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FIFA's approach to safeguarding profit from this year's football tournament is particularly aggressive. Simon Cotterill reports

FIFA has generated a record $3.3 billion (£2.2bn) in marketing and television rights ahead of this summer’s World Cup. Big brands have paid big money for association with the tournament. In return they’ll be protected by FIFA’s strict trademark regulations which prevent unofficial associations diluting the messages of official sponsors. Many in South Africa have criticised the heavy-handed way FIFA have been enforcing their often ridiculous regulations.

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Thirty years ago this month Mossley AFC went to Wembley. Drew Whitworth remembers the club's greatest day and the story of a once-formidable Northern Premier League side on a very personal level

Between Oldham and Stockport, where the huge Greater Manchester conurbation breaks against the rocks and moors of the Pennines, there lies Tameside. This metropolitan borough has no historical centre, being a collection of old mill towns of which few people have ever heard. In football terms it is a backwater, without representation above the Conference North.

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A promising career undone by lifestyle choices. Graham Willgoss tells the tale of a good-looking footballer who made quite an impression on Harry Redknapp

Portugal has produced its fair share of gifted footballers who have embraced style over substance. None, however, has done so more openly than Dani da Cruz Carvalho, the twinkle-toed attacking midfielder-cum-striker known simply as “Dani”, who spent nine games at West Ham on loan from Sporting Lisbon in the late winter of 1996.

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Footballers are increasingly viewed by extremes in the press. James Calder worries that we have become too quick to judge

I haven’t heard much about Titus Bramble lately. I can’t say I’ve followed his career assiduously but I’m definitely hearing less about him than I used to. Time was when he seemed to be everywhere – pranging cars, giving away soft goals and attracting cheap gags from anyone with an opinion on the game. Once the epitome of “comedy defending”, the term of choice for caustically humorous bloggers and writers everywhere, Bramble seems to have slipped out of the public eye. Well, out of my eye anyway.

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In their third year in League One and having lost in the play-offs for the last two seasons, Leeds were desperate to claim promotion at The Valley against hosts already guaranteed a top-six finish. Barney Ronay reports

This was supposed to be a Leeds United promotion party. That was the idea, or at least the mathematical possibility, at the start of a balmy late-spring afternoon in the Kentish London suburbs south of the River Thames. By the end of a match that started at chest-jabbing, off-the-ball-bust-up speed and just sort of took things from there, it still felt like a Leeds United promotion party; that is, a painful, soul-searching, but still aggressively defiant type of party. A party attended, perhaps, solely by feisty, gin-swilling, leopard-print-clad divorcees continually on the verge of a Gloria Gaynor party piece.

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