By Will Dalton for

Argentine football has always been shaped as much by its stadiums as by the matches they stage. So it is at San Lorenzo where the cancha is far more than a backdrop.

The forgotten football federation that tried to dethrone FIFA

By for The Backpass

Current FIFA leadership seems intent on testing the limits of its power. That has prompted fresh questions about whether football could ever break away from its governing body, although the idea is far older than many realise. More than a century ago, another international federation attempted to build an alternative.

England's recent success owes far more to the EFL than it is often given credit for. While attention inevitably falls on the Premier League, the next generation of internationals is already making its name lower down the pyramid. Here are ten players who could one day make that journey.

Eddie Howe - Losing Confidence?

By Michael Martin for

Eddie Howe's departure marks the end of one of the most successful periods in Newcastle United's modern history. Yet, beyond a change in the dugout, his decision raises difficult questions about the club's long-term vision and whether that ambition matches that of their supporters.

Bonus Read: Can experience make Chelsea title challengers?

[ x Wilson’s World (of football)]

Chelsea have gone from signing almost exclusively teenagers to buying two experienced players in the twilight of their careers. Could it be exactly what they needed?

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Why Ritiro is the Sacred Summer Ritual at the Heart of Italian Football

By Dan Cancian for Destination Calcio

Every summer, while most of Italy heads for the beaches, its football clubs retreat to the mountains. The ritiro has now been part of Italian football for almost a century, evolving into one of calcio’s most distinctive traditions.

NTT20 Scouts: 10 future England internationals in the EFL

Via

Want to know how important the EFL is for English football? How about this: twenty of the twenty-six players who made part of the England squad at the World Cup at some point played in the EFL. Here’s ten players who could continue on that trend.

Bonus Read: Every Scottish Premiership Sides Best Signing... So Far

[ x Full Time Waffle]

Scottish football has already kicked off. Here’s the pick of most promising transfers for each club. One to bookmark and refer to at the end of the season.

Bonus Read: Historic Champions and Ambitious Minnows: Previewing the 2026/27 3. Liga

[ x The Bundesliga Chronicles]

And here’s a preview of the third tier of German football.

Each week on Cultured Football we pick the five great football stories from the previous seven days.

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: Campeones del Mundo

By Jordan Thomas for La Liga and Beyond

Spain didn’t win the World Cup because they have the best players, even if they have a group of fantastic individuals. They won because they were the best team.

Bonus Read: Max Dowman, Estevao, Cavan Sullivan and 20 NXGN wonderkids we can’t wait to see make their World Cup debuts in 2030

[Tom Maston x Goal]

Less than a week since the end of the World Cup, and some are already looking forward to the next one.

By for La Liga and Beyond

Spain didn’t win the World Cup because they have the best players, even if they have a group of fantastic individuals. They won because they were the best team.

Bonus Read: Max Dowman, Estevao, Cavan Sullivan and 20 NXGN wonderkids we can’t wait to see make their World Cup debuts in 2030

[Tom Maston x Goal]

Less than a week since the end of the World Cup, and some are already looking forward to the next one.

The country that doesn't play football... yet

By Nathan Edwards for the BBC

Football barely exists on Nauru, the tiny Pacific nation where Aussie rules has always been the dominant sport. Yet a small group of volunteers are trying to change that.

How LNZ Cherkasy become a wartime success story with few modern parallels

By Nick Ames for The Guardian

With football having taken a back seat to far greater concerns, there haven’t been many feel good stories to come out of Ukraine over recent years. LNZ Cherkasy’s is one of the exceptions.

Bonus Read: Antwerp: Gheysens to Vandenhaute

[ x On Belgian Fields]

A takeover has averted financial disaster at Royal Antwerp, but their new owners now face the far harder task of delivering success on more sustainable foundations.

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Farewell Hoppy - The Champion Talent Spotter

By for The Liquidator

Few non-WBA fans will have known of Steve Hopcroft, who passed away recently. Yet every club has someone like him, men who work hard to discover the next big talent. Football would be significantly poorer without them.

Serbian Superliga 26/27 Season Preview

By for The Football Life

It seems amazing to me that we are in July and there are some leagues which are kicking off. But, for those like me who are not huge fans of national team football, it is also wonderful. Thanks Serbia.

Bonus Read: Paraguay 2026 Clausura Preview

[ x Paraguay Ralph’s Substack]

Football is also resuming in Paraguay which will now also feature New Zealand’s unwitting social media star Tim Payne.

Each week on Cultured Football we pick the five great football stories from the previous seven days.

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: Can Paolo Maldini Save Italian Football?

Via Goalazzo

Italy was the big absentee from this World Cup (and the previous two). The task of ensuring that doesn’t happen again has now fallen on Paolo Maldini. It won’t be easy.

The following is an extract from the book The Creation of Modern Buenos Aires by Joel Horowitz and published by University of New Mexico Press. It is available for purchase here.

