The Archive

Ben Lyttleton looks at what's going on behind the glitz and glamour in Spain

Spanish football looked in a healthy state when two billion fans tuned in to see David Beckham sign for Real Madrid last month. After all, the England captain had joined the biggest club in the world to play in the best league in the world. But Beckham’s arrival has coincided with a financial crisis in the Spanish game that Catalan daily El Periodico described as: “Total ruin, immense debt, crippling of the sector, zero credibility with the banks as well as on­going investigations by tax officials.”

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Organised football in deprived parts of London and other cities is giving refugees and recent immigrants a chance to build a sense of community, explains Steve Wilson

Skipping past a second challenge just inside the op­position’s half, Gazza looks up and sees the keeper marginally off his line. He lets fly from all of 35 yards and peels off in wild celebration. After shipping three cheap goals, this effort, added to his free-kick from a similar range, has pulled his team back into the game and the final ten minutes now promise to be tense.

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A side rooted in London’s Bangladeshi community will be playing four rungs short of the Conference this season. Matthew Brown traces the rise of Sporting Bengal

As footballing milestones go it probably won’t rank up there with the first FA Cup final or England’s World Cup win, but the acceptance of an east London amateur team into the ranks of the Go Travel Kent League marks a breakthrough of no little significance for one section of the footballing fraternity.

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Just one level beneath the Swedish top flight, Assyriska Föreningen are the highest-ranked immigrant-based club in Europe. Marcus Christenson reports

Assyriska Föreningen in Södertälje, south of Stockholm, was founded by Sweden’s Assyrian minority in 1971 with the aim of helping new immigrants settle. The society provided translations and information on the cultural and social aspects of Sweden and created four different sections – culture, youth, women and football – within a few years of its foundation.

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If you missed the 1978 World Cup final and don’t want to know the score, look away now. Al Needham's dad preferred the seaside to the match and didn't know the etiquette

The film Field of Dreams is about the sacred bond between father and son and the perverse ways they express their love – namely, by chucking a ball at each other. It’s deep. It’s meaningful. It’s absolute bollocks.

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