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.
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.
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.
The government believe the Football Disorder Bill can end hooliganism, Ken Gall reports from Westminster
One of the great travesties of history is the legend of King Canute, who is remembered – if at all – as some kind of megalomaniac who thought he could control the tides. Canute, however, was actually the wise man of the tale, attempting to demonstrate to his credulous courtiers that there were limits to the events over which even a monarch could legislate.
Clubs are spending too much cash on foreign players
Here are some opinions that you might have read in the papers recently. There are too many foreigners playing football in Britain at the moment. There aren’t enough foreigners playing football in Britain at the moment. There are too many of the wrong kind of foreigners playing football in Britain at the moment.