It doesn’t get much better than a long weekend with friends and  a far-flung football match thrown in and, through his cult website European Football Weekends, Danny Last managed to capture the essence of football tourism. We ask him about his travels, his site and how blogging has changed…

I wanted to begin by asking you about football tourism and blogging about it, which you did, thrilling a cult following, on your European Football Weekends website. When did you come up with the idea to start the site?

I was chugging across Romania on possibly the world’s slowest train with some fellow lunatics who’d long since fallen asleep. So, thinking quickly, in between looking out the window at the odd horse and cart and local rice street vendor, while slurping on a warm can of beer, I started to jot down a few notes about the trip. I typed it up upon my return home, added a few blurry photos, and to my amazement about 13 people read it.

How long had you been travelling to watch football in various other countries before that?

10 years or so. That trip to Romania was back in 2007, but my first European Football Weekend proper was to see Real Madrid v Atletico Madrid in 1996, in the days when the Bernabeu had sections of terracing, raucous fans and an atmosphere. I went to Vicenza Calcio in 1988 too, on a school trip. We used to travel around Europe on a coach as part of our European Studies, which was pretty cool. As the rest of the class were taking notes and marvelling at the Palazzo della Ragione, myself and one of the teachers, West Ham fan, Mr Tolerton, sneaked off to the Stadio Romeo Menti to watch a bit of football. Perfect.

Were you surprised by just how many people were keen to read about and emulate your travels?

For the first few years nobody read the website. I didn’t care a jot – but then I met Paul Hayward in a pub in Brighton, got chatting over a few beers and an expensive roast dinner and scribbled the EFW URL down on a torn off bit of the Sunday paper. He was working for the Daily Mail back then and gave it a mention in his column. Things went a bit bonkers after that and I made the mistake of checking each day to see how many people were logging on. Note to current bloggers: never do that, it sucks the life out of you. It wasn’t until I started the EFW Facebook group that I realised how many people I’d influenced in emulating my travels. Who knew?

Can you pinpoint the appeal of football tourism?

Yes, instead of pulling on a suit and going to work, you pitch up at an airport with five of your best mates; fly out into the unknown, talk absolute shite for three days, watch some football, see some sights, eat, drink and be merry. Perfect.

Do you prefer the less familiar destinations – the lower league clubs in Germany or Spain, that don’t offer hundred-strong stadium tours every two hours?

I do now, yes. Of course everybody kicks off with trips to Barcelona, Real Madrid, Borussia Dortmund and all of that show business – but if you’re not too bothered about what happens on the pitch, and don’t much fancy being herded around like sheep or buying €80 football shirts then you can have just as much fun, if not more, elsewhere. Go and see a local derby at Preussen Munster or Rot-Weiss Essen for €10.

To me, it seems so much more interesting to read what is like to go and watch a game in, say, Cracow, than to read whether Julio Geordio has signed a new contract. Are a lot of blogs tapping into that general desire to read about something different?

There’s a blog for every single aspect of football now isn’t there? Everything is blogged about to the nth degree. So get big, get niche or get out.

What was the highlight of the whole EFW era?

Things got a bit surreal when boxes of stuff from adidas started arriving at the door with football boots, towels (towels!), T-shirts, shorts, footballs and cuddly toys all with the words ‘European Football Weekends’ or simply ‘EFW’ stitched into them. But the thing I’m most proud of is the friendship between the fans of Royal Antwerp and Forest Green Rovers, which all stemmed from the original EFW trips that I used to organise. Fans from those two clubs came in numbers, formed a firm bond and now organise trips to see each other’s teams a few times a season – all because of a few words of nonsense I used to jot down whilst nursing a football hangover.

For you, which is the best country to watch football in and which club/ground did you enjoy visiting the most?

You can never go far wrong in Germany. Poland is a cheaper version of Germany with fans that can both excite and frighten in equal measures, but the country I fell in love with most while watching football was in Serbia. I pitched up on an overnight train from Croatia after having a gun poked in my face by border officials and was met by a lion of a man called Nenad. He drove me out into the countryside where, after a while, I presumed I was going to be cut up into small pieces and buried underground. Instead, his mother had laid on a huge spread of food and welcoming drinks. A few days of 80p beers, Belgrade derbies, flares, fireworks, hulking great floodlights, tinpot games, £5 match tickets, £1 taxi rides and very late nights later and I was hooked – a fan and friends for life.

Will the site remain live for posterity and has anyone offered to buy the URL from you?

Yes and yes. I never read it now as it makes me cringe. I just want to rewrite everything because it’s a grammatical horror show, littered with other errors and looks a bit bobbins and dated. But that was part of its charm I suppose. I was offered some money for the URL recently but it was a derisory amount and the chap wanted to turn it into a steaming pile of shite from what I could gather. So I turned it down.

Your site was like the Old Major of these cult football blogs – are you pleased to see several other independent blogs getting the praise and attention they are due?

Fair play to any independent blog that gets due praise and attention because I can tell you the person behind it would have put in hours and hours of “work” doing it. Blogging is a huge time sponge – but you do it for the love of doing it not money.

In Bed With Maradona is one of those sites and you are now involved with their photography section. What has that been like?

You have to raise your game when you do stuff for IBWM because – unlike EFW – there are standards. It’s a brilliant thing and I’m proud to have my name associated with it. All I really do there is source stuff for their online galleries. It doesn’t take up too much time and I love doing it. The guys that put it all together are absolute troopers too. Don’t tell them that though, obviously.

Your photos capture the essence of the clubs and places you visit nicely. What aspects do you look for in a football ground when you photograph them?

Ah, the photos. I used to bluff my way through writing, which I was never very comfortable with to be honest as my vocabulary is very limited. And now the photos. Which I also bluff my way through. My camera cost £100 and I’m able to mask my inefficiencies this time around by using filters. I’m never too interested in photos of what occurs on the pitch, always preferring to see happens off it. The best photographers to my mind; Stuart Roy Clarke, Tom Jenkins, David Bauckham, Gabriel Uchida, Jurgen Vantomme and the like always take images that make you want to go to a football match. That’s what I try and do. Honest.

Finally, how would you have felt if we had used the phrase “matchday experience” in this interview?

I think my pulse rate would have remained roughly the same. To my mind it’s obviously not just about the football. I’m not one to go home after a match and ring a radio station or write a volley of abuse on a fans’ forum – I like to enjoy everything that surrounds a match, which normally involves a few drinks and a few hours of talking rhubarb. If that’s your kind of “matchday experience” too, we are more than likely to get on. It helps if you like Half Man Half Biscuit too, mind you.

You can view European Football Weekends here and see the gallery page Danny edits for IBWM here. It’s also well worth visiting his Flickr account and following him on Instagram. You can follow him on Twitter @DannyLast

Keep up to date with all the latest from TheInsideLeft by following us on Twitter @theinsidelefty or by joining us on Facebook at facebook.com/theinsideleft

We ask the Forbes columnist and football infographic connoisseur about the differences between the MLS model and the European league system, whether we should really judge a manager’s performance based on the value of the squad at his disposal and what we can learn from graphs and wiggly lines…

Zach, you are switched on to the MLS scene as well as the top European leagues. Many of us in Europe struggle to fully understand the MLS transfer/draft system. Is that a fairer way to distribute players among the squads competing in the league?

First of all, I would say that the draft is a historical thing that I think they will downplay going forward. They are very much interested in developing academies right now and systems by which you will not have to put your academy players into the draft, but move towards home grow players. The draft was there from the days before academies, when you needed the college athletic teams to feed into clubs, and it was a more equitable way to distribute players from college teams to MLS teams.

I think the biggest reasons for MLS remaining more equal are two-fold. Firstly, they have a salary cap, which is flexible in that it allows you to bring in some designated players, like Thierry Henry and David Beckham, outside the wage structure. But, really, you are looking at two or three players on $3-5 million contracts maximum versus the other 20 or so other players in the squad that have $100,000 contracts on average. It puts butts in seats, helps marketing and attracts other big-name players over time, but in reality it is not going to move the needle too much in the club’s favour. So overall the salary cap acts as a limiting feature and maintains a large degree of parity among the teams. You can see that the best performing team in last year’s regular season table was the San Jose Earthquakes, who had one of the smallest payrolls in the league and one of the smallest attendances.

I think the other thing they have going for them in MLS is that they use the Playoffs system, which helps to randomise the outcome of the season championship to a certain extent. There has been a good deal of random behaviour in the results of individual Playoff matches. It means that, over time, we have had nine different MLS Cup champions and eight different table-toppers in the regular season over less than 20 years. That provides a certain attraction and that has long been a feature of American sports. Baseball is the least equitable American sport in terms of allowing spending and that is the sport in which you see big clubs like the New York Yankees continuously making the Playoffs. Even then, when they make the Playoffs, they don’t always have things their way.

I’ve used the Transfer Price Index to look at what a four-team Playoffs system would have led to in the Premier League over the last 20 seasons. If you had done a four-team Playoffs every year, statistically you would have seen a mild redistribution of United’s championships to other teams, including Liverpool. In fact, Liverpool would have won their long-desired Premier League title, on average, if there had been a Playoffs system in use.

So that tells you what the MLS has going for it, if you are interested in parity. I think the draft will always be around but there is less and less emphasis on it and more and more emphasis on academies and developing young players. That is not just good for the MLS, it’s good for the US national team. The biggest challenge we have here in the US is that, compared to the rest of the world, we don’t develop our players young enough.

