This Italian season is different from its predecessors in at least one significant resepct. Filippo Ricci reports

Castel di Sangro is a village in the centre of Italy. Not far from Rome, heading east, lost in the mountains. There are 5,635 inhabitants. There is a football stadium, obviously, named Teofilo Patini, that can hold 2,100 people. At the end of last season Castel di Sangro were promoted to the second division, Serie B. Never in the history of Italian football has a small village team got so high up the league. When they beat Ascoli away in the final of the promotion playoff, the entire population waited to greet the team on their return.

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Steve Davies takes a look at the figures in the annual review of football finance, which as expected offer good news for the big boys and bad for everyone else

Premier League clubs are on the gravy train while the Endsleigh League drift toward oblivion. That, at least, is the commonly held view, and the report prepared by Deloitte & Touche into football finance provides an opportunity to see whether it is supported by the facts.

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Peter Taylor's appointment as England Under-21 manager caught many people off guard. Mark Winter explains why Dover's loss could be England's gain

If I were a follower of a moderate Premiership club, I might have expected it. I’m en route to an away game, listening to Radio 5 Live, when the bombshell is dropped. We’ve just lost our manager, on the eve of a new season, to the FA, where he'll be taking over responsibility for the England U-21 side.

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Mark Perryman returned from Moldova wondering if he had been in the same country as the one described in reports of England's World Cup game

Foot-long Moldovan cockroaches ready to nibble your naughty bits was what we were promised, courtesy of the Sunday Mirror, Kalashnikov-toting bandits on every late night street corner, according to the People. Such nonsense wasn’t restricted to the tabloids either, the fearless Paul Wilson faxed this local delicacy back to the Observer: “Like some of the female citizens out looking for business on the streets at night, Moldova prefers to be seen in a dim light.”

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The atmosphere at football matches isn't what it used to be

Another season, another FA committee may be in the offing. They’ve looked into bungs and tax fiddles (investigations so thorough and complex that we’re still waiting for definitive conclusions a couple of years later), now it’s the turn of the teams of marketing managers to look into the atmosphere or, rather, the lack of it, at grounds on matchdays.

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