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Search: ' Odessa'

Stories

The strange case of Igor Belanov – the least remembered Ballon d’Or winner

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Belanov possessed incredible power and speed but, playing for an unfashionable team, his 1986 Ballon d’Or was a shock – as was his rapid decline

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Euro sceptics

Saul Pope reports on Euro 2012 developments, and in some cases lack of development, in co-host nation Ukraine

Apparently there were tears of joy on the streets of Kiev when Ukraine was awarded the opportunity to joint host Euro 2012 two years ago. The surprise decision was seen as an opportunity for Ukraine to develop its crumbling infrastructure at the same time as boosting its standing within European football. However, UEFA’s recent warning that the country has until November 30 to prove that three of its cities are capable of hosting any matches suggests that the tears in the near future may be of a different type.

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Russian Vysshaya Liga 1992

Russia in 1992 and Spartak Moscow begin their era of dominance. By Saul Pope

The long-term significance
To a background of hyperinflation, widespread poverty and rocketing alcohol-related deaths, Russia held its first national championship for almost 80 years. That previous championship ended in controversy; Odessa were not awarded the 1913 title due to fielding too many foreigners. Now, with the country in chaos, football was hardly a priority – attendances were down almost 50 per cent on 1991. However, these were the first shaky steps towards creating what is now one of Europe’s richest leagues, the Russian Premier League, thanks largely to the vast amounts of money pumped in by those who got rich during the privatisation of former state industries, which started in 1992.

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Teach the world to sing

If you’ve ever been enchanted or mystified by foreign chants, then Ian Plenderleith has found your dream site. Learn Polish raps and Russian ragtime numbers, but steer clear of PSG and Sampdoria 

While football and music may attract the same kind of slightly sad, trivia-driven fan, these two cultural staples have always seemed ill at ease when they’ve overlapped. Yet the website Soccerclips.net , which has gathered more than 1,000 football songs from around the world, proves that while many attempts to fuse the two cultural staples have hopelessly failed, there are a ton of surprising gems that would probably make up a fat and eclectically pleasurable double compilation CD to stick on the car stereo for away trips.

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Igor Belanov

While the Czech Pavel Nedved celebrates being named European Footballer of the Year, Ian Farrell  remembers the rapid decline of a previous winner, from slightly further east

Such is the general view of football in eastern Europe today, it takes some effort to imagine teams from there electrifying the sport and win­ning admirers across the world. But in the mid 1980s, Dynamo Kiev, together with the virtually interchangeable USSR side also coached by Valery Lobanovski, took football to another level with a conception of the game as a living machine. Total Football meets applied mathematics. This lent itself easily to Cold War stereotyping – collectivised football played by faceless automata – but the play was a world away from the drabness of the Eastern Bloc, thanks mainly to Oleg Blokhin, Alexander Zavarov and, foremost among them, Igor Belanov.

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