How do you spend money in the MLS, though? Can a team just splash the cash on a player like European clubs, or are their restrictions?

They can, but they would have to fit within the salary cap. To give some perspective to people outside the United States, a number of Premier League clubs have £50-100 million pay rolls, which is over $100 million. The salary cap in MLS is a little over $3 million. So we are building teams at about 33 times lower cost than the Premier League clubs.

If you buy a designated player, like Thierry Henry or David Beckham, you can pay out of your own pocket but the first, say, $300,000 goes towards the overall squad salary cap of $3 million and then you pay the rest yourself. That is why these players go to clubs like New York or LA typically – they have the market place, the clubs are willing to pay it, and the attractiveness of the cities. It’s a challenge for other places to compete when looking to recruit big-name players.

The pay structure for that first $3 million per year doesn’t come out of the team’s back pocket, you see. Technically, the league is the one paying the players. It really is a league with franchised teams, without promotion or relegation and with a lot of clubs who either break even or lose money each year. There are a few who make money – the Seattle Sounders are probably one of those – but the reality is that the contracts, like TV deals, are pooled at league level and MLS is concerned with having a sustainable league, where they allocate that money to the clubs equitably. That way all the clubs will have enough money to pay at least the base pay roll of $3 million. Technically, the players are signed to both the MLS and the club, and their base salary up to approximately $300,000 is paid out of the league coffers. For a designated player, the rest of the salary is made up out of the club’s pocket.

The majority of the guys who run MLS have come from other North American sports leagues and there is just a different way of running things. Ironically, it is less free market than a lot of European league systems.

Let’s look at the very different transfer system in Europe now and how you measure a club’s success in the market. You’ve worked on something called the Transfer Price Index, which draws direct comparisons between each Premier League team’s financial output and their results. What is your aim in revealing these kinds of relationships and models?

I want supporters who read my writing to be able to form realistic expectations. The worst thing you can do is to put together a bunch of statistical analyses that supports sacking a particular manager, getting rid of a specific player and buying someone else. Reacting to things without proper context is unhelpful so I hope to give people some context for their expectations. The reality is that the English game, more so than any other league outside of Spain, is very much geared towards the teams that spend the most money and the expectations of clubs have to be placed into that context.

So the index effectively tells you whether a club is overspending and under-performing, or vice versa. Can you explain how it works for the mathematically minded among our readers?

The Transfer Price Index grew out of something that Graeme Riley – a Liverpool supporter – had been building for some time. He got together with a few other guys including Paul Tomkins to publish a book called Pay As You Play. All they do is take all the individual transfer fees paid over a year and you stack them up to work out what the average transfer fee was for a specific year – let’s say 2002. You would then do the same for 2003, so now you have an index and you can take the average fee from 2002 and the average fee for 2003 and inflate and deflate the previous year’s total list of transfer fees by that amount – like a consumer price index.

I joined them just after they published the book and what we’re trying to do is be able to say what is the capital investment required by a club to build any team at one point in time. Players have two aspects to them: the capital investment that you pay – which is virtually nothing if you bring them through the Academy, or the transfer fee if you bring them from another club – and the operating cost of the wages on an annual basis. So the Transfer Price Index is named that way because they initially looked at the transfer fees paid over time and then aggregated them at the team level, so they can work out how much it would cost to build any team from any season if you tried to build it in the current season.

We take the transfer fees (what the squad cost to build), the salary reported in their public audit books and they add them together. We do that averaged over time, from year-to-year to get an inflation or deflation factor, so we can say, in constant pounds, what it would cost to construct that team and pay it for the year. It becomes a basis for us, not only on individual transfers, but so we can say what is the aggregate value for one team versus another. The difference in that aggregate value should give them some sort of advantage on the pitch when they play in an individual match, accepting that the randomness of soccer in any individual match means that advantage is less than if you look at it over the course of the whole season when all the noise starts to cancel out. Over an entire season, we can begin to build a model to determine what relative player value brings to your team versus the teams you are playing against.

So if you run a simulation for all the fixtures in a season, taking into account each team’s aggregate value, you can come up with a projected league table based on the results you find. Does this mean you can tell where a team should expect to finish based on its resources?

To give you an example using the Transfer Price Index, we use a value for each squad called the m£Sq which is the multiple we use for the squad’s price in pounds. What that does is take the cost of the squads (because we don’t know what XI they are going to go into battle with in advance) for each team in the game and we put them both to get a ratio. We then take into account who the home team is and who the away team is, because there is an advantage in that.

We built what we call an ordinal logistic regression, which sounds more intimidating than it is. It says I have all this data of who’s playing home and away, what their m£Sq ratios are and I put it all into a model which will give me the likelihood of each team winning, losing or drawing that match based on those given factors.

If I know there is a 25 per cent chance of one team losing, a 25 per cent chance of a draw and a 50 per cent chance of the other team winning, I will assign a random number between 0 and one to each match, I then compare that random number to each of the likelihoods for the match – likelihood of loss, tie, and win. If I do that 10,000 times with a Monte Carlo simulation, I will generate a distribution of a number of wins, draws and losses for each match– more frequently wins because there was a higher likelihood of the team winning in this example.

I run a Monte Carlo simulation for all the matches, generating 10,000 random outcomes for each match based on the information we have from the Transfer Price Index and whether the team is playing home and away. If the outcome was less than, or equal to, the probability of a loss, it was registered as a loss; if it was between the probability of a loss and a win, it was a tie; if it was greater than the probability of a win, it was a win.

It literally comes out with 10,000 league tables of 20 teams each, from which you can work out what percentage of times each team finished in each position to work out their average projected league position. You are basically observing the frequency with which certain outcomes happen. The best part of such an approach is that you’re able to observe the interaction of 760 match outcomes (380 matches x 2 teams per match) with each simulation. We can also run the simulation as the season progresses, essentially only simulating the matches that haven’t been contested yet and add those simulated results to the results of the matches played to date. This allows us to keep a running tally of team’s odds of finish position by match.

For those of us still following you, how accurate has that process proved to be when you compare your projected league tables with the real end-of-season tables?

It’s been reasonably accurate historically, when you look at the actual match data. We do this pre-match, based on the squad values because we don’t know which eleven players are going to start any given match, looking ahead. So, what we also do, at the end of the season, is recreate the study using the actual starting line-ups because now we know the actual cost of each lineup and not just the cost of the squad. The simulations based on the value of the starting lineups are pretty accurate. You can look at the study I did for an article on Arsene Wenger in The Blizzard Issue Seven and historically it’s reasonably good (author’s note: or this summary of the article here). From studies we’ve done, we can see that the advantage given to you by the average value of the players in your squad is very close to the advantage each of your lineups throughout the season will have in individual matches.

Zach Slaton is a Seattle-based lay statistician with a love for the beautiful game. Author of A Beautiful Numbers Game at Forbes, his writing can also be found in Howler magazine, The Blizzard and transferpriceindex.com among others. He is also editor of abeautifulnumbersgame.com

You can follow Zach Slaton on Twitter @the_number_game

TheInsideLeft is on Twitter @theinsidelefty and you can find us on Facebook at facebook.com/theinsideleft

The views expressed by our interview subjects are theirs alone and not those of TheInsideLeft, neither do we endorse any comments made in interviews with our writers or take responsibility for the accuracy of financial information.

Be prepared to start viewing the game differently as the groundbreaking football writer and co-author of Soccernomics discusses the potential of analytics in football, the pitfalls of misusing data and the reasons why everybody has become so interested in reading about the financial side of the game…

Simon, let’s begin by talking about the emergence of journalism that focuses on the economics of football. Has the audience always been there for this kind of writing or has it grown with the prominence of the financial side of the game? 

Before Bosman, clubs’ finances were less significant, because a poorer club could just say, “The player is not leaving” and a club like Manchester United did not have that much more pulling power than, say, a club like Queens Park Rangers.

TV rights went for much less and there was just less money in the game. With the run-down stadiums, whether you had a huge stadium or a small run, ticket prices were all low.

So, from the Nineties, money came into the game and it became even more significant when you had players able to move freely between clubs. From then, certainly, the richer your club, the higher it will probably finish in the league.

Then you had the Abramovich phenomenon, with an owner propelling a club into stardom, before Manchester City experienced the same thing.

So fans have seen over the past 15 years that money is everything; money determines where you will finish.

On top of that, there are a couple of other trends. Probably now people are more financially literate than they used to be, which has come from private pensions and the fact that people have had to become their own accountants in a way that we never used to be, although the Americans were.

Then there has been the raise of data. Since computers came into general use 30 years ago, it has been much easier to crunch data and, belatedly, that is now entering football, although that is a separate trend.

You have touched on it there, but what do you think opened people’s eyes to the data revolution in football? 

Partly it was Moneyball – the book and the film – which reached a few people here. The other thing was that you got these data providers, which also started in the mid-Nineties – at the same time as Bosman – and they were trying to sell their product to football clubs and TV channels at a time when there was more money in the game.

Suddenly, you were seeing stats on TV. Initially they were quite crude ones, like how many kilometres a guy had run or how many passes they had completed, which don’t actually tell you that much. But people started to become more interested, in a way that they always had done in baseball and cricket, and gradually the stats started to become more sophisticated and people began to argue about which stats mattered.

What you saw was a lot of people, who in their day jobs work in insurance or the city, starting to apply their skills to their favourite football club because that is a field of expertise in which they were better than the manager. If you support Liverpool, for example, and you work in the city, you can probably do more with the club’s data than Brendan Rodgers or Kenny Dalglish could. So, people are starting to do that and they are finding out very interesting things.

