Between Dortmund and Dusseldorf in Germany lies to town of Essen, home to Rot-Weiss Essen and their stadium. Under construction since April 2011 and opened with an initial capacity of 13,500 in August of this year, the ground will eventually hold 20,000.
This image is of the Feijenoord Stadion, more commonly called De Kuip (The Tub), home to Feyenoord of the Eredivisie. It has a capacity of 51,177 and was opened in 1937.
Day six of the WSC advent calendar and we’ve got snowballs for you. When Division Three’s Sheffield Wednesday hosted top-tier Arsenal in the FA Cup in 1979, the pitch was cleared of snow but the open Kop wasn’t. It gave Owls fans plenty of ammunition to hurl at Arsenal keeper Pat Jennings as the second half began – not behaviour we condone, obviously. The game was drawn 1-1, the reply at Highbury 2-2, the second and third replays at Filbert Street 2-2 and 3-3 before Arsenal finally won 2-0 in the fourth replay.
Skip to 5m20s for snowballs
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Two intrepid travellers plan to spend over half a century watching games in all of UEFA’s ever-changing territories, writes Tristan BrowningMy friend and I do one foreign football trip to a different European country every year, with the aim of completing the whole of UEFA by the time we are done. Seeing a game at every club in the English league – “doing the 92” – at least has the advantage of offering a fixed number. “Doing the 53” seems to involve hitting a moving target, dictated just as much by politics as by action on the pitch.
Jon Spurling goes back to Boxing Day 1963, when 66 goals were scored in the First Division
As Christmas 1963 approached, weathermen warned a shivering nation to expect a recurrence of what had happened 12 months previously. The winter of 1962 was the worst since the big freeze of 1946, when the snow began on Boxing Day and wiped out football for virtually the next two and a half months. The occasional game was played here and there, but most were played out in the minds of the newly created Pools Panel, who met each weekend in a secret London location and guessed what each result might have been.