While the Czech Pavel Nedved celebrates being named European Footballer of the Year, Ian Farrell  remembers the rapid decline of a previous winner, from slightly further east

Such is the general view of football in eastern Europe today, it takes some effort to imagine teams from there electrifying the sport and win­ning admirers across the world. But in the mid 1980s, Dynamo Kiev, together with the virtually interchangeable USSR side also coached by Valery Lobanovski, took football to another level with a conception of the game as a living machine. Total Football meets applied mathematics. This lent itself easily to Cold War stereotyping – collectivised football played by faceless automata – but the play was a world away from the drabness of the Eastern Bloc, thanks mainly to Oleg Blokhin, Alexander Zavarov and, foremost among them, Igor Belanov.

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Many object to Sepp Blatter’s plan to cut the number of teams in Europe’s top divisions to 16, but Roger Titford is keen to examine the full horror of what the plan would entail

Last month FIFA president Sepp Blatter had another go at flying one of his favourite kites – reducing all Europe’s top divisions to 16 clubs each. Even Arsenal, usually so protective of how many games their delicate flowers have to play, spoke out against the idea. So universal is the condemnation that few have paused to consider in detail what a 16-club top division would mean. In England (and also Spain) it would mean a lot less top division football – 240 games in total instead of 380; that’s a 37 per cent reduction. As recently as 1994-95 the Premiership offered 462 fixtures. Reducing the number of clubs makes the league competition both much smaller and more occasional – more gaps for international weeks and quite possibly a mid-winter break too.

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In the face of claims that this is the dullest season in years, Stephen Wagg contends that the true heart of football is beating strongly and not represented by the “big three”

Lately there has been quite a lot of talk to the effect that the Premier League, as currently constituted, is “boring” and “not value for money”. Paul Wilson of the Observer caught the mood when his article led the paper’s Sport section beneath the headline Yawn… It’s the worst ever Premiership. I wondered if I was the only one to find Wilson’s article unpleasant. I talked to people and found, predictably enough, that I was not. But Wilson, sounding closer to the saloon-bar traditions of Daily Mail or Daily Express sports commentary than to the more measured style of the broadsheets, was on a roll. The following Sunday, buoyed apparently by a bulging postbag of supportive correspondence, he declared: “We all agree. The Prem is boring.” This, I feel, is a dismal argument. But it’s been a long time coming: it seems grimly inevitable now that people would begin to make this kind of judgment ten years into the life of the Premier League.

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And you think rebuilding Wembley was a saga. Paul Doyle reports on the homelessness crisis that could bring the Republic of Ireland to a ground nearer than you would think

Can Irish football recover from its current crisis? A nation that was last year trying to convince the continent it should co-host Euro 2008 is set to admit that it cannot, in fact, host its own home matches.

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Rwanda as a nation state was close to extinction a decade ago, but the mixed-race side will line-up against the hosts Tunisia in the  opening game of the ANC after financial backing from the country's president, as Alan Duncan writes

If we are to believe FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s assertion that “the philosophy of football is to offer hope”, then it goes without saying that some nations are more in need of football than others. While it is unclear exactly when Blatter started to spread the word, it would be hard to believe that the minute-long silence that followed his laying of a wreath at Rwanda’s genocide memorial in the central African country’s capital, Kigali, on April 10, 2002, did not help in shaping this view.

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