After England's recent goalless draw in Italy, Mike Ticher claims that we still haven't shaken off our reputation as football hooligans
“Multiculturalism is a divisive force… One cannot be loyal to two nations any more than a man can have two masters.” So said Norman Tebbit in the week before England qualified for the World Cup with an accomplished performance on the field and a hideous mess off it.
Berlin may be Germany's capital but is a city of footballing minnows. Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger looks at the city's underachievement
Berlin is the most bizarre of the European metropolises, decadent and yet slightly provincial, megalomaniacal but isolated, both historically and geographically. People from Berlin are friendly, open and yet inaccessible, stuck up; they are proud of their city and its history, even though for the greater part of this century Berlin has been associated with two brutal regimes. What has that to do with football? Everything.
The reunification of Germany had big implications for football in the new country. Karsten Blaas explores how the game has developed since the Berlin Wall fell
At the end of last season, German football commentators were able to announce some rare good news from the east: all professional club teams from the formerly communist part of the country had avoided relegation. Hansa Rostock had successfully completed their Bundesliga campaign while Leipzig, Jena and Zwickau secured their places in division two. Energie Cottbus added some icing to the cake by winning promotion to the Second and reaching the cup final (which they lost).
John Williams looks at the explosion of books nostalgic for the days of mass hooliganism
At West Ham in late September, a few away travel truths struck home a little more sharply than I can remember before. The District Line train eastbound at 2.30 was thinly populated. A number of passengers were Europeans, picking up a Premier League game between the Hammers and Liverpool while on holiday in London. Other Liverpool fans (and their kids) were openly wearing dispiritingly new team shirts.
Along with many more, he was compared with the Busby Babes, but Tony Kinsella thinks that Andy Ritchie could have laid claim to being that good
In the days before winning championships with kids became a formality, every new Wonderboy at Manchester United was viewed exclusively as a perspective on the bygone Busby era: Trevor Anderson was “the new George Best” because he resembled the maestro uncannily; Scott McGarvey “the new Denis Law”, fair-haired and Scottish; and Ashley Grimes was “the new Bobby Charlton” because… nope, can’t help you on that one.