Manager of Luton Town in the summer of 2008, Harford was at Warwick University doing an FA diploma, keeping an eye on his phone. That day, he was waiting to discover the verdict of a Football League investigation into financial issues, which had blighted Luton for a decade. Only a week previously, the cash-strapped Hatters – preparing for a season in League Two after back-to-back relegations – had been hit with a 10-point deduction after the FA found the team’s former directors guilty of misconduct over payments made to agents. Today, Harford was braced for more bad news, but not quite to this extent. Luton had been deducted a further 20 points, the most…

ITALY 1-0 AUSTRIA (1934) Eight years after its opening, San Siro hosted three games at the World Cup. Germany overcame Sweden 2-1 in the quarter-finals before a paltry 3,000-’strong’ crowd, then 35,000 watched Italy’s semi-final against Austria. Enrico Guaita scored to steer the hosts towards a controversial Mussolini-inspired World Cup triumph in Rome days later. CAMEROON 1-0 ARGENTINA (1990) Diego Maradona’s Argentina turned up as world champions for Italia 90’s curtain-raiser, only to lose 1-0 to nine-man Cameroon, whose second red card was courtesy of Benjamin Massing’s sensational act of war on Claudio Caniggia. San Siro’s other five games at this tournament all involved West Germany; only one involved Frank Rijkaard’s spit, though. INTER 0-6 MILAN (2001) The pair finished fifth and sixth in the 2000-01 Serie A – Inter…

“So this is the catapult they’ll use to propel the dice onto the field. Over there, that’s the cannon they fire the ball from, to start the match. And then, for the final, there will be a tightrope walker who drops the ball from over the centre of the pitch.” FourFourTwo have arrived pitchside at Atletico Madrid’s impressive Metropolitano home and things have already taken a turn for the weird. We are speaking to Alberto Lambea, our helpful guide for the finals event of the Kings and Queens Leagues. Set up by Barcelona stalwart Gerard Pique, it is akin to The Hundred, only even more outlandish than its cricket equivalent. The seven-a-side football tournament, which features legends of the game, social media stars and every daft idea you could possibly…

If Peter Drury was in any doubt about the size of the job he was taking on this season, he needed only to look at the massive display on the wall in the foyer of his new home, Sky Studios in west London. “The greatest show on Earth,” it exclaims, alongside a photograph of Manchester City striker Erling Haaland, celebrating the fact that Sky is still the home of the Premier League, as it has been since the league’s launch in 1992. Until this season, the biggest games were accompanied by the dulcet tones of Martin Tyler – this summer, it was Drury who was summoned to take over the microphone and describe the action. “It’s a great honour,” the commentator tells FFT, as we meet him on what’s actually…

Since the formation of the Football League in 1888, just 38 players have reached the remarkable milestone of plundering 40 English league goals in a single season. As FourFourTwo goes to press, Erling Haaland is bidding to become No.39, which would make him – incredibly – only the third person in the past 50 years to achieve the spectacular feat. What’s more, neither of those two most recent goal-getters did it at the top level. Haaland, just 22 and in his debut season in the league, would be only the second player since the Second World War to register 40-plus efforts in an English top-flight campaign. Even true greats such as Gary Lineker and Thierry Henry never managed more than 30, and the modern-day Premier League record is shared by…

XAVI Time with Pep: Four years at Barcelona, as part of arguably the greatest club team of all time. Managerial career so far: Champion of Qatar with Al Sadd, then champion of Spain in his first full season at Barça. XABI ALONSO Time with Pep: Two years as a player at Bayern Munich. Managerial career: Three years with Real Sociedad B, then an impressive debut campaign with Bayer Leverkusen last term. MIKEL ARTETA Time with Pep: Three years as his assistant at Man City. Managerial career: Nearly four years at Arsenal, winning the FA Cup and almost toppling his old mentor in the Premier League title race. ENZO MARESCA Time with Pep: Man City assistant last term, as they won the Treble. Managerial career: Before working with the Blues’ first…

RAY HARFORD Kenny Dalglish’s former assistant (above right) was a pioneer as an English gaffer in the group stage of the Champions League, having stepped up to take the Blackburn job in 1995. They finished bottom, however. Leeds’ Howard Wilkinson and Besiktas boss Gordon Milne had taken part in 1992-93, but didn’t make it as far as the group stage. BOBBY ROBSON Wor Bobby joined Harford in failing to escape the 1995-96 group stage, at Porto. He suffered the same fate with PSV three years later, despite five goals from Ruud van Nistelrooy, but guided Newcastle into a second group stage in 2002-03 following a famous 3-2 win against Feyenoord. He remains the only English coach to manage more than one team in the competition. HARRY REDKNAPP ’Arry isn’t the…

Seven games, zero goals scored. By late February in 1990, Parma’s Serie A dream was slipping away. Weeks earlier, the club had been rocked by the death of their long-serving president, Ernesto Ceresini; now, they just couldn’t find the net. Even when they did score twice, against Reggina, a visiting player was struck by a missile thrown from the crowd and their opponents were awarded a 2-0 win. Over the entirety of their 77-year history, Parma had never competed in the top flight. Eighth in Serie B, after a 1-0 loss to Cosenza, their chances of making it in 1990 looked remote at best. A fortnight later, they lost at Barletta, another relegation-threatened team. Then the remarkable happened. Not only did Parma recover to seal the club’s first ever Serie…

Diogo Jota didn’t anticipate the carnage he’d unleashed in Liverpool’s technical area when he bagged a dramatic winner against Tottenham in April. In the space of the next 10 seconds, not only had the whole of Anfield descended into the kind of fervour borrowed from the Portuguese forward’s dreams, but Jurgen Klopp had landed himself in hot water for celebrating angrily in front of the fourth official – and pulled a hamstring in the process. It was a celebration that the Liverpool boss would rather forget, though he could hardly blame Jota for the injury. “He did, actually!” Jota tells FourFourTwo now, laughing as he reveals his manager’s tongue-in-cheek reaction. “I can’t tell you what he said, but when he saw me the next day, he pointed one finger at…

Vincent Kompany is surprising a lot of people – himself included. “My passion is scoring goals,” he told the Burnley squad in his first meeting after becoming their new manager in June 2022. That might have surprised the likes of Ashley Barnes and Jay Rodriguez, who only had memories of Kompany the player being hellbent on preventing them during their tussles with Manchester City. “My passion is a team who are looking at every opportunity to score,” Kompany went on to say. “It means every phase of the game. We have a plan, we have an idea to score a goal. I don’t care if it’s a throw-in or a corner we’re defending: we clear it, then we try to get up the other end and score.” Kompany surprised himself…

More than 27,000 people were on their feet in Mecca, shouting “Siuuu!” at the top of their voices, as Cristiano Ronaldo celebrated his fourth goal of the game in trademark fashion. Al-Nassr were 4-0 up at relegation battlers Al-Wehda, but the home side’s fans didn’t seem all that bothered that they were on the receiving end of a tonking. CR7 was the unquestionable star. In their previous home match at the King Abdulaziz Sports City Stadium a fortnight earlier, Al-Wehda had lost 2-0 to Al-Fateh in front of a crowd of only 2,455. The holy city welcomes around a million visitors each year for Islam’s famous Hajj pilgrimage, but this time people had come to worship Ronaldo. In bagging the 61st hat-trick of his career to put Al-Nassr in total…