A Suburb and the Role of its Key Football Clubs

In Avellaneda [an industrial suburb of the city of Buenos Aires], two clubs—Racing and Independiente—embedded themselves, becoming two of the largest and most popular clubs in the country. [Soccer clubs were civic associations whose members elected the club leaders]. They became centers of sociability for members and sometimes for other local inhabitants, offering athletic and cultural activities and educational opportunities. The two clubs developed into fierce rivals on the playing field, and they also came to represent opposing political positions.

From its inception, Racing was tightly tied to the Conservative political boss Alberto Barceló, who dominated Avellaneda during almost the entire interwar period. Therefore, Racing was usually run by men connected to the local Conservative political elite. Barceló’s initial support for Racing came when football had not yet become important and before the voting reform of 1912, and therefore he was not looking for popular support. Barceló carried out a more traditional type of patronage, aiding his friends and relatives in something they wanted to do.

Racing’s initial supporters came from Avellaneda’s middle class. One direct predecessor was created by Argentine employees of the Ferrocarril Sud while another was formed after a meeting at the home of two of Barceló’s brothers. A member of that club, Alberto’s brother-in-law Leandro Boloque, later would lead Racing for three years.

After several twists and turns, in 1903 Racing was founded by Argentine males who were mostly under twenty. By January 1909, the club had 251 members and received economic assistance from the Barceló family. Opposition to the Barcelós caused some founding members to leave Racing and play for Independiente. Independiente had just moved to Avellaneda, and it became identified with Barceló’s opponents. Racing’s connection to Barceló had many other consequences. For example, in 1915 and 1916 the opposition paper in Avellaneda claimed that the local police favored fans of Racing over those of Independiente. In 1917, after President Yrigoyen intervened in the province of Buenos Aires, replacing a Conservative governor and charging a Radical with organizing new elections, at least three Racing players lost their city employment.

Racing dominated Argentine football from 1913 to 1919, and according to some, its manner of play began the start of a distinctive Argentine style. In 1920 Racing was the largest club in the country with 1,413 members. As it grew, Racing increasingly became a center for many types of activities, which increased its attractiveness. At the beginning of the 1920s members could participate in basketball, swimming, track, and Basque paddle ball. In 1926 Racing had 2,624 members, making it the third largest club—just ahead of Independiente. By 1931 it claimed slightly over 7,000 members, while Independiente had over 5,000. In 1935 Racing had 21,500 members, and its rival had 14,500. In 1941 the former claimed 17,053 members and the latter 17,454. Racing had continued to add sports. By the end of 1935, members enjoyed football, tennis, bocce, basketball, paddle ball, roller skating, field hockey, track, gymnastics, swimming, ping-pong, fencing, and Greco-Roman wrestling. Some sports were played by both men and women.

Racing also celebrated carnival; for example, in 1936 it scheduled six dances, each with two bands, one that played tango and one that played jazz. The club also held dances at other times, frequently with the same musical lineup. It established a beach for its members along the coast. For its young members it had a summer camp, offered excursions, and created a chorus and a theater. During the summer, Racing showed free movies, which nonmembers could attend. The club offered lectures by diverse speakers, including the Communist militant and historian Rodolfo Puiggrós, the educator Pablo Pizzurno, the physician and Socialist Alicia Moreau de Justo, and the Radical Party politician and historian Emilio Ravignani. It hung art in its facility and sponsored concerts of works by famous composers. The club organized classes, including cooking instruction by Petrona de Gandulfo (known as doña Petrona), the author of Argentina’s iconic cookbook. Racing also organized a football tournament in 1933 in which twenty-eight schools participated. It gave milk to 500 children three times a week. In other words, it was part of the community and a critical center of sociability.

Barceló’s influence over the club was extremely large. According to Juan Corradi, Barceló discussed Racing’s affairs with club leaders at his home. The club’s political connections are revealed by the indictment in 1916 of Barceló and several followers for using their official positions to influence elections. Three of the accused, Leopoldo Siri, Luis Carbone, and Pedro Groppo, had been or would be presidents of Racing; together, they held that post for thirteen years. All were absolved. In a study of the twenty-eight most influential followers of Barceló, ten belonged to Racing and one to Independiente. However, elections were often contested, and the close allies of Barceló were not always victorious.

…

Independiente gave its members and the community many of the same opportunities that Racing offered, though on a slightly smaller scale, but it was still a significant club. For example, in 1928 it inaugurated with the presence of the Radical governor of the province the first cement stadium in South America, which sat 60,000. Although its members could enjoy a variety of sports, the opportunities were fewer than those at Racing. Fewer cultural opportunities existed as well. However, it too was a center of sociability. Independiente sponsored lectures and classes of music, singing, and various needle-working skills. It hosted carnival celebrations and dances that paralleled its rival. Club members also created a theater company. In early 1936 Independiente opened a site for camping at a beach in the nearby community of Quilmes. The club also involved itself in the community and helped provide physical education for local schools. In 1935 it gave a year’s pass to its field to the two best students in each local school, and it held a celebration for the graduates of local elementary schools. When Independiente, as part of its expansion into the capital, purchased a preexisting facility, members could participate in dances and several sports there.

