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Search: 'Pro Patria'

Stories

Taking ownership

Matthew Barker reports on a desperate but imaginative protest movement that relied on solidarity from the local community

In late February, players, staff and supporters of Lombardy side Pro Patria staged a three-day sit-in protest at the club’s Stadio Carlo Speroni. In recent years the Lega Pro Division Two (fourth tier) team has endured a litany of miserable luck and disastrous financial mismanagement. Occupying the stadium was a last attempt to save a dying club and a famous name in the Italian game, even if i tigrotti (the little tigers) last played in Serie A in 1956.

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Supermarket sweep

Hard-up clubs are establishing partnerships with other businesses in order to make ends meet. Robert Shaw reports

The lucrative business of representing and trading Brazilian players is no longer the exclusive preserve of a motley assortment of ex-players and wide boys. These days investment funds and a range of businesses, including supermarkets, are moving in.

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Spartak Moscow

A History of the People's Team in the Workers' State
by Robert Edelman
Cornell University Press, £21.95
Reviewed by Jonathan Wilson
From WSC 278 April 2010

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Listen to some fans of Spartak Moscow and they would have you believe that their club almost single-handedly defied the state machine, that the 12 league titles they won in Soviet times were each clear and decisive blows for liberty and independence. Spartak's founder and long-time president, Nikolai Starostin, is hailed as some sort of sporting saint, whose years in a prison camp in Siberia were a form of martyrdom for the spirit of freedom he kindled in others.

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Football against the enemy

On the 40th anniversary of the “football war” Jonathan Barker asks if a World Cup play-off really led to armed conflict

On December 29, 1968, Honduras, widely regarded one as of the lesser lights of Central American football, caused a major surprise in the 1970 World Cup eliminators by overcoming a Costa Rica side that had been favoured to qualify for Mexico. Their opponents in the next round would be neighbouring El Salvador. Seemingly of little interest to the outside world, the three games the countries played in June 1969 would become the focal point of simmering tensions between the two governments, with the subsequent conflict coming to be known, however misleadingly, as the “football war”.

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Dutch courage

A spate of death threats, with bullets sent in the post, is hurting the image of football in Holland. Derek Brookman reports

Many people, if asked to choose an appropriate adjective for Dutch society, would plump for “tolerant”. We all know about the views on prostitution and soft drugs, and the country also has a centuries-old tradition of welcoming those deemed not to ­conform elsewhere.

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