The Seven Deadly Sins Of Football, As Presented By The Guardian

Ever the innovators, The Guardian are running a series of fascinating football supplements in the coming days entitled ‘Foul Play: The Seven Deadly Sins of Football.’

Starting today, the series delves into the shadier side of the beautiful game with tales of football misdemeanours based around the seven deadly sins: Greed, Pride, Wrath, Envy, Gluttony, Sloth and Lust.

The Guardian have pulled out all the stops for this series, bringing together all the collective knowledge of their team of award-winning sports writers from both The Guardian and The Observer, and in scratching beneath the shiny face of the modern Premier League era they find that football has a secret history of the odd, the wild and the downright sneaky. It looks like being a really entertaining series.

Here is an excerpt from one of the supplements, on Sloth:

Sloth #49: Pistone gets a sheep’s heart

Secret Santa theoretically provides an opportunity to get a colleague an ingenious Christmas gift (or spend as little as possible safe in the knowledge that they won’t know you are the skinflint). But in 1998, Newcastle’s footballers took it as an opportunity to tell other members of the squad what they really thought of them. Especially those pesky foreigners. The Italian full-back Alessandro Pistone was given a sheep’s heart, as a sign of his perceived commitment, or lack thereof. Duncan Ferguson, who had done time in 1995, was given a prison’s shirt. And Dietmar Hamann – he’s German, you see – unwrapped a copy of Mein Kampf. Suddenly a deodorant set from Superdrug didn’t seem so bad.

The seven part series is available in The Guardian starting today. We strongly recommend that you check it out.

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