The larger scope of Racing is not surprising in a city dominated by Barceló, and to a large extent his opponents ran Independiente. Its first dominant figure was Juan R. Mignaburu, a lawyer, who had been intendente of what became Avellaneda in 1899 and served on the city council in 1902. In 1894 he had founded a newspaper that defended the political positions of Bartolomé Mitre (an opponent of the Conservatives). Mignaburu served as president of the club in 1911–1912, 1917–1918, and 1920–1921 and was active in the club for many other years. His successor as the dominant figure was Pedro Canaveri, a Radical who was president in 1919 and from 1922 through 1933 and from 1942 to 1945. During two of those years, he served on the city council of Avellaneda. Miguel Martinicorena, who was club president from 1938 to 1941, was also a Radical Party militant.

…

The two clubs created deep loyalty in Avellaneda, and even funeral homes got involved. Two funeral homes existed in the city: one owned by the Peruihl family, who were fans of Independiente, while the other was owned by the Corradi family, who supported Racing and not incidentally Barceló. When the two teams played, the victor’s followers would go to “their” funeral parlor, borrow coffins, and parade them past their opponents.

About the Book: The Creation of Modern Buenos Aires by Joel Horowitz examines how Argentina’s capital evolved into a modern metropolis during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through politics, immigration, urban development, social movements, and everyday life, Horowitz explores the forces that shaped Buenos Aires and the identities of the people who lived there. The book offers a rich portrait of a city in transformation and provides valuable insight into the social and political environment from which many of Argentina’s most important institutions, including its football clubs, emerged.

About the Author: Joel Horowitz is a historian specialising in modern Argentine history. His work focuses on the political, social, and cultural forces that shaped Argentina during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through extensive archival research and a strong emphasis on the experiences of ordinary citizens, Horowitz has established himself as one of the leading scholars examining the development of modern Buenos Aires and Argentine society.

Each week on Cultured Football we pick the five great football stories from the previous seven days.

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Via

Italy was the big absentee from this World Cup (and the previous two). The task of ensuring that doesn’t happen again has now fallen on Paolo Maldini. It won’t be easy.

Farewell, Leandro Trossard

By for The Non-Negotiables

Arsenal have rarely lacked star names under Mikel Arteta, but some of their most important players have been those which never really fell under the spotlight. As Leandro Trossard leaves north London, his time at the club is remembered not for headlines, but for the reliability and decisive moments that helped deliver results.

GOAL | Photo Series Celebrates Goalposts Around the World

Via Lower Block

“After a ball – and maybe a few mates – a goal is one of the most important parts of football. And they come in every shape and size.”

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Fabio Cannavaro’s Naples and the Streets he can Never Leave Behind

By Gates for Destination Calcio

Fabio Cannavaro's story is inseparable from the streets of Soccavo, and a training ground in the shadow of the Stadio Diego Maradona that helped define generations. Years after conquering football, he has returned to protect the place that first gave him a chance, completing a circle that ensures a future for the next generations.

Messi first met Yamal as a baby. The World Cup final will be their next meeting

By Chris Wright for ESPN

Before Lamine Yamal emerged as Spain's brightest star and Lionel Messi completed football, the two shared an unlikely meeting at Camp Nou. Now they arrive on opposite sides of a World Cup final, linked by a moment that feels almost impossible.

Each week on Cultured Football we pick the five great football stories from the previous seven days.

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: The Fall From Grace: Bundesliga clubs in the Regionalliga - Part One

By Benjamin Darby for The Bundesliga Chronicles

Football has always celebrated clubs that climb the pyramid, but the journey in the opposite direction can be just as fascinating. Germany’s lower leagues are home to a host of former Bundesliga sides whose glory days now feel a lifetime away, each carrying a different story of how quickly fortunes can change.

William McCrum: The Irishman who invented the penalty kick

By BBC Bitesize

The penalty kick has become such a constant of football that we rarely stop to wonder where it came from. Yet, like so many parts of the game we now take for granted, it all began with one person's idea.

South London: Home of Football?

By for Outside Write

Much of the modern game’s early story runs through South London. Is this the place football should call home?

No league tables, no trophies: how Norway made sport fun for kids – and built a football team that beat Brazil

By for The Guardian

Norway's victory over Brazil was remarkable, but perhaps not as surprising as many have interpreted it to be. Behind this generation lies a sporting philosophy that encouraging children to play, explore and choose their own path.

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62% Conversion: Why Are Defenders Still Taking Penalties At the World Cup?

By Oliver Hopkins for The Analyst

More on penalties. And the heading says it all for this one.

