Many people would struggle to place the home city of CFR Cluj on a map, but the club could be hosting Champions League matches next season. Andy Hockley reports on an unlikely stirring in Transylvania
As Romania’s league enjoys its two-month winter break, an unfamiliar name occupies top spot in the table. The club are 100 years old, but their recent rise has been nothing short of dramatic.
Youngsters in search of a football career are turning to the sport’s equivalent of a public school. Gavin Willacy wonders whether this experiment will work or if good money is going after bad
Borehamwood’s Hertswood School v Birmingham City was a league fixture. On the same day, Dagenham & Redbridge lost at home to Brightlingsea Regent, Conference club Histon played Queens’ School in Bushey and Oxford United lost at home to someone called FCV Reds.
The PFA has celebrated its centenary at a time when players aren’t held in especially high regard. But that doesn’t mean the union’s battles weren’t worth winning, says John Harding
In December 1907, a group of Manchester United players entered a hotel in the city centre and created admiring headlines by forming a union. One hundred years on almost to the day, another group of United players, at another city-centre hotel, created altogether different headlines, ones that must have had PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor weeping tears of frustration.
Richard Barker recalls when a top-flight side last hit nine
When Manchester United entertained Ipswich Town at Old Trafford on March 4, 1995, there was little reason to expect much of a contest. Defending champions United were locked in a struggle with Blackburn Rovers at the top, while Ipswich were going hell-for-leather to clinch the bottom spot.
Just occasionally, a thumping win becomes a massacre. Ian Farrell looks back at the most recent time a League team posted double figures
Though the points were totting up nicely, Manchester City’s record of ten goals in their first eight games of this season was nevertheless an underwhelming and depressingly familiar return. When, at the start of November, Sunderland were then subjected to their regulation 1‑0 defeat – the sixth such home win at Eastlands – nostalgic fans couldn’t help thinking back almost exactly 20 years, to a time when a very different MCFC matched Sven-Göran Eriksson’s eight-match stats in 77 insane minutes.