FourFourTwo UK January 2023

Hope you’re enjoying the novelty of a first winter World Cup. Due to publishing deadlines there’ll be no mentions of Qatar this issue, but we’ll have a diary next month. Instead we turn our attention to domestic matters and the top of the Premier League, where Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal are still sitting top of the tree – the Spaniard, who worked under Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, is now leading his former boss by five points. We analyse what Arteta is doing so right and ask if they can lift their first title since 2004. With the break in the campaign, we saw it as a perfect opportunity to cast our eye over all 20 Premier League sides and see how they are doing going into the festive and New…

FourFourTwo is walking through London with Martin O’Neill, trying to remember the name of John Cleese’s third wife. “It wasn’t Connie Booth, the one he co-wrote Fawlty Towers with – I think he’s on good terms with her,” O’Neill muses. This wasn’t the conversation we expected with a double European Cup winner, but he seems happy to talk about pretty much anything. The former Nottingham Forest player and Celtic manager had suggested meeting FFT outside Sloane Square tube station before wandering to a café – a pleasing throwback in itself, as few interviews in this modern era start so informally. Now 70, he has been living in central London since just before the pandemic. “We got here, then everyone started moving out,” the Northern Irishman rues. Since normal life returned,…

KIT ★ FASHION ★ ART ★ DESIGN ★ TECH CLASSIC SHIRTS CHRISTMAS JUMPERS £39.99 classicfootballshirts.co.uk Knitting and nostalgia combine to transform the tedium of office Christmas jumper day into a tribute to retro royalty. This year, CFS’s charity collection has swelled to 30 including Andriy Shevchenko at Milan (right) and Henrik Larsson at Celtic. Picking just one is the hard bit. 92 SCRATCH-OFF MAP £13.99 amazon.co.uk Time to tick off that rainy night in Stoke, Forest Green’s vegan burgers, the top-tier calorie burn of Newcastle away and the ‘what-am-I-doing-with-my-life?’ journeys to Brunton Park. ‘Doing the 92’ is some achievement and this satisfying scratch-off map plots your Football League odyssey to utopia. FOOTBALL MURALS: A CELEBRATION OF SOCCER’S GREATEST STREET ART £20 bloomsbury.com Coffee tables were invented for books like this.…

WEIRD WORLD OF FOOTBALL 1 “RAY PARLOUR, IS THAT YOU?” When Middlesbrough hosted Newcastle United in a Tyne-Tees derby clash in December 1998, two of the crowd had a secret plan. Newly promoted Boro had signed Paul Gascoigne from Rangers that summer and lost just two of their opening 15 Premier League matches, in an odd start to the campaign which yielded 10 draws in their first 18 games in all competitions. Relentless stalemates didn’t keep the crowds away: among the 34,000 at the Newcastle fixture were stripper Rachel Sadler and pal Vanessa Richards, who both invaded the pitch, charging towards Gazza “in an attempt to cheer him up”. With Sadler wearing nothing but a G-string, and Richards sporting an increasingly revealing Santa costume [above], the plan sort of worked…

“I SAW THE DUTCH LOSE 4-1 TO ENGLAND AS A FAN AT EURO 96. TWO YEARS LATER, I WAS PLAYING” V. Setubal 2-2 Boavista May 4, 1997 Primeira Divisao “My first match is for Boavista against Vitoria Setubal – you didn’t expect me to choose this one, did you?! [Laughs] The Leeds manager George Graham was in the stadium – he saw me for the first time, he was scouting me. I scored, and from that moment he liked me, and a deal to join Leeds started to get going with my agent. I scored 20 league goals for Boavista that season. I couldn’t stop scoring, we had a really good year, with me and Nuno Gomes up front – we played a lot of games together. Back in the…

1 MURDER MYSTERY Interviews in matchday programmes can be pretty dull. Not at Newcastle, who came up with ‘Tombola’, whereby players would draw numbers out of a hat featuring 50 “fresh and far reaching” posers to let chaos reign. Asked how he’d dispose of a dead body in an hour, Florian Lejeune embraced the format almost too well, Clive. “I’d put it in the boot of my car, drive out to sea, put it on a boat and throw it into the sea with weights on it,” he explained, rather worryingly. 2 PEAK OF KNOWLEDGE Oldham’s former right back Connor Brown probably would struggle to dispose of a body – he was still struggling with what day of the week it was. Taking on the club’s assistant groundsman in a…