UEFA, the governing body of football in Europe has been rightly accused of using double standards. And more importantly, become ever more like FIFA, the world’s governing body of football which has been criticized for various reasons over the last years, corruption just being one of them. Double Standards When Michel Platini became head of…
[typography font=”Alike” size=”14″ size_format=”px”]Euro 2012 is only a few days away and looking at the sport sections of the German media, it appears as though many already know the winner of the competition before even a ball is kicked: Germany. Of course there is reason for this mindset as the qualification was very successful and…
Leonardo, the football director at Paris St. Germain since 2011 was quoted in the Blizzard (issue four, p. 52) that Paris is THE only European capital that has not won the European Cup, i.e. the Champions League. Neither has any team from Berlin or Prague or Roma won this particular trophy but these cities are…
Monday last week Germany grieved for Timo Konietzka, who died aged 73 of cancer. Friedhelm as was his real name was the first ever goalscorer of the newly established Bundesliga in 1963 when his team Borussia Dortmund lost away at SV Werder Bremen 2:3. He opened the scoring after just 58 seconds. He finished the…
Didier Drogba, Michael Ballack…the list could be continued and will be in the future. But what these players have in common is a successful playing career with their club sides and defeat on the international stage. Sometimes bitter defeats, sometimes truly deserved. This piece will highlight both players’ highs and lows and near misses. Ballack…
While Ghana’s footballers are called The Black Stars, the name Red Star is heavily in use in Germany. Red Star Belgrade, one of the great sides of Yugoslavia that often proved to be a banana skin for many European top clubs in the 1980 and European Cup winner in 1991, have involuntarily lent their name…
The former Yugoslavia is said to be one of the best national teams that have ever existed around the late 1980s and early 1990s in Eastern European football. Yet, the only witness to that is the triumph of Red Star Belgrade 1991 in the European Cup Final. This will be an attempt to look at…
It is with seen with astonishment that many Football League clubs in England have agreed to the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) yesterday, which would leave many if not all clubs in League One and Two with less money for their talent if these youngsters are sold on and the whole Academy system is put…
This week is going down in history as the week when the British Parliament finally decided to release all papers in connection with the Hillsborough stadium disaster on 15 April 1989 when 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death. What initially looked like crowd troubles turned out to be a chain of bad decision making…
Leipzig, city of heroes it is often referred to. The credit is due and well deserved as the city was the cradle from which the East German ‘velvet revolution’ began and spread across the GDR in 1989. In football however, the city resembles a working station, a lab, which experiments with football and produces new…