The joy felt in Togo and Angola at World Cup qualification risks turning to fear of humiliation after a poor continental championship. Ghana also have little to cheer about and, as Chris Taylor reports, only Ivory Coast of Africa’s five teams in Germany did really well in Egypt 

It was an exciting African Nations Cup tournament and when the champions were crowned in Cairo’s International Stadium they approached their debut in the forthcoming World Cup on German soil with high hopes. Little did they realise that disaster awaited them.

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  An attempt to measure racism in the politically charged world of Israeli football appears to be back-firing, reports Shaul Adar

With Maccabi Haifa on their way to a third consecutive championship, the Israeli league isn’t the most exciting, bar daily news about Russian oligarchs pumping in money. But every Monday another Israeli football league is a source of drama and shocks. Every week, 50 observers from New Israel Fund, an über-liberal institution for promoting democratic values, go to the premier league grounds and file reports on racist chanting. All those chants are calculated by a complicated mathematical equation based on the severity of the events, their length and the number of fans taking part; they end up negative points published in a league table.

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Is it offensive to taunt people with a word they use about themselves? Some believe neither Arsenal nor Spurs fans know what they’re saying, as Jon Spurling reports

In November 2005, Alan Sefton, the overseer of “Arsenal in the community”, announced that the club would be setting up five soccer schools across Israel. Arsenal are already involved in working with a number of primary schools in mixed Jewish/Muslim areas of London, and children are encouraged to co-present religious festivals before playing football together. Sefton later confirmed his and the club’s belief that “…football unites people of different classes, social groups, races and nationalities… We don’t want it to focus on divisions and tribalism.”

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The top two teams in the Deloitte Football Money League are Real Madrid and Manchester Utd. But as Roger Titford finds out, the income they rely on differs greatly

We live in an era when there are prizes for everything: player of the season, calendar of the year, the best pie, the most improved website and many more self-regarding baubles. Combine this with the obsession to put a value on anything in football – press red now for a cost-benefit analysis on that through ball – and we have (hopefully tongue in cheek but probably not) the Deloitte Football Money League (DFML).

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Chris Taylor is confused – he’s a Manchester United fan, or at least he was. Does he now support FC United as well as or instead of the Glazer-owned Old Trafford team?

It’s not easy being a Manchester United fan at the moment. Oh, stop laughing at the back. It really isn’t. I suppose the playing side of things isn’t too bad, you know, relative to everyone else who isn’t Chelsea. But off the pitch, where things are suddenly far more important, things are screwed up good and proper.

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