AMERICA IS A COUNTRY WITH A GREAT PASSION FOR SPORT. They have the largest leagues for basketball, baseball, ice hockey and American football. However, soccer has never been the most popular of…
Month: July 2016
Welcome to Bergen. Surrounded by breathtaking fjords and magnificent mountain ranges, Norway’s second biggest city attracts hundreds of thousands visitors a year. Many of them arrive by cruise ship in Bergen’s harbour a…
Few footballers carry themselves in the same way as Daniel Agger did. A legend at Liverpool and Brøndby, this is his story of what could have been
Late in the evening of 27 April 1993, a plane is climbing out of Libreville. On board the Zambian Air Force Buffalo DHC-5D are 18 members of the Zambian national team, four…
WHILE THE WORLD was in the death grip of the worst economic depression in history in the summer of 1934, fascist Italy hosted the second FIFA World Cup in what remains the…
This feature is part of The Tsars of Football THERE’S GREED, and then there’s Vitaliy Mutko. When the Russian Duma’s Audit Chamber completed a review of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver,…
It was around 380BC that one of Western philosophy’s founding fathers, Plato, of Classical Greece, first speculated about the purpose of art. In his dense investigation into society titled The Republic, it is…
When on 15 June 2016 Polonia Warsaw sealed their promotion to the II Liga, the third tier of the domestic football pyramid, following a 2-1 aggregate defeat of Górnik Wałbrzych in the…
THE DATE IS 7 July 1974 in a packed Olympiastadion in Munich. With the scoreboard showing 1-0 in favour of the dominant Total Footballers from the Netherlands, Bernd Hölzenbein latches onto the…
FOR MANY, 11 September conjures up memories of infamous moments that have been seared into modern history. In the USA, in 2001, the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center; in Chile,…
As Stockport County played out a 0-0 draw with Curzon Ashton in their last game of their National League North campaign, Leicester City were on the brink of winning the Premier League.…
Momentarily paralysed, the familiar looking man in his mid-30s had to rely on the help of strangers to get home. This wasn’t a one-off occurrence. In extreme instances, an ambulance had to…
There’s a point that all addicts reach known as the moment of realisation. The point when amidst the mental fog a sudden ray of sunshine breaks through to provide clarity. Mine came…
All eyes were drawn to Cristiano Ronaldo when the final whistle blew after 120 gruelling minutes. The injured captain burst into tears on the touchline as the emotion hit him. Portugal had…
Founded in 1906, Torino Football Club are perhaps the most tragic team in the history of football. Many who have heard of Torino know them solely for the Superga disaster, but in truth,…
BERLIN: AUGUST 1961. An already fractious relationship between the Allied powers and the Soviet Union descended into chaos and crisis as the Soviet-controlled government of East Germany erected a makeshift wall along the…
Asian football has been hit with match-fixing scandals aplenty over the last decade. On 23 May, yet another scandal made the news. Three things made this scandal different: first, it involved one of…
The date is 4 December 1996 and the time is 20:28. Grasshopper Club Zürich and Ajax Amsterdam line up on the pitch of Hardturm stadium in Zürich. The Champions League tune blares…