From Port Vale to Port of Spain, and now Los Angeles. Andy Fraser charts the progress of a Caribbean cult hero born in Stafford

When Chris Birchall signed for LA Galaxy this summer, it marked a new twist in a once-promising career that seemed stalled in the lower leagues. While Birchall had all but disappeared in the UK following his unlikely World Cup heroics for Trinidad & Tobago three years ago, across the Atlantic his performances for his adopted nation lingered longer in the memory. On signing the Stafford-born midfielder, Galaxy’s coach Bruce Arena spoke of his longstanding admiration for the player Trinidadians hail as a national hero and affectionately refer to as “Me Mum”.

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Having acquired sporting representatives in Austria and the US, Red Bull have turned to Germany. Paul Joyce assesses the fallout

No city exemplifies the decline of East German football since reunification more starkly than Leipzig. Lokomotive Leipzig, European Cup-Winners Cup finalists in 1987, went bankrupt in 2004 and had to restart at the bottom of the league pyramid. They now play in the same fifth division as former GDR champions Sachsen Leipzig, who entered insolvency in March with debts of €3 million (£2.7m).

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National tensions are expressing themselves through Belgium's two biggest clubs. John Chapman looks at the latest instalment

Anderlecht’s Marcin Wasilewski has twice made the front cover of Belgium’s leading football magazine in recent weeks: once when he was using his elbows to great effect against Standard Liège and then being stretchered off against the same club.

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A new and impressive stadium is available for Euro 2012 but, as Jonathan Wilson explains, it may not actually see any football

Coming in from the airport, you drive over the brow of a hill and there before you, the Donbass Arena appears, a pulsing blue diamond embedded amid the slag heaps of industrial Donetsk. It is a magnificent site and it is, in truth, a magnificent stadium, but you do wonder whether it has become a metaphor for itself, a lone and perhaps superfluous point of light in a city struggling desperately with recession.

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Josh Widdicombe watches a remade film about football fighting

“London – The Eighties” the caption reads at the start of The Firm, and it is with brushstrokes this broad that Nick Love goes on to paint his latest picture of violence in days of yore. If coverage of the recent fighting at West Ham has taught us anything it’s that there are still a lot of people that find football hooliganism quite the turn on. Combine this with a yearning nostalgia for the Eighties that can surely only be shared by Norman Tebbit and T’Pau and you have The Firm.

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