Few players have made more impressive starts at a club than scoring 30 goals in half a season; few have then done less to earn their wages, writes Gordon Cairns
Marco Negri’s four years at Glasgow Rangers is one of the strangest episodes in the club’s history. Signed from Perugia for £3.5 million, the Italian striker scored 30 goals before Christmas in 1997-98, then barely made another appearance as he saw out the remainder of his four-year, £18,000-a-week contract.
Strange brown envelopes at Genoa, ominous red ink at the bank for Torino, taxing times for Messina: it has been an angry summer in Italy, as Matt Barker explains
It’s difficult to know for whom to feel the most sorry. The long-suffering fans of Genoa who, still bleary-eyed from celebrating their return to Serie A after ten years, discovered that the club had been accused of match-fixing. Or maybe the Torino tifosi who, having survived a play-off against Perugia, were looking forward to life back in the top division, only to be told that Il Toro were to face charges of false accounting.
The victims of Heysel have been all but ignored by Juventus while the disaster’s lessons are unheeded in Italy, reports Matt Barker, to the frustration of the relatives
The pairing of Juventus and Liverpool in the quarter-finals of the Champions League has been heralded in the Italian press as an opportune moment to remember and pay tribute to the 39 lives lost on Heysel’s Section Z terracing.
It's been 20 years since the island had a team in Serie A, but as Matt Barker writes, it looks as if Palermo and Messina will both be in the top flight next season
W ith Milan’s 17th Scudetto done and dusted, Italian attention has passed in recent weeks to the promotion chase, or rather marathon, down in Serie B. From next season Italy’s top division will expand to 20, a consequence of last year’s shenanigans that followed threats of legal action when Siena fielded an ineligible player. The Italian football federation reinstated the teams relegated from the second division (and took Fiorentina up from Serie C2 with them). Five sides will now go up from an expanded B, with a sixth playing off against Perugia.
Nowhere is the women’s game more buoyant than in Germany. Margot Dunne reports on the homecoming for the World Cup winners and the hopes for a full-time league
Six months ago, all the average German male knew about women’s football could be written on the back of a beer mat with a blunt bockwurst. But all that was before October 12 last year when Nia Künzer’s golden goal in the final against Sweden shot her country to World Cup glory. The team returned from America and were overwhelmed by the kind of frenzied reception to which their male counterparts grew accustomed in recent decades. The trophy was paraded in front of thousands of screaming fans in Frankfurt; there were chat show appearances for coaches Tina Theune-Meyer and Sylvia Neid; and endless magazine covers featured the new world champions in all their fresh-faced wholesomeness. Journalists voted them “Team of the year” at Germany’s Sports Personality Awards – a title bestowed the previous year on Rudi Völler’s men.