The Fall From Grace: Bundesliga clubs in the Regionalliga - Part One

By for The Bundesliga Chronicles

Football has always celebrated clubs that climb the pyramid, but the journey in the opposite direction can be just as fascinating. Germany’s lower leagues are home to a host of former Bundesliga sides whose glory days now feel a lifetime away, each carrying a different story of how quickly fortunes can change.

Each week on Cultured Football we pick the five great football stories from the previous seven days.

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: The Calcio Brandemic

By Luke Taylor for FORZA CALCIO

Conscious that Italian football no longer carries the weight it once did, clubs are increasingly turning to modern rebrands in the hope of staying relevant. All they seem to be achieving, however, is alienating fans.

By Sohini Desai for Defector

The World Cup’s official songs have traded local identity that marked them out at the start for global familiarity. Tracing that evolution from Chile in 1962 to the present, this reflects on what has been gained and what has disappeared. It also confirms that nothing beats 1990’s Un Estate Italiana…

Maradona to Messi: Why Bangladesh loves Argentina’s footballers

By Masum Billah for Al Jazeera

As the World Cup unfolds an ocean away, parts of Dhaka resemble Buenos Aires. Rooted in memories of Maradona and renewed by Messi, Argentina’s hold on Bangladesh stretches beyond results and have become a cultural phenomenon.

The Calcio Brandemic

By for

Conscious that Italian football no longer carries the weight it once did, clubs are increasingly turning to modern rebrands in the hope of staying relevant. All they seem to be achieving, however, is alienating fans.

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Inside Arabian Falcons: The Dubai football side managed by Jonjo Shelvey

By Matt Hardy for City AM

Dubai has become a familiar destination for ageing footballers, but one ambitious club is trying to rewrite that story. Arabian Falcons are betting on young talent, English coaching and an unconventional model that aims to turn the UAE into a stepping stone rather than a final stop, with Jonjo Shelvey at the heart of the project.

After World Cup goals are last year’s signings finally set to deliver for Newcastle?

By Ciaran Kelly for the BBC

Newcastle's recruitment looked almost infallible until last summer's arrivals struggled to make the expected impact. Still, after encouraging World Cup displays from Anthony Elanga and Yoane Wissa, there is renewed hope that patience, rather than panic, may yet prove to have been the wiser approach.

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: Why every World Cup country wears the colours it does...

By Joey D’Urso

Have you ever wondered why international teams at the World Cup wear the colours they do? Well, wonder no more.

At the turn of the twentieth century, cycling was one of San Sebastián’s most fashionable pursuits. Much of this was down to Julián Comet, a French entrepreneur who had settled in the city and become one of the sport’s leading advocates. Through his efforts, a velodrome was built whilst major events that attracted the sports’ leading stars were brought to the city.

Cycling flourished. In February of 1907, that enthusiasm led to the formation of the Club Ciclista de San Sebastián.

Football, meanwhile, was also beginning to take hold across northern Spain. Introduced by students and workers returning from Britain, the game was spreading rapidly. In 1904, the San Sebastián Recreation Club was established, adding football to the range of sports already played within the Real Club de Tenis de San Sebastián.

Just a year later, the club became the first side from Gipuzkoa to compete in the Copa del Rey. Its president, Jorge Satrústegui, would later become one of the three authors of the statutes of the Spanish Football Federation, while in 1906 the club opened Ondarreta Stadium, the city’s first purpose-built football ground.

For all this rapid progress, not everyone was happy with the way the club was being run. So much that in late 1907, a group of players had become disillusioned enough to decide to form a new side leading to the setting up of San Sebastián Football Club.

Whilst this new club could play in friendlies, competing in the Copa del Rey was an altogether different matter. Clubs had to be registered for at least one year to be allowed in, too much of an ask for the new club.

A creative solution was needed, and one was that was duly found. As their games were being played games at the Atocha Velodrome, making it an obvious step to set up a football section within the Club Ciclista de San Sebastián, and using their registration to get access.

Given that their participation had been at risk till the final weeks, what followed was remarkable.

Driven by Englishman George McGuinness, they first beat local rivals Athletic Club 4-2 and then overcame Galicia FC 2-0. McGuinnes scored five of those goals and he was again on the scoresheet in the final as Español de Madrid were beaten 3-1.

A cycling club had conquered Spanish football.

That success, however, was fleeting. Within a few months there was no longer any need for San Sebastián Football Club to rely on others to take part in national competition. All players returned back to their original club which would eventually become what we know today as Real Sociedad.

These days, cycling is still deeply woven into the Basque Country’s identity and the region is widely considered the traditional heartland of cycling in Spain. Yet, in the second decade of the twentieth century, it had to give way to football’s progress not only metaphorically but even physically.

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When, in 1913 Real Sociedad were looking for a site to build their stadium, the choice fell on the velodrome which hosted their earlier games and this was torn down to make way for the new Atotxa Stadium.

For Julián Comet this was a particularly bitter moment. According to local legend, he blasted that Real Sociedad “jamás serán campeones” – they will never be champions – and those years would come to haunt the football club.

