Dave Jennings went to Bradford’s last match of the season in 1985 and lived to tell the tale, but 56 of his fellow supporters died in the fire that engulfed Valley Parade

On the morning of May 11, 1985, it felt great to be a Bradford City supporter. The club had been rattling around in the bottom two divisions of the Football League for 58 years, but at last City were moving on up. The Third Division championship was already ours, so the final game of the campaign was meaningless in competitive terms. But 11,076 turned out anyway for the home match against Lincoln. We Bradford fans wanted to celebrate and watch captain Peter Jackson collect the Division Three trophy.

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For a £30million footballer, Rio Ferdinand is going to need to start showing class off the pitch, writes Ashley Shaw, as well as on it

Any footballer who associates himself with Jody Morris is looking for trouble. The turning point in PFA player of the year John Terry’s career was probably the night he opted to stay in when Morris and his pals were urging him to join their latest bender. England centre-half Rio Ferdinand, by contrast, seems to court publicity and, following successive tabloid stings involving Peter Kenyon and a fight with a photographer on a night out with Morris, it seems he doesn’t learn. Ferdinand has the millionaire lifestyle – the car, the clothes and presumably the women – but he lacks the vital component required to take the next step to football greatness: common sense. Morris, who has a conviction for assault and was sacked by Leeds for being drunk at training, is the personification of the current football disease – so why would a player of Rio’s standing think that a night on the tiles with him in celebrity central was a great idea?

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Europe's minnows can sleep easy for now as Leinart Johannsson saw his UEFA presidential term extended. But according to Steve Menary, it's only delaying the inevitable

Europe’s minor nations can breathe a sigh of relief as doomsday has been temporarily averted. At last month’s congress in Tallinn, UEFA changed procedures for replacing Lennart Johansson as president and delayed Franz Beckenbauer’s seemingly inevitable advance to European football’s top job.

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Phil Town on Jose Mourinho's short-lived TV debut

“I’m the face of Portugal in the world,” José Mourinho told the current affairs magazine Visão recently. While footballing heroes such as Eusébio, Luis Figo and Cristiano Ronaldo may still lay some claim to that distinction, it is hard from a global perspective to disagree with Mourinho’s assertion. London-based fashion designer Nuno Reis told Visão: “Suddenly, I’m not someone from a Third World country… I’m from the same country as José Mourinho.”

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Racism, just an unsavoury "circumstance of the game" in Argentina, writes Martin Gambaratta

All continental trophies are hotly contested. But the Copa Libertadores, Latin America’s most coveted piece of football silverware, is like no other because of this unsavoury fact: on-the-field violence can happen in practically any game. Police in riot gear often pour onto the pitch to stop a fight and many times make things worse by siding with the home team. So, if you happened to be watching São Paulo play hard-tackling Quilmes (a smallish club from impoverished Greater Buenos Aires) on April 13, the scrap just before half-time would not have looked like something extraordinary. Two Quilmes defenders scuffled with Grafite, São Paulo’s towering centre-forward. One of the Quilmes players and Grafite, who retaliated, were sent off.

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