1. They used to worry that the Adjarabet Arena, with its sinuous arches and illuminated exterior, would turn into something of a white elephant. Batumi, after all, is a quaint resort town; it had little need for a 20,000-capacity stadium. Dinamo, the soccer team that was to call it home, generally required seating for only half that number.

And then, at the start of April, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia arrived.

“The city lived from one match to the next,” Tariel Varshanidze, a prominent voice in Dinamo’s fan scene, said. “The atmosphere changed radically.” Matches in the Erovnuli Liga, Georgia’s top division, suddenly had the same air as “top Champions League games,” he said. “It was fantastic.”

The New York Times’ Rory Smith on how Khvicha Kvaratskhelia’s anarchic style has taken Italian soccer by storm, transforming Napoli into a title contender. 

2. Soon after Micah Richards bursts into the room, with booming laughter, the former England footballer shows a different side to his character. His sadness after his soaring career faded, then ended when he was 31, is accompanied by acceptance.

“I can hardly walk now because of my knee but I wouldn’t change it,” Richards says of the injury that ruined his life as a footballer. It began with giddy promise when he made his international debut as England’s youngest-ever defender at 18 but, as Richards insists now, “I would sacrifice everything for football. I know that sounds ridiculous, and I should have a knee replacement, but I wouldn’t change a thing. That shows my devotion to football.”

Richards, who is 34, smiles and spreads his hands as if embracing his second life as a successful pundit. “Everyone knows that without football I wouldn’t be anything,” he says.

Check out Donald McRae’s fascinating interview in The Guardian with Sky Sports pundit Micah Richards.

3. I want you to close your eyes. Picture the scene. It’s a farmhouse in Lecarrow in Roscommon. It’s a fine house now, built 100 years ago or more, but in it lives an old man, 82 next birthday. He’s a bachelor, never married. A fine big house for a family that never came. He’s the last of his people, scratching out a living there on the shores of Lough Ree. Can you picture him?

A dog beside him as he sits by the range (the dog is not long for this world either, but maybe that’s laying it on too thick.) He used to go to the games of course – he thought the world of Dermot Early senior, God be good to him. Never saw a man like him under a dropping ball.

But since the eyes started to go, he’s happy enough to watch away on the telly, or maybe rely on Willie Hegarty on Shannonside … and now you’re telling that man he has to go and get a satellite dish, to watch the Rossies on *spit* Sky *spit* Sports?

Writing in The Irish Times, Ciarán Murphy explains why it’s hard to see the new GAA media deal being a good one for the consumer.

4. A few minutes before the start of the Dutch Grand Prix, which was held last month in baking sunshine at Zandvoort, a beachside racetrack within commuting distance of Amsterdam, Toto Wolff, the principal of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 team, walked out onto the starting grid. A Grand Prix begins when a row of five red lights above the start line is extinguished, but, for a short time before, the track is a twenty-thousand-horsepower mob scene.

Each of the unearthly, long-nosed machines is attended by a mobile I.C.U. of generators, steel trolleys, laptops, tire blankets, and uniformed mechanics in crash helmets and flameproof gear. Umbrellas shroud the drivers’ cockpits. Billionaires stalk the grid. Race marshals hold clipboards in red gloves. The noise is beyond belief: helicopter blades, high-speed wheel guns, the desperate howls of the cars, the massed emanations of the waiting crowd.

In Zandvoort, loudspeakers laced the sky with dance music. The afternoon was humid; the air felt saturated. Wolff was at home. He is tall, dark, and Austrian. He could pass for a Sacha Baron Cohen character or for someone who breezes past you in the airport, smelling good, wearing loafers and no socks. He worked the grid in a white shirt emblazoned with the Mercedes star and the logos of twelve other corporate sponsors, black pants, team-issued Puma sneakers, lovable smile. He kissed people’s cheeks, touched elbows, gave impromptu TV interviews, and yelled last-minute thoughts to his drivers. Somewhere in the fumes was death. Two Formula 1 drivers were killed in the span of three years at Zandvoort in the seventies. At one point, I found myself by the pit lane when three cars leaped out, red tail-lights flashing. The speed was like a whip.

The New Yorker’s Sam Knight on Toto Wolff, the compulsive perfectionist behind Mercedes’s Formula One team. 

5. Laporta has exposed the club’s financial future to the fickle luck of football. That is what it was based on. This was the warning right from the summer. For all that money influences the game more than anything else, its effect isn’t complete, especially not when you are up against clubs of a similar financial profile.

That leaves a considerable possibility of error. That is why a certain safety net has to be built into any financial plan, an allowance that things can go wrong. This hasn’t seemed the case at Barca from the outside.

It is why the scale of the plan in the summer felt very risky at the time and now seems farcical.

Put bluntly, going out of the Champions League will cost Barca tens of millions this season. It could cost them so much more in the medium term. It prevents the club from restoring the global profile through stars in the manner that Laporta aimed for.

The Independent’s Miguel Delaney on why Barcelona’s summer transfer gamble is already at risk of failure following their costly Champions League troubles.