Over the years, as one title after another slipped through their hand, Comet’s curse seemed impossible to shake off. It was only seven decades later, in 1981, that Real Sociedad would finally break it when they finally won the league title.

Incidentally, that same year, the Clásica de San Sebastián was launched, a prestigious one-day race that brings some of the best cyclists to the Gipuzkoa capital year after year. Coincidence? Perhaps not.

Honours:

Copa del Rey 1909

The story of Club Ciclista de San Sebastián is now captured in this exclusive Cultured Football shirt. Featuring its original badge and a brief history, if you enjoyed their story you can now own a piece of football’s forgotten past.

Buy the T-Shirt

By

Have you ever wondered why international teams at the World Cup wear the colours they do? Well, wonder no more.

Stay In The Game

By for

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s title race produced an unlikely champion in Abel Pascual, whose route to the top was shaped by far more than football. While his career seemed destined to slip away, family tragedy and perseverance carried him towards an unexpected opportunity that had an emotional pay-off.

The Dream Factory: Inside the ‘cruel’ system behind Argentina’s soccer empire

By Steve Fainaru for ESPN

Argentine football has long been celebrated for producing extraordinary players, but the path to the top is often far darker than the triumphs suggest. Beneath the romance of chasing a professional career lies an unregulated system that leaves countless young hopefuls vulnerable, raising uncomfortable questions about the price of football's greatest dreams.

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The hands behind the beautiful game

By Sunniya Ahmad Pirzada for Al Jazeera

In Pakistan’s city of Sialkot, generations of artisans have stitched footballs that travelled the world. Now, as their craft slowly disappears, they put all their trust in the hope that tradition still has a place in football.

Joga Bonito in Ravenna: Inside Ronaldinho’s Shock Serie C Move

By Dan Cancian for

Transfer news have taken a bit of a back burner during the World Cup. One of the few exceptions, however, has to be the story of Ronaldinho returning to football in the Italian Serie C.

Each week on Cultured Football we pick the five great football stories from the previous seven days.

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: The Doomed Nation

By James Bennett for Football Heritage

It is now has largely been forgotten but, as the Berlin Wall fell and reunification loomed, East Germany’s football team was still chasing a place at the 1990 World Cup. This is a story of a campaign played against the backdrop of a country disappearing in real time, with players, clubs and loyalties already being pulled towards a different future.

Bonus Read: Magdeburg’s Co-Managers: Will it ever work?

[Benjamin Darby x The Bundesliga Chronicles]

In Maltese there is a saying that a ship with two captains does not move forward. Will Mageburg prove that to be wrong?

By for

For many people living with Parkinson’s, walking football offers something just as meaningful: a chance to move, connect and briefly leave illness behind. In a summer defined by the World Cup, this is a different kind of football story, but no less moving.

The Doomed Nation

By James Bennett for Football Heritage

It is now has largely been forgotten but, as the Berlin Wall fell and reunification loomed, East Germany's football team was still chasing a place at the 1990 World Cup. This is a story of a campaign played against the backdrop of a country disappearing in real time, with players, clubs and loyalties already being pulled towards a different future.

Bonus Read: Magdeburg’s Co-Managers: Will it ever work?

[ x ]

In Maltese there is a saying that a ship with two captains does not move forward. Will Mageburg prove that to be wrong?

How Campobasso’s American Dream is Proving Molise Does Exist

By Lauren Canning for Destination Calcio

Molise is often dismissed as the Italian region that “doesn’t exist”, but Campobasso’s rise has made it harder to ignore. Rebuilt after collapse and carried by American investment, local devotion and a renewed sense of belonging, the club has become more than a football project.

Bonus Read: Lens – the problem of competing with the state

[Neil Fredrik Jensen x Game of the People]

What Lens have done in recent seasons has been remarkable. Yet, finishing second seems to be the only thing they can aspire to when faced with such a rich rival.

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The Falkirk lad and the miracle from the sky

By Stephen McGowan for

Despite the various efforts to commercialise (and ruin) the World Cup beyond recognition, football tournaments remain defined by the experiences gathered around them. In Boston, as thousands of Scotland supporters turned a baseball game into an unlikely Tartan Army gathering, one fan's trip took an even fantastic turn.

Why South America Is So Good at Football

By for

South American countries have spent generations confounding assumptions that football talent needs money, infrastructure and population size to emerge. The reasons are not always obvious, but they help explain why the continent continues to produce some of the game's most enduring powers.

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: ‘But...he’s rubbish.’ How a Championship reject became a 500-game icon.

By Simon Binns for More Than Just Football

You know the saying ‘one man’s meat is another man’s poison’? Seems that there is a football equivalent to it.

The following is an extract from the book Relegated by Todd Smith and published by Gallery Books. It is available for purchase here.

