Surreal Football

The most legendary chokes in football

Given Manchester United have more or less chucked the title away, having seen Manchester City chuck the title away, we thought it would be a good idea to do a sportsbook review of the best accounts of the most legendary chokes in football.

1. The Real Madrid Story, 1926-1998 (Breivik)

This heartfelt account of an arbitrarily particular time in Real Madrid’s history includes the famous title challenge of 1933, which started out like a cat on fire, and ended like a burnt cat. After just two matches, Real Madrid were ahead of their closest rival, York City, by a mathmatetically impossible two million points. Rumours of a deep corruption in the league were rife, but were never challenged as journalists were either ‘disappeared’ or ‘lazy’. In May 1942, halfway through an exceptionally long season, the wheels fell off. Ronaldo, both of them, were not yet born. Once this fact became known, Real Madrid struggled to score. For the rest of the season they scored only two goals, both of them by mistake. Picking up a further 0 points from 200 available, the title escaped their grasp. Real Madrid would go on to win the next fourteen titles in just thirteen seasons, but this failure has never been fully expunged from the memory, which is why you’ll not see any mention of it anywhere else.

2. Sonny Anderson’s Autobiography Sonny Anderson by Sonny Anderson (Anderson)

Sonny Anderson’s Autobiography Sonny Anderson by Sonny Anderson is a lazy joke stolen from High Fidelity, but we have a wordcount that we need to hit, and by Jove by Jove by Jove by Jove by Jove we are going to hit it. In this completely made up book, there is, conversely, an utterly true story of a title challenge gone to pot. Lyon were some points ahead, but they still lost the title in the end. Compelling.

3. Manchester United cede the title to Manchester City with a comprehensive Devon Loch job. (Booze)

‘When it goes there’s nothing you can do about it.’ True, to an extent. There’s not much you could do about this bottle job, with the exception of not obfuscating financial disaster, not wasting money on Ashley Young and actually playing Dimitar Berbatov. You could also not cultivate the most mentally weak Manchester United team of recent memory, and you could make some effort to set up a side that might at least deign to have a single shot on target against your main tital rivals. On the other hand, you could just ignore all those things and fundamentally tarnish a legacy that would not be fully comprehended by some thick fans for at least another five years. That’ll do.