Lost In Time Futbol

A controversial party in Thailand started a domino effect that led to the most incredible story in English football.

Athletic notoriously only signs Basque players, but the rule is not as straightforward as it seems. 

Between 1949 and 1990 Germany suffered the political consequences of World War II. Its land was divided in occupied zones: some parts were annexed by Poland, while modern-day German territories were divided between the two post war blocs. The Western and Southern parts of the country were given to the Allies, while the Eastern part ended up under Soviet control. Even Berlin was split in half by its famous wall. Nowadays the country is reunited, but the effects of the divide are still extremely visible in terms of economy, politics, demographics, religion and the most important of all: football. Football in Eastern Germany A new top-flight football league was established in East Germany in 1949 ,  as separate sports competitions were created following the division of the country. The DDR-Oberliga, as it was called from 1958 onwards, was contested for most of its history by 14 teams. 12 different clubs won the league over this period, but the most successful were BFC Dynamo Berlin, w...

Greenwashing is a marketing strategy which aims at wrongly persuading the public that a company's products or operations are environmentally friendly. It is a form of gaslighting which makes customers believe that by purchasing said company's services they won't harm the planet in any way, but reality is often very different from what the customer may think. One example of this practice was gifted to us by the world's leading plastic polluter, Coca-Cola, which for years has been claiming that it is lessening its plastic waste, with the goal of "getting every bottle back by 2030". As admirable as such claims may be, they are also way too optimistic to be true: they were sued in 2021 for false claims, and in 2024 they were still first in the pollution race by quite some margin, more than doubling the waste produced by second placed PepsiCo. The phenomenon of greenwashing has spread over many industries, including sports. FIFA, which is not a great example of con...

Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe, Bursaspor and Besiktas. What do these four clubs have in common? Well, for starters they're all Turkish, but only three of them are widely recognised as giants abroad.  The "big three" from Istanbul - for those unfamiliar they're Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe and Besiktas - have dominated Turkish football for decades, leaving crumbs to other clubs. Amongst the rest are Trabzonspor, with 7 titles to their name, Başakşehir, who were crowned champions once in 2020, and... Bursaspor. But what more does this club have in common with the big three, that Trabzonspor and Basaksehir don't? Bursaspor is, along with Gala, Fener and Besiktas, one of only four clubs in Turkey with an average attendance of over 30,000 people. Just one little bit of info is missing: they've done this while playing in the 3. Lig, a.k.a. the fourth tier of Turkish football. Bursaspor's fans are the strength of the club   The city of Bursa is the fourth most populous in T...

It's pretty common to have more than a club in a single city, especially if it's a National capital. For example, Belgrade has both Red Star and Partizan, Wien has Austria and Rapid and so on. However, a fight for domination over a city by two clubs who claim to be the same exact thing is a completely different story and much rarer. That's exactly what is going on in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, where FCSB and CSA Steaua have been fighting for years, each claiming to be the righteous heir of Steaua Bucharest's historic sporting achievements, including their famous 1986 European Cup triumph. FCSB fans displaying the historic badge of Steaua and FCSB's one [FCSB]   The concept of two clubs arguing about which one is the real successor is a little hard to grasp, but it's not that uncommon in Eastern Europe. Something similar is going on in Bulgaria, where CSKA 1948 Sofia was founded by people breaking away from the original CSKA Sofia after their bankruptcy, ...

Everyone loves an underdog. Whether it's an unlikely Champions League run, a small nation making the World Cup or your notoriously untalented friend scoring a worldie in your Sunday League match, enjoying a spectacular event happening against the odds makes countless predictable matches worth the wait. Sweden's Allsvenskan has taken this concept a step further. Despite crowning an astonishing 11 different clubs as champions between 2000 and 2024, this year has surpassed any possible result in terms of shock. The 2025 edition of Sweden's top tier has been won - mind you,  dominated - by Mjällby AIF, a club based in Hällevik, a town located in Blekinge County, which by land mass is the smallest in the country. Tom Pettersson celebrates the title [Getty Images] Blekinge  län , as the Swedes would call it, is home to about 150,000 people, and happens to be less than any of the 10 biggest metropolitan areas in the country. Of these 150,000, just 17,000 live in the municipality o...

Forget the Camp Nou and La Liga, the Sant Andreu vs Europa rivalry is born in the neighbourhoods.

Belfast, as capital city of Northern Ireland, has for centuries been plagued with tensions between the Protestant Unionist and the Catholic Republicans. Such a tricky cohabitation has seen the city become theatre of plenty of violent incidents, political unrest and deeply rooted hatred between the two factions, creating a similar environment to that of Glasgow, which has seen Celtic and Rangers grow into one of the most notable pair of rivals on the planet. As it does to this day in Glasgow, football also played a role in Belfast, partly taking inspiration from its Scottish counterpart. In 1891, four years after the founding of Celtic FC, the Catholics in Northern Ireland founded a club of their own and named it Belfast Celtic, adopting the same name and colours of the Scottish side. The Celtic mural in Belfast [sky.com] Quickly becoming a pillar of the Catholic communities of west Belfast, the club started achieving success at the turn of the century, winning its first league title in...

Anyone who as any slight interest in the atmosphere surrounding a football match rather than the action happening on the pitch knows how different the English crowds are compared to the rest of Europe, and even to the rest of the United Kingdom. While the Scottish Premiership can display colorful home stands populated by active fan groups like Aberdeen's Red Ultras, Celtic's Green Brigade, Rangers' Union Bears and many more, the English top tier is pretty dire in terms of noise and colour, with few exceptions. Crystal Palace are the most notable 'exception'. [GQ Magazine] To talk about the atmosphere in English stadiums, we first have to address the Elephant in the room: several laws were introduced from the 1980s onwards to stop hooliganism after a series of incidents involving English fans both in domestic and European matches, in particular the Heysel disaster of 1985. The Football Spectators Act of 1989 introduced football banning orders that could be imposed t...