I’d chosen to come to Grimsby because I wanted to see football played in a place that had lost the other thing that defined it. Grimsby was once home port to the world’s largest fishing fleet. A 309-foot clock tower, a gift from Prince Albert, rose from the town docks as a beacon of strength and wealth. The Grimbarians, as they’re called, took immense pride in their successive generations of native sons who risked their lives in the dangerous North Sea to feed their nation. The threat of dying or being injured in their work was so real that when the sailors reached shore and got paid, they were known as “Three-Day Millionaires’’ because they blew all of their fortunes in epic runs of debauched gratitude. Once it became possible to preserve fresh fish in ice and transport it by rail, fish caught by Grimbarians in the morning would show up in London restaurants that night. It was the haul brought in by these men that helped usher in the craze for the country’s iconic dish, fish and chips.

Due to a myriad of factors—international fishing disputes, overfishing, labor shortages, bad government policies—the fishing industry and its jobs were eventually pulled clean out of Grimsby like the swift deboning of a northern Atlantic cod. By the 1980s, Grimsby suffered mass unemployment. The jobs never returned.

I was curious if that history would make the town’s football club a more important focus of its residents—a shared thing to rally around—or a secondary concern when there was so much else to worry about. Grimsby Town FC, est. 1878, were competitive through their first few decades, often beating teams fielded by much larger cities. From the start, they featured a trawler boat and fish on their team crest. Their peak moments came between 1929 and 1939, when they played the vast majority of their games in the top division of English football and made it to the semifinals of the FA Cup twice. After that, their performance was spotty. They became what’s known as a “yo-yo club,” swinging up and down through the different levels, in all switching divisions thirty-two times, with fifteen promotions and seventeen relegations. At the moment, they were in the fourth-tier League Two, with a real possibility of getting relegated again at the end of the season.

The day I arrived, Grimsby Town FC’s Under-18 team had an evening match. Youth clubs of this nature are known as academies—in American terms, it would be like a cross between an elite high school team and a farm team for a professional baseball club. I regrouped at my Airbnb after the grocery store and got ready for the game. First, I needed to pause in the vestibule of my flat while a man out on the street was having a psychotic event. I waited until there was a break in the yelling. Then I made it onto a bus, on which I rode with two women in tattered down coats who carried mop buckets with loaves of bread sticking out of them.

The bus dropped me off a few blocks away from Blundell Park, the stadium where the youth and senior teams both play. The legendary ground has been Grimsby Town FC’s home since 1898. As I walked, I could smell the sea. The stadium’s front gate rose out of the darkness like the Black Gate of Mordor from The Lord of the Rings. The walls were thick and metal and painted black and had spikes and barbed wire strung across the top in a lattice pattern.

Inside, things were far less intimidating. It was a proper old English ground, a relic to a humble and simpler time of football, and I absolutely loved it. There were no frills here, no modern amenities. Metal roofs hung low over three of the four sections. Wood beams and cheap plastic seats spoke to a bygone architecture and aesthetic. The bathrooms were fortresses seemingly built to survive the blitzkrieg. There was a pub underneath one of the stands. The walls were adorned with framed pictures of long-ago teams: the players in short shorts, long socks, and billowy blackand- white striped kits.

The U18 game I was there to see was meaningful to the town on two major counts. It was an FA Youth Cup match, and one against a higher-level opponent. Millwall FC played in the second-tier Championship division. The Grimsby boys had beaten the youth team of Premier League side Nottingham Forest to get here, and if they could pull off a second straight upset, it would be a big deal. However, the mood before the match was not at all celebratory, and for good reason. Grimsby Town U18 were playing their first game since the tragic deaths of their popular defender Cameron Walsh and his father, Dave, in a car accident.

The team warmed up in white T-shirts adorned with Cameron’s face. The crowd of supporters around me watched while talking low and taking long, contemplative pulls from their tea and coffee and pints. The stands were nearly full—impressive, I thought, for a Wednesday night in horrid weather. Sheets of mist blew in off the Humber Estuary a quarter of a mile away. Perhaps football was helping to bring a struggling fan base in mourning together. I stood along the field and watched warm-ups from a sideline railing.

An older man with a round face, chappy hat, and bulbous nose was next to me. He looked something like the cartoon mascot from the Andy Capp’s Hot Fries packaging. We nodded hello to each other.

“Terrible thing that happened to that young lad. ’Tis just terrible,” he said.

“Yes, tragic,” I agreed.

“Say, where you from, then?”

“I’m Todd from America.”

“Bob,” he said, shaking my hand. “What state are you from, then?”

“Minnesota.”

“Is that a Trump state, then?”

This question came up all the time. After learning that I was American, almost everyone I met wanted to know if I was from a Trump-supporting state or not. I would find myself wondering which answer they were hoping for, and tried to avoid politics as best as I could. The people of Grimsby had decidedly voted for Brexit and supported Boris Johnson—the conservative politician often compared to Trump—for prime minister. Johnson had even been photographed multiple times in a Grimsby Town FC hat. I told Bob that Minnesota was a purple state, explaining what that meant and flailing for an off-ramp joke about Prince. It was good enough to get us to move on.

