FA Cup News (ITV)

Football is the biggest sport in the world. If you look at where sport is played most, people would say the United States. They have four major sports including American football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey. They do have football but it just hasn't caught on as much with the American people. However for many countries in many of the other continents including Europe, South America and Africa, football is a thriving , pulsating essence of our culture. Our TV screens, newspapers and internet web-pages are constantly bombarding us with football news, showing the popularity of the world's most popular sport.

In the Euro 2006 competition England played Germany and lost on penalties. This was obviously talked about a lot and on a show hosted football pundits it was announced that after the match Britain saw the biggest surge of electricity on record. This was due to an entire nation being glued to the T.V, and with the match ending in a bad result, everyone switched on their kettle to make themselves a hot drink. As you could imagine millions of England fans were engrossed in the match and they needed a cup of tea or coffee to console themselves afterwards. Some people have so much passion when watching their team play either internationally or at club level, that if there team loses it can ruin their day. Football touches millions of people all over the world, especially when major competitions like the World Cup are shown which brings millions of people together due to people being so patriotic when their country plays. However, sadly, passion can bring with it destructive behaviour as many world cups has seen fans clash with rival nations. In the 2006 world cup in Germany over 150 England fans were arrested in Stuttgart because of fighting against Germans. However it was blamed on hot weather and too much alcohol. England at the time weren't even playing Germany; it was just hostility between the two nations due to the wars many years ago. There is still ill feeling between the nations however football pundits like Gary Lineker said that the rioting will have been alcohol fuelled rather than actual hostility which is more than likely to be the case.

Football can truly capture an entire nation. Many football fans literally know everything about the game, and their lives revolve around football. They are constantly looking in the newspapers and on fan sites for fresh football news which could affect their teams success. However for some football fanatics it is just not enough to watch the football on the T.V, they actually spend thousands of pounds travelling to watch their teams play. In 2006 the World Cup took place in Germany, and saw 150,000 England Fans travel over and watch England compete. However this was short lived as they crashed out in the quarter finals against Portugal.

Since the recession started in 2008, it has brought about many tragic incidents such as the collapse of many businesses and organisations with existing companies having to lay off much of their work force. However due to its popularity no one thought that anything could happen to football as it is just such a lucrative industry. However February 2010 saw Portsmouth football club go into administration. This was the first club in English Premiership history that this has ever happened to. This was the story that dominated football news constantly for weeks on end. The club was reportedly in debt 70 million, owing the taxman a reported 12 million, with it emerging that the reason for the massive debt was because of buying too many players , and then vastly overpaying them. On Match of the Day Gary Lineker and Alan Hansen, both well known football pundits, showed that 131million pounds had been paid out for player’s wages in the past 3 seasons. Basically they had signed contracts with players like Peter Crouch paying them far too much and these massive salaries drained the club of money. In every papers’ football news section, mismanagement and overspending were blamed for the collapse of Portsmouth Football Club. Linking back to the recession this is a recurring theme with financial risk not being properly monitored and scrutinized lending to so many organisations collapsing. However no-one would have thought that this would have happened in arguably the greatest league in the world.

Football is reported on in so many different ways, the main ways being online, newspapers magazines and very often T.V. The T.V show Match of the Day which has been around since 1964 is one of the most popular football pundits show around today. It has featured hosts like John Motson, Jimmy Hill and the current host Gary Lineker. The show is on during the football season every Saturday and Sunday late at night. The show entails the host and its regular guests, who are usually former football players- such as Alan Shearer and Mark Lawrenson- discussing the latest football news and going over the highlights of the weekends football action. Usually it is looking through the weekends matches and examining the forms and players of different teams. It is a very good way of discussing sport as people like listening to likeable experts who have a great knowledge about the game. A reported 1.8 millions people watch Match of the Day every weekend, all in great anticipation to catch up on the results and latest football news which changes day to day.

This article was written by Ian Ryan who is the webmaster of footballbettingtips.co.uk. This website is tailored to those of us who enjoy gambling and want to learn about the best ways of going about it. This article is on football news and various other aspects of this vast sport. Please gamble responsibly when using the site and best of luck.