Sports Poets Society

Nur Photo/Getty Images; Eugenio Pingo/Alamy Place to be:  the Giuseppe Sinigaglia stadium, situated on the edge of Lake Como (left). Como 1907 are changing Serie A – and all because an Indonesian producer wanted a new TV show, writes Rory Smith ‘It’s like Disney: the stadium is the theme park,  it’s where you can experience the magic of Como’    - Mirwan Suwarso, club president 18 Oct 2026 - THE OBSERVER / Sport Rory Smith Certain conventions tend to apply in these situations. As president of Como, the backwater team with the pocket-sized stadium that now find themselves face-to-face with Manchester United in the Champions League, Mirwan Suwarso would be forgiven for wanting to take a victory lap. More than that, in fact: doing so is sort of compulsory. Ordinarily, for example, he might be expected to explain how everything that he and his colleagues have built since buying the club – adrift in the fourth tier of Italian football – in 2019 has actually been the produ...

Robbie Jay Barratt/ Getty Images  Imbalance of power: Bigger benches and more  substitutions  favour  those clubs with the money to build deep squads. Competitive balance comes not from capping losses, but reversing the great shifts of the Nineties: stricter homegrown quotas, a limit on loan deals and, yes, reducing number of substitutions that managers can make It’s not possible to even out how much money teams have...  far better to alter how they can use it 18 Oct 2026 - THE OBSERVER / Sport Rory Smith The problem then, as it is now, was the power of a Big Six. In the mid-1980s, Britain’s pubs were dominated by half-adozen breweries. Between them, the six – Allied, Bass, Courage, Whitbread, Grand Metropolitan and Whitbread – ran 34,000 pubs. They were all, in the argot, ‘tied’: compelled to sell only drinks from their rentier-brewer. As a result, the Malt Cartel held the beer trade in its grip. A three-year investigation by the Monopolies and Mergers Commis...