After ten years of a united Berlin, Markus Hesselmann discovers that in football terms, Berlin still has an East and West feel

A pale young man with a strange haircut – short in front, very long at the back – and another in a hilarious star-spangled jersey made history with a handshake. On January 27, 1990, Olaf Seier, captain of 1FC Union from the GDR’s Oberliga, greeted Dirk Greiser, his counterpart at Hertha BSC, who were then playing in the Bundesliga’s second division. Two months after the Wall came down, 52,000 fans in the Olympic Stad­ium watched the first friendly between the two most popular Berlin teams. 

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Jamie Rainbow tells us about Teletext on the internet, the two main teams in the East Midlands and advice you need to invest in football

Combine the immediacy of Teletext with the scope of the internet and you’ve got the perfect medium for keeping abreast of all the latest football news. Or so you might think. The reality is something of a letdown. Although the Teletext site provides links to ­specially written club columns and is available for longer than the televised version, that’s about all it has to offer. 

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Milan have crashed out of Europe in the early stages. Richard Mason reports on how their charismatic owner is trying to prevent this ever happening again

Milan’s failure to secure even a place in the UEFA Cup after the first phase of the Champions League is richly ironic. They are the Italian champions, and yet they are the only one of the three Italian sides in­vol­v­ed not to qualify for the next stage.

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Celtic and Ajax are making noises again about the possibility of North Atlantic League, but Ken Gall is not to sure about the whole idea

In his unjustly neglected 1911 classic The Devil's Dictionary, the great American satirist Ambrose Bierce accurately defined once as “enough”. Sadly, however, Bierce’s assertion that there can be too much of a good thing seems anathema to the individuals in charge of the big European clubs. 

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Cris Freddi takes us through the seasons he'd rather forget

We’re talking mainly postwar here, if only because there were fewer competitions before it. England had a bad season in 1928-29, beaten by a last-minute goal direct from a corner at Hampden and 4-3 in Mad­rid, their first de­feat by a foreign coun­t­ry – and 1901-02 was a bad one for everybody, especially the 25 who died in the first Ib­rox disaster. But ex­amples came thick­er and faster after 1945.

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