For example, if we had been looking at data this way 10 years ago, then Leon Britton would not have spent three quarters of his career in the lower divisions, because people would have seen that he has this incredible pass-completion rate.

So, you start to see people trying to be their own Billy Beane, as it were.

What about the average supporter who doesn’t work in the city? Are they also taking an interest in the economics of their club and/or the statistical data of their teams? 

My sense is that people do read about club finances and all the newspapers have someone who writes about football finance, in the David Conn role. The data less so – I haven’t found an enormous interest in the data and I often find I am one of the few people writing about it.  Whereas, if Manchester United have an IPO or Rangers go into administration, it is huge news.

That is partly because there is this false belief, which is propagated by many media, that your club might disappear. You read numerous stories that say Rangers or Portsmouth might cease to exist, which I’ve always argued is false – the club always continues to exist.

So, if you took that out of the equation, a lot fewer people would read the financial stuff. As it is, it is portrayed as a life-and-death issue, which people are interested in – the club is in jeopardy, the administrators need this amount within a week or the club will have to close, this kind of stuff.

How do you explain the rise of popular football economics bloggers like the Swiss Ramble and Zach Slaton at Forbes? 

They tell you a bit about a club’s finances that the club is not revealing and that a lot of the media can’t see because you need to have a specialised financial knowledge, or be a sophisticated data cruncher, to understand it, which most journalists just aren’t.

I wrote Soccernomics with Stefan Szymanski, who is a professor of economics, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it myself. I have been a financial journalist and written about the finances of companies for a while, but the level of sophistication that you need to do this kind of analysis is very high – in our case, Stefan did most of that. People inevitably end up turning to people like Stefan, Zach or the Swiss Ramble for that kind of analysis.

Could you have predicted 15 years ago that tables and charts of club finances, team performance versus wage structures, and other similar subjects would be appearing regularly in football writing? 

I don’t read that much football journalism of that kind, actually. The thing is, 15 years ago, I was at the FT, writing that sort of stuff with Paddy Harverson, who went on to become Prince Charles’ press officer.

We were writing about clubs floating on the stock market and opening their accounts – all that kind of stuff – and it is certainly true that it has become much more popular.

Do people in the stands then go off to the pub and talk about the club’s finances? Probably to some degree, yes.

What direction do you see football economics journalism going in? Do you think people will become less interested the more they become informed, given your previous answers? 

I think they will because, as I said, a lot of the interested is generated through the belief that your football club is dancing on the edge of a cliff; that it has these huge debts and might go bust. That generates a lot of interest but it’s a totally false idea. You can see over the years that they don’t go bust, so why would you care?

Having said that, how high Liverpool or Man United are going to finish in the league depends very largely on their financial rank. So maybe I am about to contradict myself!

There is a parallel with US elections, where before the elections, journalists were going to Ohio and saying they had spoken to people and they thought that Obama was going to lose. They were coming out with these completely gut feeling predictions of what the results would be. Meanwhile, Nate Silver, who used to be a baseball analyst, was looking at the data, and he predicted the results correctly in all 50 states in the presidential election.

What he was saying is that, if you have the right data, you can foresee the results and football is largely the same. If you have the right data on each club’s revenues, you can make a pretty good go of predicting the league table. That is much more important than whether the manager sounds upbeat in pre-season, or whether the club wins a couple of friendlies, or buys a Brazilian international. Those things are much less useful in predicting outcomes than revenues.

Finally, here’s a populist question for a data cruncher like yourself. Can you predict where someone is going to put a penalty based on their previous efforts? 

Any good penalty taker always varies and the best ones vary in unpredictable ways. So, just because I hit my last one left, that doesn’t allow you to make any prediction of where I am going to hit my next one.

But sometimes people have patterns. For example, there was a time when Diego Forlan hit his penalties left, then right, then left, then right. He had a really obvious pattern, but most people weren’t looking for it, so they didn’t spot it. The question they were asking was, “Which way does he hit his penalties?” But they were probably just picking out a selection of his penalties and realising that he didn’t always hit them the same way, whereas if they had looked at the pattern, they would have seen how obvious it was.

However, with a penalty taker like Frank Ribery, there is no pattern. So it is harder to predict where a penalty is going to go than which way a State is going to go in a presidential election.

Simon Kuper’s first book, Football Against the Enemy (1994), set him on a path of writing about sport with an anthropologist’s eye. His column in the FT tries to place sport and sportsmen within a country, a time, a society, while also being about sport itself. In 2009, he co-authored the hugely successful book Soccernomics with Stefan Szymanski. You can follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon

TheInsideLeft is on Twitter @theinsidelefty and you can find us on Facebook at facebook.com/theinsideleft

The views expressed by our interview subjects are theirs alone and not those of TheInsideLeft, neither do we endorse any comments made in interviews with our writers or take responsibility for the accuracy of financial information.

The start of the infrequently aired second verse of the Netherlands national anthem runs: “I am a Prince of Orange, fearless, ever free”. They should think about using those lines more frequently, in honour of Marco van Basten, the man whose name has become synonymous with the perfectly struck volley…

Image: Peter Robinson (Press Association Images)

volley

Pronunciation: /ˈvɒli/

noun (plural volleys)

• (in sport, especially soccer) a strike or kick of the ball made before it touches the ground

Utrecht, located in the heart of the Netherlands, is an unprepossessing place with a strong artistic heritage.

Lonely Planet listed it in the world’s top 10 most unsung locations. Every Saturday a stonemason adds another letter to The Letters of Utrecht, an endless poem carved into cobblestones in the city. It is a place where creative expression is very much encouraged. Unsurprisingly then, it is also the birthplace of one of the best football players the world has ever seen.

21 years after the end of World War Two, Marco van Basten was born. As a football mad youngster there wasn’t much to do in Utrecht, in a drab late Sixties Netherlands still recovering from the jarring effects of war. So he played football. And the football he played honed his technique to perfection.

Where do you start with such a player? Let’s get the stats out of the way first. Van Basten won the Eredivisie three times, the KNVB Cup twice and the European Cup Winners’ Cup once. He was also the top scorer in the Dutch League on four occasions and won the Dutch Player of the Year in 1984/85 and the European Golden Boot in 1985/86. At AC Milan he won Serie A four times, the Champions League and the European Super Cup three times each and the Intercontinental Cup twice.

On an individual level, while in Rossoneri colours, he picked up European Player of the Year three times, top scored in Serie A twice, and achieved the same honour in Euro ’88, with five goals to his name. In total, he scored 276 goals from 373 club appearances with a further 24 goals from 58 caps for Holland. In 1992, he was named FIFA World Player of the Year.

Does that do him justice?

No – for he was forced to retire at his peak. At the age of 28.

To put that in perspective, if Pele had retired at 28, he wouldn’t have been there to roll that ball to Carlos Alberto in Mexico City. If Bobby Charlton had retired at 28, he wouldn’t have been able to weep tears of joy and respect in remembrance of his fallen colleagues, clad in all blue on the sapping Wembley turf, 10 years after the Munich air disaster.

28 is no age at all to wake up and wonder what you are going to do for the rest of your life. Now that your body has finally succumbed to the continual foul play of cumbersome defenders scared of being made to look foolish by men like van Basten. Yet his legacy was the beautiful goals he bequeathed to us; studies in gracefulness and control, powered by a killer instinct.

It seems fitting that his Ajax debut, against NEC as a spindly 17-year-old, was as a substitute for Johan Cryuff, when he scored 10 minutes after coming on in a 5-0 win in April 1982.

10 years later, in the early part of his final season in 1992/93 – the year football was invented according to some – we saw a player at the peak of his sublime powers. In a tumultuous 5-4 win for Milan at Pescara in September 1992, his hat-trick goal saw him imparting the ball with backspin, lifting it gloriously over an onrushing keeper as deftly as a sand wedge.

Against Atalanta a short while later, a header across the box from Frank Rijkaard forced van Basten to contort his body in order to give himself the best shape possible to perfectly hit a reluctantly falling ball into the net. It was that intuitive grasp of physics that transcended play and formed something closer to art.

Then, in a ridiculous 7-3 win at Fiorentina in October 1992, van Basten, having been fed the ball as he ran onto the edge of the area, teed it up and attacked it with such trickery and power it practically swerved through the keeper.

The four goals that van Basten scored against IFK Gothenberg, and their record capped Swedish goalkeeper Thomas Ravelli, in the Champions League also stand out. His hat-trick goal, at a cold, misty and packed San Siro in November 1992, comes close to being my favourite MvB moment. His bicycle kick was technically perfect and aesthetically pleasing. It was executed with a lightness as lithe as an acrobat, producing an action that looked as simple as the mechanics behind it were difficult. He was always good at volleys was Marco.

The fourth, as he danced round a dazed Ravelli, saw him as nimble and effortless on his toes as a ballerina. But he was already 28 by then. A month later he had ankle surgery. He returned to play against the controversial Marseille of Bernard Tapie in the Champions League final of 1993. It was to be his last game of professional football. After two full years on the sidelines, he retired in August 1995. Who knows what other triumphs he could have achieved? Who knows what other stunning goals he could have scored?

When a sportsman is forced to retire through injury you feel sad for him. Of course you do. But when a world class sportsman is forced to retire you also feel cheated and resentful. You feel you have been denied further outbursts of joy, of magic: of special moments.

Marco van Basten’s defining special moment was the 1988 European Championships.

