The Archive

With the Berlin Wall coming down in October 1990, Paul Joyce recalls the first Bundesliga season where West Germany's teams met those from East Germany

The long-term significance
After reunification in October 1990, this was the first season in which teams from the former GDR joined the West German football pyramid. Only two East German sides (Oberliga champions Hansa Rostock and runners-up Dynamo Dresden) were allowed into the Bundesliga, which was expanded to 20 clubs. A further six GDR clubs entered a regionalised second division.

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Cameron Carter settles down to watch the 2010 Carling Cup final and spends most of his time wondering whether it is worth his attention

Historically speaking, it is not always possible to determine something’s significance at the time. Who knew that an off-hand shooting of some old Austrian guy would lead to the First World War? Or that Howard would be a non-expendable member of Take That? The BBC experienced the same dilemma with the Carling Cup final. While whoever has the rights to the FA Cup coverage each year repeatedly informs us it is a competition everyone really still strains to win, the Carling Cup’s significance is an even tougher media sale.

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The Premier League recently rejected a proposal to introduce play-offs for Champions League places. David Wangerin explains what even its consideration tells us about the state of the game

You could be forgiven for thinking that the most important thing about English football this season is not who will win the Premier League, but who will finish fourth. To many, it’s a slightly surreal notion and one not easy to reconcile. Have we become jaded by the monotony of the same four teams jousting for English supremacy? Or is the Champions League casting an ever-larger shadow on the domestic game?

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Bottom of the league with no points from 27 matches in the Unibond Premier Division, Owen Amos takes a look at what has gone wrong for the ambitious Durham City

According to the Northern Echo, Durham City are “the worst team in the country”. While that may not be true, they are by some distance the worst team in the Unibond Premier Division, one step below the Conference North. After 27 games, Durham had won none, drawn none and lost 27. They’d scored 16 goals and conceded 121, an average of over four per game. In fact, the only match they’ve won all season was at home to Washington – who play three divisions below – in the Durham County Challenge Cup.

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Derek Brookman looks at how a Champions League experiment fared (and failed) in the Netherlands

The play-offs were introduced in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 2005-06 season for an initial period of three years, with the intention to extend this if they proved successful. The second- to fifth-placed teams would scrap it out to determine who would be the second Dutch representative in the Champions League (the champions qualified automatically), while the next four sides would contest qualification for the UEFA Cup.

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