{youtube}B3X8XnIRkBE{/youtube}
The money that added flair to Manchester City’s functionality has put Barney Ronay in a quandary
Imagine how boring being a billionaire must be. Not so much the process of becoming a billionaire, which is presumably studded with the thrill of ticking off those billionaire-entry marks: beachhouse-overload, mistress-profligacy, servant-saturation. But just being a billionaire, sealed within your own frictionless seven-star world, conveyed by helicopter gunship from lobby to suite to private island. This must surely be quite dull.
Paul Joyce studies how the Berlin Wall divided the city arbitrarily and changed the lives of clubs, players and fans
Although post-war Germany was divided into two states in 1949, football clubs on both sides of the border were determined to maintain sporting relations. Despite political tensions between capitalist West Germany (FRG) and the socialist East (GDR), numerous cross-border friendlies took place on public holidays in the early 1950s. These proved massively popular with supporters on both sides of the divide. In October 1956, 110,000 East German fans filled the new Leipzig Zentralstadion to watch 1.FC Kaiserslautern, whose team contained five players from West Germany’s 1954 World Cup-winning side, beat SC Wismut Karl-Marx-Stadt 5-3.
Nick Dorrington ponders whether the return of the great Basque manager Xabier Azkargorta will inspire a new generation of Bolivian players
The 2011 Copa América seemed to illustrate the closing gap in quality between the traditionally stronger and weaker nations in South America, but there was one team to whom that didn’t apply. Bolivia were eliminated at the group stage with just a solitary point to their name and now, four matches in, lie dead last in the qualifying group for the 2014 World Cup.
A series of fortunate events helped Al Sadd secure a highly unlikely victory in the Asian Champions League, as John Duerden reports
The celebrations didn’t rival those from December last year, when Qatar was named host of World Cup 2022, but Al Sadd’s victory in the 2011 Asian Champions League has been painted as a triumph against the odds – inside the tiny peninsula at least. Elsewhere on the continent, however, the surprise was not a welcome one. All agree that the final itself was a thrilling affair. A crowd of 42,000 packed into the Jeonju World Cup stadium in South Korea to see local team Jeonbuk Motors host the west Asians.