Some international tournaments capture the imagination with their sheer energy and joy, featuring footballing flamboyance or ground-breaking, era-defining tactical revolutions. The triumphs and ...

His unruly beard and stylishly unkempt hair is straight California cool, a rockstar from a countercultural era, maybe the US in the 1960s. A Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead type figure. That’s some ...

Half-eaten dinners littered the floor of houses sheared in half. Pages from children’s bedtime story books fluttered hauntingly in the wind. On 19 April 2002, amidst the soft lunar landscape of the ...

KV Mechelen was founded just a few years into the 20th century and first reached the top echelon of Belgian football in 1921. A couple of yo-yo years ended in 1929, when they returned to the first ...

In these days of expanded World Cups, bloated Champions League competitions and saturated television coverage, most football aficionados are used to seeing regular clashes between the world’s current ...

It’s the afternoon of 9 July 1994 and the 64,000 fans in Dallas’ Cotton Bowl Stadium have just witnessed one of the World Cup’s most iconic scenes. In a moment of vintage samba finesse, Brazil forward ...

SOMETIMES YOU HEAR A FACT, notice a name or log a date in your memory in the obscure hope that one day, you’ll be in a pub quiz team, or watching a television programme where someone will say ...

Cast a backwards glance towards the exploits of the exalted Saint-Étienne squad that waltzed to eight titles in 12 years during the 1960s and 70s, the beguiling Jean-Pierre Papin -led Marseillais that ...

Mention the words ‘Bayern Munich’ and what comes to mind? A teutonic powerhouse? One of Europe’s elite? Serial winners? The Bavarians are, after all, a team that has won the Bundesliga 31 times – when ...

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. In the centre of the field, shaded from the autumn sun, a lean young man in white stands, feet apart; a slight hunch to his shoulders, a frown of concentration on his ...

Clad in a shirt that even kaleidoscopic tat-mannequin and occasional full-back Dani Alves might be moved to describe as “loud”, Basile Boli beams intently at a television superimposed onto the wall in ...

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