The Archive

The Championship has been a strange division, full of surprises yet lacking in quality, reports Tom Green

It’s easy to see why away fans might enjoy visiting The Valley. Tucked away in a quiet south-east London neighbourhood, it’s a proper football ground, modernised and expanded but still on its old site five minutes from the train station. The club “superstore” is more like a corner shop and pre-match catering still tends to mean fish and chips or a kebab. While there are plenty of expensive players’ Range Rovers in the car park, the statue of post-war Addicks goalkeeper Sam Bartram that looms outside the West Stand is an effective reminder of the club’s history.

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They showed the power of money in football but ultimately tripped up by planning poorly for the future, writes Michael Whalley

As football crash-and-burn stories go, it’s hard to beat the implosion of Colne Dynamoes nearly 20 years ago. In the late 1980s, the Dynamoes – bankrolled by millionaire chairman-manager Graham White – charged through the non-League pyramid on a budget to make some Football League clubs jealous. And then, in August 1990, having been denied promotion to the Conference because their ground wasn’t up to standard, they folded overnight.

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Now definitively part of Germany, for a while the Saar’s status was in flux. And, for a fleeting moment in history, the region was also an unlikely centre of footballing attention, explains Paul Joyce

The golden age of football in the Saar – today a region of Germany that borders Luxembourg and France – was a by-product of the tug-of-war over its political status.

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The Italians are going off the English model, says Matthew Barker

Having long been the mantra of choice for would-be reformers of the sport here, adopting the modello inglese is beginning to lose its appeal. Italian reaction to the Premier League’s proposals for a 39th game generally chimed with Michel Platini’s widely reported comments about foreign owners, foreign coaches, foreign players and now foreign fans: that English football had finally gone a step too far and was steadily losing its soul.

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The Premier League is taking itself too seriously according to the Spanish media, reports Phil Ball

Official Spanish response to the 39th game has been muted, to say the least. This may be due to several factors, but chief among them is that Angel Villar, the immovable president of the Spanish Federation for the past 20 years, has other more urgent things on his plate, such as the hostility of FIFA, rival gangs of candidates for his job, and all manner of accusations ranging from corruption to the showing of favouritism to his much loved Athletic Bilbao.

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