England lost at the semi final stage again but what does how players are shaped for professional football tell us about how they perform? 

England lose when they play a team more cunning than them but they have a system designed for obedience.

Kids will be dreaming of playing in a World Cup but what is the reality of professional sport.

On Free State today we look at how the attritional nature of succeeding in sport can break so many who try to make it. And we ask what it does to those who succeed.

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And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make. It made sense for Paul McCartney and it makes sense when we consider why we engage with whatever gives us pleasure in life. 

On Free State today we look at the meaning of sport. Why winning doesn’t matter as much as how sport makes you feel. Does this mean Mayo can win the All Ireland? Does it matter?

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Jeffrey Donaldson sits in a prison cell, waiting to be sentenced for the most horrific crimes. 

On Free State today we look at the rise and fall of Jeffrey Donaldson.

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Donald Trump destroys everyone in his orbit. His transactional nature means that eventually whoever is close to him is ruined Gianni Infantino might soon know how that feels.

‘I regularly discuss matters related to the FIFA World Cup with the President of the United States,’ Infantino said as he explained how FIFA had lifted the suspension on the USA forward Folarin Balogun. 

“During our conversation, I explained that there was an ongoing legal process involving FIFA’s independent judicial bodies and that the case would be decided in due course by the competent bodies. That is how FIFA’s system works, and it is a principle that I will always uphold.”

On Free State, we look at those principles and how they fit in with Donald Trump’s. The White House insists that Trump’s only concern is the American people. As he spends every hour thinking about them, he just happens to have made more than a billion dollars from crypto in his first year back in office.

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You might not have heard of Helenio Herrera but without him, you might not have the modern football manager. Herrera was a lowdown and a dirty football manager who wasn't so much a pragmatist as an absolutist. He was full of contradictions: he hated his players having sex but he ruined many lives with his own pursuit of sex. He would do anything to win and stopped at nothing for victory. He wasn't a pragmatist, it was more pathological than that.

On Free State today, Dion talks to Richard Fitzpatrick about HH and how he shaped the modern football world, for better and for worse. Although not a lot of it was for the better.

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The World Cup continues to captivate. France stunned the world with their performance against Sweden, with a display of pace and skill that was as good as anything witnessed in the competition.

But what is the hidden World Cup? What is the secret anguish that this and all sporting events facilitate.

In their final episode in this series looking at the dangers of online gambling, Joe and Dion look at how the dopamine hit is so carefully regulated and how the ebb and flow of sporting events became another hook.

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How many times do you look at your smartphone each day? How often do you pick it up? How aware are you of how it makes you feel?

On Thursday’s Free State we looked at how gambling has got out of control.

Today Dion and Joe examine how what we are dealing with is an entirely new phenomenon, a supercharged addiction of smartphone and gambling, a dopamine hit of huge power. 

We look at the demographic most affected and ask when will people do enough to help them?

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The 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act prohibited betting on baseball, basketball, American football and most other sports in nearly every US state.

In 2018, the Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional, opening up America to a stampede of betting.

On Free State today we look at how the gambling industry achieved such prominence and how they made gamblers feel that the problem wasn’t them it was you. 

With tens of billions being bet on the World Cup and prediction markets like Polymarket allowing people to take a position on everything, we wonder where it will end?

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