After some small talk about American television shows and the Grimsby Town FC senior team and the purpose of my trip, I asked Bob the question most on my mind. “Did you know the young player who died? Or know his dad?”

“I didn’t know them. But I’m a Grimer,” Bob said. He paused for a long while, and I tried to give him space. It seemed like he was searching for the right thing to say. “I used to come here,” he continued. His words were uneasy and tottering, like the steps of a baby deer learning how to walk. He took a breath. Then he said, “I used to come here. I used to come to every Town game, home and away. I did that for a long time. I did that for far too long.”

I looked over at Bob. He stared straight ahead at the field, but I could see tears welling up that were too stubborn to fall. I didn’t quite know what to do. The heaviness of the night was so palpable there between us. The crowd behind us swayed and swelled as kickoff approached. I stayed still.

“I used to come here,” he repeated. “I used to go to every Town home and away match. I was going to all the matches and carrying on in the pubs. Things, you know, mate, went that way for too long. I tried to get better. But I couldn’t stop. I tried to get on with it. It was so hard to quit. I had to stop coming here. To get better.”

Because of my Crohn’s disease and migraines, I stopped drinking more than twenty years ago. Before that, I was a social drinker, not a very heavy one. In the time since, I’ve only had about four drinks, and all of them had been in the last four weeks. But I’ve known many alcoholics and addicts in my life. I’ve worked with them on blue collar jobs and counted them among my friends and family. I’ve been there in moments when life triggers something deep inside them and it unexpectedly rises to the surface. I told Bob: “Well, I’m glad you came tonight.”

Excerpted from RELEGATED: One American's Pints-and-Pies Journey from the Top to the Bottom of English Football by TODD SMITH. Copyright © 2026 by TODD SMITH. Reprinted by permission of GALLERY BOOKS, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

About the Book Relegated: One American’s Pints-and-Pies Journey from the Top to the Bottom of English Football is part travel memoir, part exploration of football culture. Framed around the uniquely British concept of relegation, Todd Smith embarks on a months-long journey across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, visiting clubs at every level of the football pyramid, from the glamour of the Premier League to forgotten non-league grounds. Along the way he discovers that football is about far more than trophies and television deals. Through conversations with supporters, pub owners, volunteers, players, and local characters, Smith uncovers how clubs act as repositories of community identity, collective memory, and belonging.

About the Author: Todd Smith is an American writer based in Minneapolis whose work spans sports, memoir, and journalism. The son of the head athletic trainer of the former Minnesota Kicks, Smith grew up immersed in football and played the game himself through college. Before publishing Relegated, he spent many years working blue-collar jobs while pursuing a writing career, an experience that informs much of the book’s personal narrative. He is also the author of Hockey Strong: Stories of Sacrifice from Inside the NHL and co-author of Brave Enough with Olympic champion Jessie Diggins. His writing has appeared in a range of magazines and sports publications, and Relegated reflects both his lifelong love of football and his fascination with the communities that sustain it.

Each week on Cultured Football we pick the five great football stories from the previous seven days.

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By Ben McAleer for the Irish Examiner

New stars emerge at every World Cup. These are ten (+ the injured Lennart Karl) who could be the breakouts of this edition.

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The World Cup has a long history of being associated with slightly (or not so slightly) camp songs that become hits. Bosnia has provided the latest one.

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By Henry Cowling for BBC Sport

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: The Fall of Ajax

By Paul Madden & Boardroom Ball for Boardroom Ball

The Eredivisie remains one of football’s great talent factories, but even institutions built on strong foundations can lose their way. Next season Ajax will start their European commitment in the second qualifying round of the Conference League; a humbling fall for a giant of the European game. Their decline should serve as a lesson for plenty of others.

There is no bigger danger for a football club than indifference. Once that takes hold, decline no longer provokes urgency or anxiety. The sense that something valuable is being lost disappears altogether. When the end does arrive, there is often nobody left willing, or able, to stop it.

That is what happened to Itzehoer SV.

By the time the club folded in 2018, after insolvency proceedings and years of financial instability, few even took notice. This was just another regional German football club slipping beneath the surface after decades spent fighting gravity.

And yet, like so many clubs buried deep within the lower reaches of German football, Itzehoer SV carried a proud history shaped by the country’s post-war reconstruction; one built on local ambition, economic recovery and fierce regional pride.

The club began life on 3 October 1909 as FC Preußen 1909 Itzehoe, when German football had little of the structure we would recognise today. Its identity shifted across the decades through a series of name changes and reorganisations, reflecting both ambition and the search for stability in a rapidly changing sporting landscape.

In 1945, and in the aftermath of the Second World War, Preußen merged with VfL Eintracht Itzehoe and SC Askania Itzehoe to form Itzehoer SV, a practical union that was shaped as much by necessity as by footballing ambition.

