Search: 'transfers'

Arsenal’s move for Emmanuel Eboué of Beveren is just the latest example of a strange import-export trade in African footballers, as John Chapman explains

The thermometer is stuck on 4°C. There’s a cold wind blowing around Antwerp’s Bosuil stadium. Around 6,000 fans have braved the elements to see the locals, languishing in Belgium’s second div­ision, take on mighty Beveren, who qualified for this season’s UEFA Cup through being runners-up in the 2004 Belgian Cup. In theory, it’s a Flemish derby. In practice, it’s a visible sign of globalisation’s impact on football.

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Armed gratefully with your votes, Ian Plenderleith picks out some of the very best sites, many of which have featured in this column over the past five years, though they appear in no particular order

Stadiums
Pyramid Passion Sister site to the excellent Nomad Online (covering Sussex non-League football), both run by David Bauckham, PP boasts great pictures and text about English non-League stadiums, plus galleries of dug-outs, floodlights, ground signs and even “rollers and mowers”.

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A flop at Bradford, a controversial figure at Middlesbrough – this former England skipper is seeking managerial redemption at West Brom. Matt Rickard reports

It seems perverse that Bryan Robson should find himself managing again in the Premiership so soon after an ignominious seven months in charge of Bradford City. Wasn’t this the man who couldn’t buy a job after his time at Middlesbrough that ended shortly after a chast­ening call to Terry Venables? And this despite a desperate flurry of CV writing, only matched by the deadening thud of rejection letters.

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Wigan Athletic's chairman controls clubs involved in both codes of rugby, too, but Ashley Shaw finds that few object to this takeover of a town as the Latics fly high

Pies, piers and rugby league used to dominate Wigan. Yet as a town situated handily between the football hotbeds of Manchester and Liverpool, it comes as little surprise that supporters of Wigan Athletic reject the stereotype straight away.

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Thanks to a financial incentive scheme from Littlewoods Pools, things could be looking up for Scotland's perennial losers, East Stirlingshire. Neil White explains

For the past two years, the safest bet in British football has not been on Arsenal or Martin O’Neill’s dominant Celtic side. The smart money, if you have enough of it to counter increasingly prohibitive odds, is on whoever happens to be playing East Stirlingshire.

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