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São Caetano weren’t founded until 1989 yet rose rapidly to the pinnacle of the South American game, only to fall at the last hurdle and slip back as the richer giants reasserted themselves. Robert Shaw reports

Brazil’s most consistent club at the start of this decade were not one of the major names. Instead it was Associação Desportiva São Caetano, a club that rose from the third division of the São Paulo state league to upset the establishment before returning to near obscurity six years later.

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The US market is not exactly enthralled with the prospect of another foreign football circus passing through town as they see plenty of them already. Mike Woitalla reports from the land of opportunity

Forgive us if the prospect of English Premier League games in the United States didn’t get us all giddy. We’ve got so much soccer here already that a couple more games just wouldn’t be a very big deal. In 2007, the USA hosted more than 60 matches between foreign clubs. Include games that pitted visiting clubs against American teams and the figure passes 100. Besides the touring clubs, 40 national-team matches – not including the USA’s own 12 games – took place on our soil in 2007. And that’s not counting when Haiti, Fiji and China played against club teams.

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Is the Premier League the Holy Grail or the Emperor without his clothes, asks Gavin Barber

As I recall there have been two distinctively epiphanic moments in my life, on which the significance of an apparently mundane occasion has crept up on me unnoticed before revealing itself in a flash of enlightenment. The first was a few years ago when, at the age of 30, I bought and assembled a garden shed, and suddenly understood that the process of turning into my dad was inexorable and irreversible, and that I should embrace it rather than trying to resist. The second came at Portman Road on February 9, 2008.

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Andy Brassell looks at the fallout in Portugal four years after they hosted the European Championship

Fans may complain that the Swiss and Austrian stadiums to be used in Euro 2008 may be a little on the small side, with only those in Basel and Vienna having room for significantly more than 30,000 spectators. And you can imagine by how much those dissenting voices would have been amplified had England, or indeed any of the home nations, managed to qualify for the finals. However, there is at least little doubt over the sustainability of the grounds post-tournament.

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Al Needham has met a fair few footballers in Nottingham but the experience has been far from rewarding

Whenever a friend of mine gets into a pub argument about Manchester United (which is often), he relates the following story: when he worked in one of Nottingham’s trendier clothes shops in the early Nineties, the only place that had Timberland boots in stock, Roy Keane came in. After a nod from his manager, my friend mentioned the obligatory 25 per cent discount. “And he didn’t say thank you or anything, he just walked out the shop with the boots under his arm,” my friend says, his face screwed up in a righteous sneer, as he prepares to unleash the killer line. “And he had his fucking jumper tucked into his jeans, the… the twat.”

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