An American website could herald a new way of completely digesting football, as Ian Plenderleith describes

Looking back on historical sporting events, how much information do we really need to know? A California-based website called Match Analysis has been using its specially tailored software to provide detailed touch-by-touch breakdowns of football games, mainly to professional US coaches, for the past five years. Now it wants to expand that service to fans keen to focus on each kick, slice, header or fumble by every player.

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We take playing international football in England for granted but as Steve Menary explains it can be a long fight to be gifted that right

When West Ham signed Valon Behrami from Lazio this summer, he became the club’s first ever Swiss international. His status may change on December 19, when FIFA meet for a second time to consider a membership application from Kosovo, where Behrami was born in 1985.

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With the credit crunch starting to hit fan's pockets, attendances are suffering. Ashley Shaw looks into how Man Utd are trying to deal with the problem

The Manchester United Supporters Trust campaign to urge the Office of Fair Trading to investigate the ticket-pricing policy at Old Trafford represents the first skirmish in what could become a war between cash-strapped supporters and football clubs at all levels.

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Cameron Carter reviews a documentary on the life and tragic death of Britain's first black outfield player and army officer

We sometimes forget how hard our modern-day players have it – up to two games a week, fans throwing coins at them, contractually obliged to visit an infant classroom to encourage a healthy diet – and yet even this suffering pales in comparison with what one player went through in the early part of the last century. Walter Tull: Forgotten Hero and Walter’s Story (BBC4) were, respectively, a documentary and dramatisation of the life of an almost inconceivably strong-willed man who was the first black outfield player in the Football League and then the first black officer in the British army.

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With Aston Villa having an outside chance of breaking into the top four and the billionaire owners at Man City the four Premier League giants might be starting to panic

It’s rare that more than one of the Big Four has a bad weekend. That all should fail to score on the same day, November 24 – with Fulham and Newcastle’s draws at Liverpool and Chelsea, respectively, treated like cup shocks – was a statistical fluke. Nonetheless the fact that the cartel have looked unexpectedly vulnerable at times this season ought to be a cause for celebration, given that their domestic dominance is sapping the life out of the league. Aston Villa’s goalless home draw with Man Utd – greeted by a curious, cricket-derived headline in the Express, Villa’s Bunnies Find Some Bite – might not seem like a sign of changing times given that it simply ended a run of 14 defeats against the same opponents. But it followed on from a comfortable win at Arsenal the previous week and a widespread sense that, finally, here was a club well placed to break into the elite, at the expense of a team being widely derided as “bottlers”.

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