The Archive

League restructuring in Italy has been discussed for several years but it is now coming to fruition. Paul Virgo reports

After a long fight to save their marriage, Serie B finally accepted it had irreconcilably broken down in August and agreed to an amicable divorce from the Italian top flight. Serie A chairmen had been threatening to walk out for years, as they looked on at the Premier League’s success with envy, only to end up half-heartedly agreeing to give it another try. But they showed they meant business this time when they appointed Maurizio Beretta, an executive from outside football, to run the top flight as an independent entity from next year.

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Saul Pope looks at the relationship between short-term solution, long-term planning and nationality in Russian football

Considering he was sacked by his club following a series of disappointing results, the warm send-off Dick Advocaat received from Zenit St Petersburg fans was unusual and pleasantly surprising. In a league where managers from outside the former USSR have struggled to make a serious impact and many have been fired within a few months, his achievements with Zenit should also not be underestimated.

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The 1974 World Cup fixture between East and West Germany was a unique encounter during the Cold War era – but meetings were more frequent than the official history suggests. Paul Joyce looks back to the little-known Olympic qualifying competitions and reveals the political manoeuvring behind the remarkable Geisterspiele (ghost matches) of 1959

Most history books refer to East Germany’s 1-0 victory over West Germany at the 1974 World Cup as the only game between the two countries. Strictly speaking, however, it was already their sixth encounter. Before this, the Federal Republic and the GDR contested a series of pre-Olympic qualifiers with a Cold War intensity that made disputes about the composition of the 2012 British Olympic football team look like a vicarage tea-party.

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Cameron Carter assesses the latest flickerings on football's moral compass

Just over this short summer, several individual events or trends have been declared “good for the game” by journalists, managers, bloggers and FIFA presidents. Sepp Blatter used the phrase to describe Real Madrid’s surely booze-fuelled spending binge. In the British press, a series of journalists running on empty queued up to declare that John Terry’s transfer to Manchester City, if it actually happened, would be “good for the game”. Elsewhere it was ventured that a second powerful spending force in Manchester would benefit pretty much everyone in the living world. It is all very well bandying this phrase about when your editor requires a 500-word opinion piece by lunchtime but it doesn’t appear that anyone has done a scientifically applied cost-benefit analysis on the subjects. Here, three arguable propositions are measured in brutally clinical conditions in order to determine whether they are, empirically speaking, actually good for the game.

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One club's promotion to the Argentine top flight also means the return of an infamous hooligan gang, as Sam Kelly writes

It was, perhaps, fitting that when Mariano Echeverría scored the only goal of the match away to Platense, which confirmed Chacarita Juniors’ promotion back to Argentina’s top flight, he celebrated in front of empty stands. The match was played behind closed doors – and in La Plata, well away from Platense’s stadium in the north of Buenos Aires – because of security fears surrounding the Chacarita barra brava (hooligans).

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