A Brazilian journalist called the total football that the Dutch national team, the Oranjie, carries in their DNA, ‘organised disorganisation’. Over the years people have also called the Oranje ‘Clockwork Orange’. In South America and Southern Europe they were known as ‘La Maquina Narana’ (‘The Orange Machine’). Never have nicknames been so less apt, for they imply a mechanical automation, which belies the fantasy of tactical shapes indulging in continuous and ceaseless swaps, adjustments and amendments of personnel, pounding the opposition in waves of incessant attacking.

At Euro ’88, apart from a hiccup in their first group match against the USSR, Holland progressed serenely through to the final. They also gained a modicum of revenge for their forebears, the much lauded and loved Dutch team of the mid Seventies as they beat West Germany in the semi-final on the same pitch where Cruyff’s total football team forgot to score a second goal in the 1974 World Cup final.

Van Basten scored the winner in a tight game this time around. He also scored a hat-trick against England in a group game which sent the Three Lions home and fuelled the Dutch.

The final saw the Netherlands play the USSR at the Olympiastadion, Munich in front of 62,308 fans – the majority of which were orange-clad Dutchmen and women praying for their first International tournament win. (The Berlin Wall had yet to fall and the Soviet Union was still a deeply suspicious one-party state in which travel restrictions were the norm for ordinary citizens). Did the legendary Valeriy Lobanovskyi get his tactics slightly wrong in choosing Sergei Aleinikov, primarily a midfielder, to mark van Basten after Kuznetzov’s suspension? Even Rinat Dasayev, captain and loyal Lobanovskyi lieutenant admitted, ‘He didn’t get the defensive side quite right that day’.

32 minutes into the final, Erwin Koeman, Holland’s left winger, crosses into the box. The ball is headed back by van Basten to Gullit, who marshals the extraordinary latent force in his neck muscles to power a header over Dasayev with far more venom than many players muster in a shot. Orange waves come crashing forward in delight on the steep terraces around the Olympiastadion, but the players, mindful of the oversight of 1974, know the job is not done. After the game the Soviet team will recount Lobanovskyi telling them during the half-time interval to attack early in the second period in an attempt to put the Dutch under pressure.

Marco van Basten has other ideas, however, and at 4.39pm on 25 June 1988, he produces an iconic moment; a career defining moment. For as long football is played his goal will be talked about – and for as long as art can be said to enthuse and arouse the emotions then this goal will certainly be classed as art.

Arnold Murhen plays the ball into the box. Its arc of trajectory looks way too high for it to be effective. For those of us watching on television, the elevated ball actually disappears from the camera’s view before it drops – at one stage, neither ball nor van Basten is in shot. You wonder whether the defender will head it off for a corner; you almost look away thinking there is no danger. But you don’t. Because you know van Basten hasn’t given up and is running onto it. (As a youngster his dad threatened to kick a young Marco’s backside all the along a local canal if he didn’t persevere during one particularly tough game). Yet the angle is so impossible as to render the notion of a shot ridiculous.

The ball drops back into view, and with astonishment and a not inconsiderable amount of joy, you suddenly realise that the Dutchman has decided to volley it. You think he hasn’t a chance of connecting properly, let alone score, but you watch anyway, mesmerised at the impudence of him even trying. Van Basten has made up his mind early, far earlier than the idea of understanding exactly what the player wants to execute has even occurred to the viewer. Marco has his eyes firmly focused on the ball as he gets into the line of flight. Fearlessly he judges where the ball will arrive and strikes his foot through it as cleanly as he will ever hit a ball in his life. Dasayev, who had previously been on the verge of giving his defenders workaday instructions to keep their shape, has also abruptly realised Marco is about to shoot. As he tenses himself waiting for a shot that may never reach him, he is blown away by the power and the accuracy of the volley. The ball has powered and looped over the Russian keeper and into the roof of the net.

As Marco wheels away in delight, he doesn’t even look surprised.

A typically modest Murhen later said, ‘I think Marco made my cross into a good one as I didn’t hit it well.’ An equally modest van Basten added, ‘I noticed I was losing energy so I decided to hit the ball first time and see what happened’.

It was left to an incredulous Ruud Gullit to pay homage to the goal, stating that his team-mate could have taken that shot a million more times and never scored. Frank Rijkard, full of admiration and deep respect for his friend and team mate simply pointed out that ‘it wasn’t a lucky goal because he scored it’.

The start of the infrequently aired second verse of the Netherlands national anthem runs: “Een Prins van Oranje/ben ik, vrij onverveerd” - “I am a Prince of Orange, fearless, ever free”.

They should think about using those lines more frequently, in honour of Marco van Basten, Dutch football’s very own Prinse van Oranje.

You can follow Layth on Twitter @laythy29

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In 1998, Chelsea reached a major European final for the first time in 27 years when they sent Italian surprise package Vicenza packing in the Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final at Stamford Bridge. However, it took a comeback of epic proportions to secure a victory that Blues fans will never forget…

In recent years, Chelsea have welcomed most of Italy’s grand clubs on prestigious European nights at Stamford Bridge. AC Milan were the Blues’ first-ever Champions League opponents in 1999 and, since then, Lazio, Juventus, Roma and Inter have all visited west London in football’s premier club competition.

But it is the name of another Italian side – not one of the traditional greats – that lives on in Chelsea folklore as the opponent on one of their greatest European nights yet.

That team is Vicenza, who showed up at the Bridge in April 1998 for a European Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final with a 1-0 advantage from the first leg at their Stadio Romeo Menti.  Oddly, both clubs were wearing their away colours: Chelsea in yellow; Vicenza in grey.

Just over half an hour into the return leg, the team from the Veneto appeared to have sealed their place in the Stockholm final when Pasquale Luiso struck to make it 2-0 on aggregate to the Italians, who boasted an away goal too. Chelsea needed three goals in order to overcome the deficit – not even a draw would be enough to spare them.

Their plight was symbolised by a gesture from the goalscorer. More than a mere celebration, Luiso made clear what he believed he had achieved for his club as he raised a single finger to his lips, suggesting that his goal would silence the excitable Chelsea support.

Whatever Luiso thought, he was wrong. The goal – and the celebration – roused the crowd to double the noise level inside Stamford Bridge. Graeme Le Saux once spokeof how the place “rocked” to the sound of Chelsea chanting on those European nights in the late Nineties, but on no other occasion did it reach the decibel level registered as Vicenza fell to an epic wave of self-belief from the stands.

Three minutes after Luiso’s opening act, Gus Poyet pounced on the rebound after Gianfranco Zola’s shot was spilled by Pierluigi Brivio and forced the ball home to level the scores on the night. As the Uruguayan carried the ball back to the halfway line and whipped up the crowd in the half-completed West Stand, there was a sense that something special might be on the cards.

Half-time was a nervous waste of 15 minutes – the only thing anyone wanted was the whistle to begin the second half and a famous comeback.

Then, six minutes after the restart and the two most famous Italians on the pitch combined to score a second – for the English team. Recently appointed player-manager Gianluca Vialli supplied the assist and little Zola arrived at the back post, unmarked, to thump home a rare headed goal. One more goal would do it now for Chelsea.

20 minutes remained when the sight of Mark Hughes on the side of the pitch, preparing to enter the fray, brought a sense of reassurance to the home support. The experienced Welsh striker’s hair was fast turning the same colour as Vicenza’s silver away shirts and he probably thought he had seen it all in his impressive career, but even he cannot have expected what would happen nine minutes later.

A long kick forward from goalkeeper Ed de Goey, at a time when Chelsea fans were beginning to feel desperate for the clinching goal, was won in the air by Hughes, who landed and turned in one movement. He burst towards the Vicenza penalty area as his own flick-on dropped out of the sky and struck the ball on the bounce, unleashing a sublime left-footed effort that flew across the Italian goalkeeper and into the net.

One of the greatest goals in Chelsea history had completed one of the greatest games. The shouts, the bouncing fans in the stands, the players piling on top of one another in front of them – all of it is ingrained in the memory of those who were there.

Future Milan star Massimo Ambrosini was shown a red card two minutes from time to further cheers from the Blues support and, when the final whistle blew, reserves and coaching staff flooded the pitch – Chelsea were in their first European final for 27 years and the emotion among those present was tangible.

Vicenza. It’s the name of a city to most, even a football club to some, but Chelsea supporters use it as a byword for the evening when their club returned to the big time, on the continental stage.

Thursday 16 April, 1998:

Chelsea 3 Vicenza 1 (Agg: 3-2)
Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final (2nd leg)
Stamford Bridge

Chelsea: De Goey; Newton (Charvet 70), Clarke, Leboeuf, Duberry, Le Saux; Wise, Morris (Hughes 70), Poyet; Vialli, Zola (Myers 81)

Vicenza: Brivio; Mendez, Belotti, Stovini (Dicara 62); Viviani; Schenardi (Di Napoli 82), Di Carlo (Otero 82), Ambrosini, Ambrosetti; Zauli; Luiso

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Last weekend saw Ukraine’s biggest derby game end in yet another victory for the all-powerful Shakhtar Donetsk. Now, after years of unchallenged hegemony, one Dynamo Kyiv supporter asks how this great club has come to be living in Shakhtar’s shadow and when, if ever, they will reassert themselves…

Another derby, another defeat for Dynamo Kyiv, but it wasn’t as easy for Shakhtar this time.

