The Friday List of Little or No Consequence #161

Make mine a Coke...
5 World Footballers Who Think That Stripping To The Waist And Daubing Themselves In Day-Glo Body Paint To Advertise Pepsi Will Enhance Their Credibility

1. Didier Drogba



2. Thierry Henry



3. Fernando Torres



4. Lionel Messi



5. Frank Lampard



(Images shown in no particular order of masculinity.)

The Friday List of Little or No Consequence #1

Your name here...
Eleven Names You Used To See On Pitchside Advertising Boards in British Football Thirty-Odd Years Ago or So

1. National Girobank
2. Mornflake Oats
3. Bic Razor
4. Talbot (cars)
5. Bush Colour TV
6. Rizla
7. Visionhire
8. Daily Mirror
9. Kingsonic
10. Schreiber
11. Gillette Contour

Anyone got anymore to add to the list? Leave us a comment and tell us!

World Cup Memories #4

by Chris Oakley

And now a different sort of World Cup memory. We go back to the summer of 1998. People all over the world are gearing up for the Finals to be held in France and on their way from South America are the Brazilians.

Any true football fan finds no difficulty in conjuring up images of those yellow-shirted maestros and their amazing silky skills, but Nike obviously thought we needed some help.

So to publicise their new range of sports apparel, they created a fabulous TV commercial featuring the stars of the Brazilian team playing football in and around an airport.

It was inspired. We may not have all rushed out in our droves buying Nike t-shirts, but many of us did allow a broad smile to break out on our face as we watched Ronaldo and co. playing the fools in a non-footballing environment.

Sadly, like the end of the advert, Brazil's luck ran out in the 1998 World Cup Final, losing 3-0 to the host country, yet with a raft of similar adverts showing football stars doing their thing following on in its wake ever since, who's to say this advert wasn't a success in it's own right? I loved it then, and it's just as good when you watch it now.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1857284069598884079&q=nike+brazil

Bodyform for you. Sir?

By Smart

Another World Cup, another deluge of TV and Radio ads from purveyors of fine goods wanting us to purchase their wares.

The usual suspects are there - Coca-cola, McDonalds, the Scottish Tourist Board, and of course Adidas with Jermaine Defoe in goal (which seems like his best bet for Germany) – but more and more irrelevant companies seem to be jumping on the World Cup band wagon as it rolls into town. Annoyingly.

Continental Tyres- which is one of my ‘favourites’, and the best way they could find a link to football was to make the goalies gloves out of tyre tread. Genius.

It gets worse. Have you seen the Durex advert with the strapline “He shoots, he scores”? How about the SlimFast advert “Lose the equivalent weight of Michael Owen during the World Cup”.

The one that gets me every time however, is the slow motion footage of a female footballer doing an overhead kick whilst someone wails “WAAAAAAHHH BODYFORM!”.

You haven’t seen any of those? Well you wont have, as I made them up. But if you believed them does that prove my point?