Search: 'Eintracht Frankfurt'

Lyon attempt to cement their domestic dominance by floating on the stock market. Steve Menary reports

Olympique Lyonnais dominate their domestic scene in a manner few can match. They have won the past five French titles and are on their way to a sixth, 16 points clear with nine games left at time of writing. Yet though they are routinely tipped as potential Champions League winners, Lyon have always fallen short. To provide a bigger challenge to English, Spanish, Italian and German clubs, they want to quit the 42,000-capacity Stade Gerland and move to a new stadium seating 60,000 and costing €300 million (£200m). They decided a stock-market flotation was the best way to finance the move. But why did the European Commission, which is interested in promoting greater ownership of clubs by fans, force the French government to change the law in order to help Lyon out?

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A new generation of football magazines has appeared in Europe of late, breaking the monopoly of established, establishment titles. The first of an occasional series looks at the subversion and humour attracting readers in Germany. Philipp Koster reports

The magazine (literally 11 friends) began in April 2000 with a print run of 2,500. There was no marketing department or organised distribution, just two Arminia Bielefeld fans with the desire to produce magazines. Before that we’d had a small fanzine called Um halb vier war die Welt noch in Ordnung (At half three the world was still OK) – and noticed that supporters liked a certain type of writing: ironic and critical of the growing commercialisation of football. We naturally thought that these fans needed a national voice.

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As the World Cup approaches, the possibility of violence is a concern but so is the ability of the German police to tell the difference between a fan and a hooligan, writes Paul Joyce

On November 27, 53 Polish hooligans drove to a wood in Briesen in north-east Germany for a pre-World Cup fight with 45 hooligans drawn from the region’s Hell’s Angels and nightclub bouncer scene, one of whom had been involved in the assault on French policeman Daniel Nivel at the 1998 World Cup. Although German hooligans had previously been keeping a low profile at home, fears of a resurgence of organised violence had already surfaced last March, when more than 40 Germany followers were arrested after rioting during a friendly in Slovenia. 

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In an extract from his new history of German football, Tor!, Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger recalls the sensation of the 1971 Bundesliga bribery scandal

Despite his name, the German-born Spaniard Horst Gregorio Canellas was not a Cosa Nostra don but an importer of bananas. Legend has it he supplied the DFB (German FA) headquarters. He had a raspy voice worthy of Al Pacino and was a chain-smoker, despite persistent asthma problems. He had also been the pre­sident of Kickers Offenbach since 1964.

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Borussia Dortmund have just set a transfer record that should last. Matt Nation, the first of our far flung correspondents to get to the postbox, explains why

Günter Netzer recently complained that the Bun­desliga was lacking “personality players who com­mand a big fee”. While the rest of the country pondered the link between Alan Shear­er and the word “personality”, Borussia Dortmund snapped up the Bra­zilian forward Amoroso for DM 50 million (£15.7 million) from Parma.

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