66,000-plus fans braved the near-freezing conditions at Dynamo’s Olympic Stadium on Sunday night, hoping to see their side finally get the edge over their fierce rivals from the East. Had Ideye Brown put away his sitter in the 54th minute, they may have got their wish. Alas, Brown managed to hit the crossbar with the entire goal at his disposal, Henrikh Mhitaryan gave Shakhtar the lead twenty minutes later and, just like that, the Donetsk side once again emerged victorious in the Klasichne, Ukraine’s own version of the Clásico.

This was Shakhtar’s third straight victory in the derby this season; they ran out 3-1 victors in the reverse fixture in Donetsk in early September and dispatched Dynamo from the Ukrainian Cup later that month in a 4-1 rout. Three-time defending champions Shakhtar are certain to make it four in a row; with seven matches left to play they have an astonishing 66 out of a possible 69 points and are 17 clear at the top. They are a cut above the rest in the Ukrainian Premier League and have left Dynamo in the dust in their relentless assault toward yet another league title. Make no mistake about it: as much as a Dynamo fan like myself hates to admit it, Shakhtar are without rivals in Ukrainian football.

It hasn’t always been like this. In fact, Shakhtar’s ascendancy to the apex of Ukrainian football is a relatively new development and represents an anomaly in a country where Dynamo has always been the undisputed standard-bearer.

The (Non) Rivalry of the Soviet Era

To understand this seismic shift in Ukrainian football we must look back and examine the historical roles of both clubs, dating back to the Soviet era. The first country-wide competition in the Ukrainian SSR was held in 1921. The teams were not proper clubs, however, but city selections consisting of the best footballers from the participating cities.

Dynamo Kyiv, founded in 1927, won the trophy in 1936, the first time the competition was open to clubs and not simply city selections. Shakhtar were founded that same year as Stakhanovets Stalino; they were named after the Stakhanovite movement, while Stalino was the name of the city of Donetsk at the time. In their first match they were defeated 3-2 at home by Dynamo Odessa in the quarterfinals of the 1936 Ukrainian Championship. Dynamo were also an inaugural member of the first Soviet-wide championship in 1936, in which they finished runners up to Dynamo Moscow, and, following the expansion of the top flight in 1938, Stakhanovets were also included.

In the first ever Ukrainian derby, contested on July 18, Dynamo won 2-0 in front of their home fans thanks to a brace from Pyotr Laiko. At the time, of course, the match was not know by that name and did not stand out in the fixture list; it was just one contest among many between the six Ukrainian teams competing in the top flight at the time.

Following the Second World War, Dynamo slowly but surely began to consolidate their position as the elite Ukrainian representative on the Soviet stage. In 1961 they won their first Soviet Championship and, in the decades to come, under the reigns of the legendary managers Viktor Maslov and Valeriy Lobanovskyi, they would conquer the Soviet top league 12 more times, the most championships of any team, as well as nine Soviet Cups.  They left their mark in Europe as well: two UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup trophies, in 1975 and 1986, as well as a 3-0 UEFA Super Cup victory in 1975 over Bayern Munich, elevated Lobanovskyi’s teams to a legendary place in Ukrainian football lore.

Image: David Holt London (via Flickr)

The Ukrainian derby, as such, did not exist.  Dynamo looked to the Soviet capital, Moscow, for their prestige derbies. Dynamo Kyiv vs Spartak Moscow was usually the most anticipated match in the fixture list, while matches against Dynamo Tbilisi of Georgia were also characterized by a certain romantic flair. Dynamo were historically so superior that other Ukrainian sides were not seen as rivals to the capital club. That is not to say that other Ukrainian teams never made their mark on the Soviet football scene; Zorya Voroshilovgrad (now Zorya Luhansk) shockingly beat out Dynamo for the league title in 1971, and Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk’s famous side from the Eighties twice won the championship.

Ukrainian teams fared better in the Soviet Cup. Karpaty Lviv became the first and only team from outside the top flight to lift the Cup in 1969, before Metalist Kharkiv and Dnipro won it in 1988 and 1989 respectively. It was in this competition that Shakhtar Donetsk excelled. They won the trophy in back-to-back years in 1961 and 1962, and again in 1980 and 1983. They twice contested the Soviet Super Cup against Dynamo, losing both times on penalties.

In short, Shakhtar achieved modest success in the Soviet era but they were no match for the might of Dynamo Kyiv. Dynamo were simply peerless in Ukraine, and there were reasons for this other than just footballing prowess. Being situated in the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, Dynamo enjoyed the patronage of Ukrainian Communist Party leaders that the other sides did not have. It did not hurt that Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, head of the Communist Party in Ukraine from 1972 until 1989, was a fanatical Dynamo supporter. Dynamo’s connections served them well, as promising young players and managers from elsewhere in the republic were pressured to make the move to the capital.

Lobanovskyi was asked to leave Dnipro and become manager of Dynamo by Shcherbytsky himself. In such circumstances, it is not surprising that no other clubs were able to break Dynamo’s hegemony over Ukrainian football, but the Soviet system was quickly disintegrating, leaving the door open for challenges to Dynamo’s primacy.

Independence and the Emergence of a Challenger

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of the Ukrainian Premier League, Dynamo initially remained far and away the most successful team in Ukrainian football, winning nine of the first 10 championships. The only exception was the inaugural edition of the UPL, which consisted of two group championships and a final between the winners of the groups. Tavriya Simferopol, an unheralded side from the Crimean peninsula, defeated Dynamo in the final for their first ever piece of silverware. But the decade belonged to the capital club, who won the next nine UPL titles in a row.

Following the return of Lobanovskyi as manager in 1997, Dynamo once again became a force in Europe. Led by the deadly strike partnership of Andriy Shevchenko and Serhiy Rebrov, Dynamo were quarter-finalists in the 1997/98 edition of the Champions League and nearly made it to the final the following year, going down 4-3 on aggregate to Bayern Munich in the semi-finals. Though the Soviet Union no longer existed, Dynamo still enjoyed their structural advantages inherited from the Communist era, including access to the prestigious formerly state-run academy.

In the first half of that decade, Shakhtar hardly threatened Dynamo’s domination. They were runners up in the 1993/94 campaign but steadily fell down the standings in subsequent seasons, dropping as low as 10th place in 1995/96. That season, however, would prove to be fateful in Shakhtar’s history.

On October 15, 1995, Akhat Bragin, President of Shakhtar, was assassinated by a bomb in the stadium, while Shakhtar were playing Tavriya. Bragin was succeeded by Rinat Akhmetov, a businessman and oligarch who soon began to invest heavily in new players and a luxurious training complex.

Results followed immediately. Following Akhmetov’s ascendancy to the Shakhtar presidency, the club has not once finished outside the top two in the Ukrainian Premier League. They were runners up every year from 1996/97 through 2000/01 and won the Ukrainian Cup in 1995, 97, and 2001.  Then, the following season, Shakhtar finished one point above their rivals and finally nicked the league title away from the perennial powerhouse from the capital. The result that made the difference was Shakhtar’s 2-0 derby victory over Dynamo in Round 25.  Shakhtar had officially announced themselves on the Ukrainian football scene.

A Changing of the Guard

In the 2000s, Ukrainian football seesawed between the two clubs. Following Shakhtar’s inaugural triumph, Dynamo reclaimed their title as Ukraine’s best the following season and retained the league the year after that. But they could not hold on to their status as the undisputed top dog.

Dynamo and Shakhtar evenly split the spoils over the decade – both sides becoming champions on five occasions. No other side even broke into the top two; the Ukrainian Premier League effectively became a two-horse race.

For Shakhtar, this could be seen as a massive success; a 10th place finish was not far removed in the collective memory of their faithful, so being in contention for the title was a dramatic improvement. But for Dynamo, the emergence of a worthy opponent represented an unprecedented disruption of the status quo. Long used to being the cream of the crop, they suddenly found themselves challenged by, and even losing out to, the upstarts from the East. Even worse was to come.

The seminal moment of Ukrainian football in recent years came in the 2008/09 edition of UEFA Cup, as Shakhtar and Dynamo were drawn together in the semi-finals.

With the aggregate score at 2-2 and away goals even late in the second leg, a place in the final was up for grabs when, a minute from time, Shakhtar’s Brazilian winger Ilsinho burst in from the flank, expertly cut inside to beat his man, and sent a low shot into the far corner to send Shakhtar through to the final. There, a 2-1 extra time victory over Werder Bremen gave Shakhtar their first piece of European silverware – it was the Donetsk outfit’s ceremonial crowning as Ukraine’s new elite club; Dynamo may have won the league that season, but Shakhtar’s European glory was far more memorable.

Shakhtar have been all but unbeatable since: three straight Ukrainian Premier League titles, two more Ukrainian Cups, and two Ukrainian Super Cups. Dynamo’s only trophy during this time has been a solitary Super Cup in 2011 and, although they defeated Shakhtar, it was scant consolation for losing out on both the league and the cup to their great rivals.

This season, the league has been more one-sided than ever. Shakhtar are on pace for a record-breaking points total, while Dynamo risk falling out of the top two for the first time in their history. Moreover, Shakhtar have convincingly won every single Klasichne this season, while Dynamo’s latest derby victory in the league came in April of 2011.

To add insult to injury, Shakhtar are now the flag bearers for Ukraine on the continental stage. They have been to the knockout stages of the Champions League in two of the past three seasons, while Dynamo only returned to the group stage this season after a three year absence and were unceremoniously dumped out in the first round. Dynamo, for so long Ukraine’s finest, have been unseated. Ukraine belongs to Shakhtar.

