Organised football in deprived parts of London and other cities is giving refugees and recent immigrants a chance to build a sense of community, explains Steve Wilson

Skipping past a second challenge just inside the op­position’s half, Gazza looks up and sees the keeper marginally off his line. He lets fly from all of 35 yards and peels off in wild celebration. After shipping three cheap goals, this effort, added to his free-kick from a similar range, has pulled his team back into the game and the final ten minutes now promise to be tense.

Read more…

Some Manchester City fans just don’t want to let their old ground go and spent a few hundred quid at auction to make sure they never have to, as Helen Duff  reports

Though the wake for Maine Road was held on the last day of the season, the will reading had to wait until high summer. On a scorching Sunday morning in July, Manchester City fans converged for one final time on the stadium that had served their team through 80 turbulent years – to bid for its fixtures and fittings. The auction spelled a temporary change of emphasis for City, from eager anticipation of the future (this was the week in which an excited Kevin Keegan had taken custody of the keys to the club’s sparkling new 48,000-seat stadium) to bittersweet retrospection.

Read more…

Ben Lyttleton looks at what's going on behind the glitz and glamour in Spain

Spanish football looked in a healthy state when two billion fans tuned in to see David Beckham sign for Real Madrid last month. After all, the England captain had joined the biggest club in the world to play in the best league in the world. But Beckham’s arrival has coincided with a financial crisis in the Spanish game that Catalan daily El Periodico described as: “Total ruin, immense debt, crippling of the sector, zero credibility with the banks as well as on­going investigations by tax officials.”

Read more…

Paul Ashley-Jones explains why TNS will be a force to be reckoned with in the Welsh Premier next season

When this year’s UEFA Cup draw was made, there cannot have been any greater sense of anticlimax than that felt by Manchester City when they were drawn against Total Network Solutions. Still, at least it should mean a straightforward passage into the next round for Kevin Keegan’s team, with no one really expecting an upset against a team based in Llansantffraid, a mid-Wales village of under 1,000 people. No one, that is, except Mike Har­ris, chairman and owner of TNS Football Club, who has gone on record as expressing his condolences to City for the fact that their long-awaited European adventure is to finish so soon. This is the same Mike Harris who has predicted his TNS side will become the second largest team in Wales, behind only Cardiff City, within five years.

Read more…

Neil Rose paints a sorry picture of Luton Town

I wanted to believe, really I did. I wanted to be­lieve Luton Town could become “the largest club in Europe”. I wanted to believe we would have a 75,000-seat indoor stadium that also accommodated a Grand Prix track, from which we would net a clean £200 million profit a year once Luton took its rightful place alongside Mon­aco and the rest on the Formula One cal­endar. I even wanted to believe our new sta­dium would be home to NFL and NBA fran­chises and that thousands of Europe-based Americans would travel to it.

Read more…