Football films tend to be as underachieving as Newcastle United. But Neil Wills has found a few that make the grade

Mention the term “football films” to an infinite number of monkeys and they will turn in unison from their typewriters and bellow, “Escape to Victory – aaaaargh!” They’d be right too, of course. Aside from the fact that it offered a truly surreal mix of Bobby Moore and Sylvester Stallone, it is not easy to forgive a film whose actors could not play football and whose foot­ballers could not act. Pelé actually compounded the crime six years later by appearing in something called Hotshot, whose only virtue lay in successfully making Victory look art-house by comparison.

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Dear WSC
I found the article on the relative fortunes of football and rugby league in WSC 162 fascinating, as personally I feel these two codes are the two sports in the UK with most in common – and by the way the performance of Doncaster Dragons is much improved, and they should be the ones feeling prosperous and loved. However, it might have been an idea to illustrate the piece with a photo of an actual rugby league match. It’s not the “Giants” playing at the McAlpine, but a rugby union world cup qualifier between England and the mighty Dutch. There are probably still a few RL fans who would happily lynch you for this!
Stuart Bromwich, Sittingbourne

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Ian Plenderleith discovers a brave new world of websites

If you only buy World Soccer to pore over results and league tables from impossibly distant lands, but despair that the scores are usually two months old, then help is at hand. The website of the Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation is a football statistician’s wet dream of both archived and bang up to date results and standings from anywhere in the world where a football is kicked in earnest.

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Britain's Asians are vastly under-represented in professional football. Peter Briley and Laura Manning report on an emerging footballing community 

There is not one professional first team foot­baller from Britain’s 2.3 million Asian com­munity. It is widely agreed that the main factors contributing to this absence have included the lack of Asian parental acceptance of football as a legitimate profession, the fear of racism within the game and, most importantly, scouts short-sightedly disregarding Asian areas and leagues.

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He shares a birthday with the club whose fortunes he turned around. Filipo Ricci gets beneath the tanned skin of Lazio chairman SergioCragnotti 

Distinguishing features Sven-Goran Eriksson lookalike. Same hair dye, same artificial sun tan 365 days a year. Cragnotti is not as familiar with the Italian language, however. He has taken ages to build up a stand-offish, reserved image, but now avoids any contact with microphones and notebooks.

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