So, how did such a changing of the guard occur? For starters, in the post-Soviet environment, Dynamo’s institutional advantages, while still existent, could no longer safeguard them against the forces of a market economy. Akhmetov’s wealth and patronage of Shakhtar could not have been possible in the USSR, but in the free-for-all capitalism unleashed on the former Soviet republics by shock therapy, Akhmetov was able to make a fortune and use it to fund his local football club. A new academy encouraged the development of local youngsters, while a generous transfer kitty ensured Shakhtar’s competitiveness in the global market. Additionally, while it may not be directly responsible for the team’s successful results, Shakhtar’s new stadium, the Donbass arena, opened its doors in 2009, a reflection of Akhmetov’s dedication to elevate Shakhtar’s prestige to equal and even exceed that of Dynamo.

Image: Timon91 (via Flickr)

But simple economics alone cannot account for Shakhtar’s rise and Dynamo’s fall. It is not as if Dynamo are struggling financially; their owner, Ihor Surkis is a successful businessman who is not hesitant to open up his wallet for the sake of his club. The dynamics of the shift in Ukrainian football are more complex. Ever since Lobanovskyi suffered a stroke on the bench during a match in May 2002 and passed away a week later, the role of manager has been a revolving door position at the club, with no one man lasting more than two full seasons. Lobanovskyi casts an immense shadow over the club even in death, and his successors have been unable to replicate his achievements. The inability to come to terms with Shakhtar’s rise has led to an impatience with both managers and players, in contrast to Shakhtar’s prudence and stability. Romanian manager Mircea Lucescu has been at the helm since 2004, while Dynamo have gone through 12 different managers in this period.

Meanwhile, the Dynamo academy, no longer receiving funding from the state, is not the vast pool of talent it once was, and the recent transfer histories of the two clubs also reflect the stark difference in policy. For example, after Shakhtar sold Willian to Anzhi for €35 million, they mitigated his departure by bringing in Taison from Metalist Kharkiv for a fraction of that cost, leaving them in the black for the season. Dynamo, meanwhile, in an attempt to challenge Shakhtar’s sudden supremacy, went on a sending spree this summer and bought internationally recognized players Niko Kranjcar, Miguel Veloso, and Raffael, for a combined €23.5 million. While Veloso has become a fixture in the midfield, Kranjcar and Raffael struggle to get a start. Sometimes it feels as if Dynamo’s transfer policy is conducted not with a vision for the future in mind, but with the haphazardness of a teenager playing a computer game.

The future looks bright for Shakhtar, but Dynamo are by no means a defeated club. Surkis is more than willing to spend money, but Dynamo need a vision and a project for the future – confidence in newest manager – former Ukraine boss Oleh Blokhin – is a must.

Even Shakhtar fans must recognize the importance of Dynamo’s revival for the sake of the vitality of Ukrainian football. A one-horse league is no fun for anyone. Whether Dynamo can reverse the trend of Shakhtar’s supremacy is up in the air. Shakhtar, for their part, will enjoy this moment of unparalleled domination for as long as it lasts.

Vadim Furmanov is a football blogger with a heavy focus on Ukraine and Eastern Europe, as well as a supporter of Dynamo Kyiv. You can follow him on Twitter @passive_offside

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Once a footballing power in the Soviet era, SKA Rostov-on-Don are in dire straits. Financial woes have forced the club to withdraw from Russia’s Second Division and there may be worse to come, but few seem to care. Is the Don region’s most successful team about to disappear without a whimper?

Rostov is a proud city. Sitting on the Don River, famous for its rich Cossack history and Soviet canal, the gateway to the Sea of Azov and just a few miles from the Ukrainian border, it has played its role in Russian history as a military base, a naval stronghold, cultural centre and now a modern business city experiencing growth so impressive that neighbouring cities have been swallowed up by its sprawl.

It is a city that prides itself on being able to look both forwards and back, paying homage to its legacy and yet constantly looking to plot a way through the mists of the future.

It is not, however, a great sporting city. It will play host to the 2018 World Cup, a new 43,000-seater stadium to be built on the banks of the famous river, but the Premier League team that will occupy it are far from the glamorous names at the top of the footballing tree. Rostov have for some years found themselves slowly slipping down the top flight table, occasionally drifting into limbo between the top two tiers but always finding enough to hold on to elite status, whether by winning play-offs or scraping enough points. In terms of entertainment they contribute very little to the league, in terms of news there is nothing from Rostov that ever makes the papers – David Bentley’s brief loan aside – and while the locals would certainly question it, there would be few outside the city who would mind too much if FC Rostov disappeared from the Premier League.

There is no rich pedigree in other sports either. Traditionally Russia’s ice hockey powerhouses come from either Moscow or the east, the likes of Kazan, Ufa and Omsk competing with the Dinamos of this world for the national title, while the capital dominated in the Soviet period. Rostov is too far south to have really stood a chance when it comes to producing champions at biathlon, another favourite Russian endeavour, while it sits too far north of the Caucasus to have benefited from the region’s prolific production of Olympic wrestlers. On the sporting front, it occupies a no man’s land which is envied by very few.

The one claim to sporting achievement they do have lies with the city’s second team, army club SKA. In the Soviet era, SKA joined the powerful army society to become one of the stronger clubs in the USSR, finishing runners-up to Dynamo Kyiv in the 1966 Top League season and reaching three Soviet Cup finals, victors over Spartak Moscow in 1981 having twice fallen at the last hurdle. The end of the Soviet period was less kind to SKA however, even the likes of Oleg Veretennikov unable to stop them plummeting into the regional leagues, and it is there that they have stayed, the odd foray into the First Division never lasting more than a season or two as they cemented their position as Second Division stalwarts. In many ways the old men of the southern region, they remain as a reminder of what Rostov can achieve, a nostalgic glimpse into a past which surpasses future prospects.

At least, they did. With financial difficulties already taking their toll on the club – a key reason behind their inability to progress beyond the regional level – a limited squad was registered at the start of the current season, and thus far they have failed according to every measurement. From their 20 games so far they have managed just two wins, eight goals and nine points, sitting dead last and facing the prospect of relegation to the amateur divisions.

Their problems have not been restricted to performances on the pitch, but also in the stands and on the balance sheet, the two of which have proved inextricably linked. A crucial factor in the SKA’s financial mess is the contribution towards their oversized and outdated home at SKA SKVO, a 27,000 seater 1970s monolith completely unnecessary for a club which cannot boast the biggest crowd in a localised league. With Rostov’s natives preferring the Premier League to the Second Division, the takings on the gate have been nothing short of abysmal – SKA’s average crowd this season numbers less than 800 people, a figure smaller than the equivalents at local ‘rivals’ in Novocherkassk and Taganrog, cities which have effectively become part of the Rostov conglomeration.

With no cash coming in and plenty leaving the coffers, the club’s management began to run out of places to turn to. With poignant timing – in the middle of European ties featuring millions of pounds of expensive foreign stars at Russian clubs – SKA voluntarily withdrew from the Second Division, their finances simply unable to stretch to the end of the season. It is unclear what the next step will be for the historic club. When Zhemchuzhina Sochi pulled out of the First Division last season, it was expected that they would automatically relegate and begin afresh. This never materialised. In the same way, for all intents and purposes, SKA Rostov-on-Don do not exist.

An emergency committee has been formed, with the usual process of handing the club over to the regional authorities in a desperate last-ditch attempt for salvation well underway, but it is more than likely that the Don region’s most successful club will simply fade into oblivion. The sadness lies not in the circumstances, but in the reaction.

So far, the clubs that have paid the ultimate penalty for financial woes have been either new upstarts or regional sides with little history to their name – Saturn Ramenskoye, FC Moscow, Dinamo Bryansk. For a brief moment, SKA’s demise had the potential to be the catalyst for a new awareness of old clubs in danger and cities losing more than just a football team. In England, fans club together to buy sides like Portsmouth, in Spain the likes of Real Oviedo can draw support from all corners of the globe. In Russia however, SKA’s withdrawal failed even to make the website of the other club in their city, while the millionaires in Europe continue to play. While new money and new opportunities continue to present themselves with the World Cup around the corner, Russia would be mad not to take them. However, as other nations have proved so often , there is plenty of value in maintaining history – this is something Russia is yet to discover.

Rob Dillon writes and tweets regularly about Russian football. You can find his work at morethanarshavin.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter @RobDillonMTA

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The MLS may be a relatively new league, but the passion of the Great Northwest Derby, between Seattle Sounders and Portland Timbers, runs deep. We take a look at a rivalry based on two distinct civic identities, with a hostility driven by subtle distinctions in principles and ethos…

In early March, the MLS dedicated the third round of their 2013 season to ‘rivalry week’. It was no surprise that the showpiece match was to be the Seattle Sounders vs Portland Timbers derby.

Quite simply it is the fiercest MLS fixture in America. Ex-Fulham and Cardiff striker Eddie Johnson who now plays for Seattle said “I played in some rivalries when I was in Europe [but] this is a pretty special game.’

Kasey Keller, who played for Millwall (including their last ever game at the Old Den) has compared it to the enmity between the Lions and West Ham United, saying that the off-field opposition between the two Pacific Coast Football teams was a ‘cool thing’, whilst stressing he did not condone violence.

Likening relations between Sounders and the Timbers to a century old East End Blood feud may be stretching the point, but the fact is that Seattle vs Portland is associated with rancour and ill-will. More so than any other fixture – or ‘match-up’ as the Americans call it – in the MLS.

Major League Soccer was created in 1993, as part of America’s bid to host the 1994 World Cup. In a league that is only 20 years old, the two Pacific Northwest giants have a history which stretches way back to the 1970s and the glamorous, but ill-fated NASL. In MLS terms that makes it positively prehistoric.

The teams are two-and-a-half hours’ drive apart (miniscule to US tastes), and they lack the big city feel of New York or Chicago, where traditional sporting teams are entrenched, invariably choking aspiring newcomers. The Seattle Supersonics NBA Basketball team were also recently relocated to Oklahoma amidst much acrimony. This leaves the only professional sporting contest between Seattle and Portland as the MLS derby in this sports obsessed region. Further strengthening the belief that this rivalry, already huge, will grow even larger.

It already stretches back almost 40 years, encompassing six different league or cup competitions. In their first ever meeting on May 2 1975, Portland beat Seattle in a NASL play-off game, causing the majority of Timbers fans in the 31,000 crowd to storm the field in ‘raucous fashion’. It was a provocative act that some from Seattle have never forgotten.

Other notable incidents have included the Timbers Army, the Portland hard-core supporters or tifosi, as they prefer, constructing a 20-foot-high banner of the club’s mascot Timber Jim – a reference to the Portland’s extensive logging tradition, pivotal to the town’s early years. The artwork showed him sawing down a representation of Seattle’s iconic Space Needle tower with a chainsaw. So intrinsic is the structure to the city of Seattle’s consciousness, and so offended were many from Seattle by the artwork, it would be like Sunderland fans displaying a 20 foot banner of the Tyne Bridge being destroyed, at the Stadium of Light, before the start of a Tyne-Tees derby.

Local cult figure – and ex-Portland Timbers forward – Roger Levesque also fanned the flames when he scored for Seattle against Portland a few seasons back. He celebrated provocatively by impersonating a falling tree, with team-mate Nate Jaqua miming a woodcutter using an imaginary axe at his feet. (Seattle legend Levesque is so hated by Timbers fans that when he once played for Portland as a guest player in a friendly they incessantly booed his every touch.)

There have even been reported instances of trouble away from the stadium between the two sets of fans, although everyone is keen to stress that official tifosi from both sides were not involved. Thankfully organised trouble is unheard of.

Derbies can revolve around geography, economics, politics or religion. In the region the two teams were born into, the Great Northwest, their rivalry has been described as an argument about civic identity, with a hostility driven by subtle distinctions in principles and ethos.

Songs from both sets of tifosi reflect this.

Sounders fans can often be heard to sing,

‘Port-scum, Port-scum

Seedy little city on a river of piss

We’ll drink your beer and shag your sis’,

with the Timbers replying, to the tune of Oh My Darling Clementine:

“Build a bonfire, build a bonfire,

Put Seattle on the top,

Put Vancouver in the middle,

And we’ll burn the bloody lot”

Seattle call those from Portland drunk, laid-back, work-shy hippies, with the reverse mocking those from the bigger city of Seattle as dilettante pseudo-sophisticates: in other words fair weather prawn-sandwich-eating-pretenders waiting for the next fashionable thing to be seen at.

Yet, to level that accusation at all Sounders fans would be as unfair as to describe every Manchester United or Arsenal fan as such. The reality is that the team from the Emerald City appear to be a progressive and well-run club (incidentally the nickname is a reference to the evergreen forests of the area. With the emerald influence being seen in Seattle’s bright green current home top, the colours of which, apart from the embossed Space Needle as their badge, have been described somewhat intriguingly as ‘rave green and capital blue’).

All season ticket holders can vote on the direction of the club, including the fate of the general manager, a concept taken from the Barcelona model of elections for team presidents. Indeed, the Sounders have sold more season tickets than any other MLS club in the league’s 13-year existence and proudly boast a higher average attendance than that of Tottenham Hotpsur.

In a league with historically unrelated names such as the New York Red Bulls, Seattle fans voted for the team’s name, which has historical links with the original Sounders of the NASL and the Seattle Sounders who played in the USL; they even have a 53-piece marching band, the Sound Wave – the only such band in MLS.

Yet, geography does have a part to play too. As Adrian Hanauer, a Seattle shareholder, said recently, “We’re pretty isolated up here, the only…cities until you get to California,” continuing, “There’s nobody else for us to hate and battle with.”

Just as there is pride in the Sounders from their fans, there is also a great regional satisfaction from Seattleites in their city as it undergoes an economic resurgence. Through being a hub for ‘green’ industry and sustainable development, the city is imperceptibly moving away from its more well-known corporate image of Microsoft, Boeing and Starbucks.

Jason Quillin, a London based Sounders fan who hails from Seattle, said, ‘Timbers fans are seen as quite rowdy Thirty-somethings, who view us as a bunch of sober families’, but, as he continued, ‘we get three times as many fans as them at all our games and have won far more trophies than they have. In fact they haven’t won anything. We consider them to be like our little brother, or our ‘noisy neighbour’. They’re still jealous Nirvana came from Washington State’.

This view was echoed by the Seattle tifosi and their intimidatingly large banner at last season’s game which simply read, ‘Decades of Dominance’. For a derby game in 2009 they displayed another to Portland, stating, ‘Tonight our History becomes legend’ – to which, in a cup game a few months later, The Timber Army with a huge effort of their own, cheekily replied, ‘Tonight your legend becomes History…’

Equally, the Timbers also have a reputation for being a club embedded within their community.

It may be a town that lies in the shadow of the corporate behemoths of Seattle, but it is a place where locally sourced food abounds, and nationwide chain stores are hard to find.

Perhaps because Portland supports local products, businesses and initiatives, they also support their local team. Think of a regionally proud and distinctive city such as Glasgow, Bilbao or Marseille, where you would be hard pressed to find a shirt from a team that lay outside its environs and apply that principle to Portland.

The Great Northwest is a place where innovation, change and risk-taking run deep – the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, and third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson called the region a ‘great, free and independent empire’. With that in mind, it is a tribute to its people – Sounders and Timbers fans alike – that their independent streak involves embracing the world’s favourite game far more than any other part of the United States.

This is a proud constituency that has bred timber logging, the aerospace industry, Microsoft, and re-invented the coffee shop; offered a musical platform to Paratrooper and guitarist Jimi Hendrix, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and of course Kurt Cobain. A place where interest in rugged activity is admired, where the spirit of free-thinking that goes against perceived opinion is respected, and with a counter-culture deeply embedded in its DNA that is greatly welcomed by its natives. Perhaps with these features in mind, it really is no surprise, that the Seattle vs Portland derby is the biggest in US football.

“Any other rivalry in this league has sort of been created,” said current Seattle boss Sigi Schmid, “This rivalry has history. That makes it the best rivalry in the league.”

…..

Note: The Sounders have a superior 42-29 (nine draws) head-to-head advantage dating back to 1975. Seattle fans have witnessed four second-division championships and three Open Cup titles, while the Timbers Army has yet to celebrate a trophy.

The last derby game, on 16th March 2013, ended in a 1-1 draw in front of 40,150 at the CenturyLink Field, Seattle, Washington State, with the Timbers Costa Rican striker, Rodney Wallace, scoring a 90th-minute equaliser to level Eddie Johnson’s 13th-minute opener – much to the joy of the 500 travelling members of the Timbers Army.

Seattle’s Space Needle was based on the Stuttgart Tower in Germany. In the 1999 film, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, it served as a base of operations for the villain Doctor Evil with the word Starbucks written across its saucer.

You can see more on the visual displays of the impressive pre-match derby banners, here:

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The narrative of Fulham’s season has largely been defined by the sultry performances of Dimitar Berbatov, but while the stylish forward has been making the headlines two other former Bundesliga stars have been quietly impressing the Craven Cottage crowd with their neat combination play…

The white circle surrounded Sascha Riether and the rest of the pitch darkened slightly. He had been chosen and the viewers were about to find out why.

However, it was not the voice of the Mysterons, or some almighty deity, that spoke next – it was the melancholy Lancashire whinnying of Mark Lawrenson. He had deemed Riether’s lung-busting run to set up Dimitar Berbatov for the decisive goal in Fulham’s win at White Hart Lane worthy of a white circle and a dotted line.

It was March and, you feel, quite possibly the first time many of the viewing public had paid any kind of attention to the German international full-back, who has been making such runs with regularity during his season-long loan at Craven Cottage, including the run and cross that led to Berbatov’s stunning volley against Stoke a few weeks earlier.

Later in the same move we were treated to the briefest of mentions for the link-up play and quick feet provided by Ashkan Dejagah, another Bundesliga export who has been key to the club’s transition play alongside the hustle and bustle of Damien Duff and the languid creativity of Bryan Ruiz.

Lawro and the Match of the Day 2 producers deserve some credit for managing to point out that Fulham’s team is not made up of Berbatov alone, which had been the sole narrative of previous analysis of the Cottagers this season. Yet, it seems remarkable that it has taken us until March to notice that Martin Jol’s side have been bolstered by two men with Bundesliga winners’ medals to their names and international caps to boot.

Riether and Dejagah arrived at Fulham without the hint of a fanfare and, even when the former immediately took to his role at right-back with the reliable defensive nous you can often count on from a twice-capped German international, the plaudits were still not forthcoming. Dejagah, as you might expect from a more expressive, creative force, took time to adapt to the Premier League, but the 26-year-old has recently begun to display the technical ability that made him a mainstay for Germany at every youth level from Under-17s to Under-21s before he decided to turn out for Iran, the country of his birth, at senior level.

So should we be surprised by their performances in west London, or should the real shock be that so many of us knew absolutely nothing about these men before they were given the white-circle treatment on Match of the Day?

Liam Lee is one of that rarest of breeds – a Wolfsburg supporter in England – but, as he explains, both Riether and Dejagah played a part in the German club’s 2008/09 title triumph. Lest we forget, this is a league many of us are looking at with covetous eyes right now.

“Riether was part of a team that recorded 10 straight league victories, which at the time was an exceptional achievement,” Lee informed us. “He made his mark that season by scoring the winning goal against Borussia Moenchengladbach and was a regular in the Wolfsburg starting XI at right-back. He was a favourite under Felix Magath and featured a lot. Considering he arrived for €500,000 from Freiburg, it was an excellent signing and he was one of the many key players to feature for Wolfsburg that season.

“Dejagah is a player who entertained me in his Wolfsburg days and still does now he is at Fulham,” he continued. “The majority of his time at Wolfsburg, he had more time on the ball to showboat or take on the full-backs and has had to adapt his game since achieving his dream of playing in the Premier League, and is gradually looking like a half-tidy player.

“Magath wanted to keep Dejagah, but he had his heart set on a transfer to the Premier League. Since their departures, their replacements have never lived up to their standards.”

Fulham supporters seem equally taken with their former Bundesliga boys and, if anything, they are glad too much attention has not been heaped on them. After all, the Whites are yet to secure a permanent deal for Riether, who is on loan from his parent club, Koln, following their relegation from the German top flight last season.

“I’m sure a few other Premier League clubs have noticed Riether this season, so if less media attention stops the price from going up, it could help us to sign him permanently,” said Tony Bliss, a season-ticket holder at the Cottage.

“With his rounded shoulders, he has that slightly hollow-chested look that reminds me of Steve Finnan and he isn’t dissimilar to Finnan as a player either. I am yet to see a winger outpace him and he times his tackles perfectly – he has a knack of getting his toe on the ball just as the attacking player is about to strike or cross it and that comes from having very good anticipation.

“As for Dejagah, while I would point out he is very right footed and, for someone so stockily built, a little bit timid in 50-50 situations, he has improved as his confidence has increased and he has excellent technical ability. His close control helps him a lot in tight situations and he has good feet, so he can sidestep players at close quarters and get free of them.

“It’s noticeable that the pair have played together in the past because Dejagah has a good understanding with Riether down the right side. He often takes the ball forward at speed, then slows right down, leaving people wondering what he is doing, but he is actually waiting for the overlap from Riether. In fact, he did both those things for the goal against Spurs – showed good feet in a tight area and then spotted the overlap from Riether.

“Still, after all their work, Berbatov got a lot of the plaudits and the attention – not that we’d ever complain about having Berbatov because he is a fantastic player. I just sometimes feel that the rest of the team is overlooked. Other players, like Steve Sidwell and Mark Schwarzer deserve more credit for their crucial roles this season and Ruiz is a top quality player in his own right.”

As long as Riether and Dejagah are combining well down the right flank, it is fair to say Fulham supporters will be happy enough, but perhaps it would be nice if the pundits’ white circle drifted a little more often to the unsung heroes who make their teams tick.

Dominic Bliss is editor of TheInsideLeft and, despite his fondness for the club, he is not a Fulham supporter. You can follow him on Twitter @Dominic_Bliss

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How much does the prospect of tomorrow’s match excite you? 

Speaking, not as a journalist but as a fan, this rivalry is the top thing in soccer for me. MLS is great and the US national team playing other games is great too, but everything else is below this. It is a battle every time and it doesn’t matter if it is a friendly or a qualifier – neither side wants to lose to the other.

How did you come to support the United States despite your Mexican heritage? 

My parents were born in Mexico, while I was born in the United States, so I am first generation and there are a lot of people like me – first generation – that will support Mexico and they won’t support the US national team at all. That is mainly because their parents’ patriotism is pretty strong when it comes to Mexico and they try to make sure they pass their culture along to their kids – the language, the food – and part of that is soccer and the Mexican national team.

So, I would think I am in the minority, but there are more and more fans of the US within that sub-community of first generation Mexican-Americans. For us, I think it is more personal because it is a family rivalry, where the older generation supports Mexico and the younger supports the United States.

I’m not sure how familiar you are with Mexico fans in the UK, but they can be a bit arrogant, and for years they have had reason to be. They were dominant in this region for a long time and nobody else could touch them, but that started to change a bit in the mid-Nineties, when the US started to improve and Costa Rica started to get better.

Costa Rica won in Mexico in a qualifier in 2001 and, since then, it has levelled out. I think a lot of US fans – not just Mexican-Americans – see that arrogance from Mexican fans and there is a feeling, not of anger, but of, “Give us some respect.”

A lot of times we feel that the US has been disrespected because they don’t acknowledge the growth that the US national team has undergone and they don’t acknowledge that the US is a quality opponent. From Mexico’s side, they see their rivals as Argentina and Brazil – they think they are at that level, and I think that adds to the situation because we think we are their neighbours and we should be their top rivals. They do acknowledge the US as a rival, but they also like to get a piece of Argentina whenever they can.

So you grew up with parents who support Mexico… 

Yeah, they have always supported Mexico and a lot of the family are die-hard Mexico supporters, who always used to tease us about the US national team. They didn’t consider us a rival, but as a nice little team, while they were the big boys. That certainly added to it on a personal level.

I know Mexican-Americans feel a loyalty to Mexico, including myself. My parents own a home in Mexico and I have lived there on two separate occasions in my life; my kids are in a dual-immersion programme, so they speak Spanish as well as English. So, for me, there is a huge influence and I really identify with the Mexican culture.

There are Mexican-American players, like Herculez Gomez, Jose Torres, Edgar Castillo, who are US internationals, and that side of it is just going to keep making this rivalry grow. There are a lot of kids who will have to choose who to play for once they get older.

What was it like for you once the pendulum started swinging towards the USA?

When I was younger, in the mid-Nineties, the US couldn’t compete with Mexico. Then we tied 0-0 there in a qualifier in 1997 and that was really exciting because they always bragged about the Azteca and we shut them out there.

But, of course, nothing will ever top the moment in the World Cup 2002, when the US beat Mexico 2-0 in the Round of 16. That was a singularly fantastic moment for US soccer fans.

The American soccer magazine, Howler, designed their first cover around the fact that the United States had won away to Mexico, even though it was only a friendly! Having said that, depicting Jurgen Klinsmann in an Apocalypse Now scenario was worth the hyperbole… 

I haven’t seen that, but I can definitely see why it made the cover. The Azteca is where US teams go to die, basically. Historically, all teams have struggled there – Jamaica has had six-goal and four-goal losses there – and the Mexican fans draw so much confidence from playing in that stadium. They have such a swagger there and the feeling that nothing can go wrong, and before winning that friendly last year, the best the US had was the 0-0 draw in 1997.

The smog, the altitude and the fact that you are playing against a really good team in front of 100,000-plus fans has such an impact.

The 1993 Gold Cup Final was played down there and Mexico beat the USA 4-0 – it was like a Mexican hat-dance as they just had their way with the US team. They always hark back to that, but this last friendly was a great moment because the US did what many thought couldn’t be done. Some people are trying to write it off as “just a friendly”, but this week they are going to play there again in a qualifier and it is going to give the US confidence to know now that they can win there, because they have won there.

Have you been to a game at the Azteca between these two sides?

In 2009, I went down there for the qualifier and the US scored really early, but Mexico tied it up in the end with an 82nd-minute winner. For most of the second half I was thinking, “Can they actually get the draw here?”

Then they got the goal and I realised that it can’t happen! That was always the impenetrable wall, but now it has been taken down and that is going to add a lot of spice to this match.

What makes the rivalry so fierce? 

They are neighbours and there is so much Mexican influence in the United States now. The Mexican national team can come and play in any number of US cities and draw 60-70,000 people. Just seeing that great support here, and how lacking the support for the United States is by comparison, makes you feel that the US soccer fans might have a chip on their shoulder. They are thinking, “We want that sport for us” and the team here is becoming more successful.

The Mexican fans get it – they get what the US fans want and, like the situation for myself, you get a lot of families where the older generations support Mexico and the younger generations support the US. That leads to trash-talking, making bets and taunting – it can get pretty heated.

There are ‘Ultra’ sections among many MLS sides, so do the US fans make themselves heard in the stadium during games against Mexico? 

The atmosphere is great. I was at the Gold Cup Final in 2011, at the Rose Bowl, Pasadena, where Mexico won 4-2.  There was a little over 93,000 people there and I would say 10-15 per cent were US fans. The problem for US fans, in that kind of setting, is that they are outnumbered.

What if they played Mexico in Seattle, for example, where US soccer fans are more prevalent? 

There is a lot of backlash against playing there because they use an artificial surface and I think US soccer wants to avoid that, but I think that would be great. Even in Portland, where they can only get 18,000 in, I like to think that, like Seattle, you would get a majority of US fans. It might only be like 60-40, but I think you would see a majority and that is something this rivalry hasn’t seen.

US fans and players have said since 2002 that, if they played Mexico anywhere outside of Mexico, the US will win. They proved that in the World Cup, but when they play here the US team has all the comforts of home, until they get to the stadium, where it’s full of Mexican fans. It’s the Azteca without the altitude and the smog!

• Read how the rivalry with the USA has grown into something important in Mexico, as Guadalajara-based journalist, Tom Marshall discusses the history of the fixture with TheInsideLeft here.

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