The timing proved unexpectedly fortunate.

In the immediate post-war years, Itzehoe benefited from one of the defining demographic movements of the era. Refugees from the former eastern German territories arrived in Schleswig-Holstein, among them several players from the once-prominent East Prussian side VfB Königsberg, a club displaced and ultimately erased by the redrawing of Europe’s borders.

It changed the club’s level almost immediately.

The late 1940s and early 1950s became Itzehoe’s golden years. Three consecutive Schleswig-Holstein titles between 1948 and 1950 pushed the club toward the summit of northern German football. They had gone close before. In 1947, they narrowly missed out on a place in the new Oberliga Nord. In 1948 and 1949, promotion play-offs again ended in frustration.

In 1950, under player-coach Kurt Baluses, they finally made it.

Their promotion to the Oberliga Nord represented much more than elevation to a higher division. Before the Bundesliga was founded in 1963, it was the highest level of football in northern Germany. This was the world of Hamburger SV, Werder Bremen, St. Pauli and other clubs with greater resources, deeper support, and a far more established place in the game’s hierarchy.

Now, Itzehoe stood among them.

It did not last. In 1950–51, Itzehoer SV finished seventeenth and were relegated immediately. The gap was often brutal. They lost 9–0 to Hamburger SV and 8–1 to Göttingen 05. By the end of the season, they were well short of survival and returned to amateur football.

But the significance of that campaign stretched far beyond the league table. In practical terms, it was probably unsustainable from the beginning. The economic and structural realities separating a club from Itzehoe from the major northern sides were already becoming visible. But that hardly mattered. For clubs of this size, a single season at the summit can sustain an identity for generations. It becomes proof that the impossible once happened.

And, maybe, could happen again.

For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the club remained strong within Schleswig-Holstein’s amateur leagues. They won another state title in 1954, came close again in promotion rounds, and remained one of the region’s serious football clubs. There was a particularly painful near-miss in 1952, when Itzehoe travelled to VfB Lübeck in front of 14,000 spectators and lost the decisive game late on, after a disputed corner that left the visiting players protesting on the pitch.

For clubs like Itzehoe, entire eras could turn on moments like that.

In 1965, Itzehoe returned to a wider stage by winning another Schleswig-Holstein championship and gaining promotion to the Regionalliga Nord. By then, the Bundesliga had already been created, which meant the Regionalliga was now the second tier. Even so, it still carried real weight. For a club from a rural town in Schleswig-Holstein, it was a considerable achievement.

They remained there for nine seasons.

There was something intrinsically German in their stay. Itzehoe never finished higher than twelfth, much less were they ever close to promotion. Most years were shaped by relegation battles and the constant problem of competing against clubs with more money and larger catchments. Survival was in itself was an achievement.

That era now feels almost impossible to imagine. Regional football in West Germany still carried genuine weight where crowds in provincial towns could be substantial. Travel remained local enough for rivalries to feel intimate, while semi-professional clubs could still believe, at least briefly, that persistence might narrow the gap to the elite.

Instead, the opposite happened.

The formation of the Bundesliga had already centralised German football economically and culturally. By the mid-1970s, the creation of the 2. Bundesliga accelerated the divide further. Clubs like Itzehoe increasingly found themselves stranded between ambition and infrastructure. Too large for purely local football, too small to survive the professionalisation swallowing the game above them.

When the Regionalliga Nord was disbanded in 1974, Itzehoe failed to qualify for the new second division. It was a defining turning point.

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Still, Itzehoe did not disappear.

They entered the new Oberliga Nord, now a third-tier competition, and produced one of the quietly remarkable seasons in the club’s history. In 1974–75, Itzehoer SV finished eighth, ahead of both Holstein Kiel and VfB Lübeck. For one season, they were the highest-ranked club from Schleswig-Holstein. It was not as romantic as the single Oberliga Nord season of 1950–51, but in its own way it mattered. It showed that Itzehoe could still compete regionally, even as the game around them was changing.

The cup offered other brief returns to view.

Itzehoe made five appearances in the DFB-Pokal. The most memorable came in 1977–78, when they reached the second round after beating Borussia Brand before losing to SpVgg Bayreuth. The previous season brought a heavier but more evocative occasion: a tie against 1. FC Köln, then one of the major powers of German football, which ended in a 7–0 defeat.

Fleeting though they were, those cup appearances were vital. For clubs outside the elite, knockout football offers something league structures increasingly deny them: temporary equality. One afternoon where the distance between provincial amateur football and the national stage briefly disappears.

By the 1980s, though, the old pressures had begun to harden.

Itzehoe were relegated from the Oberliga in 1981, ending sixteen consecutive seasons above the Schleswig-Holstein state level. Debts weighed heavily. Attendances fell. The club remained competitive at times, winning further Schleswig-Holstein titles in 1985 and 1986, but the route back upward became harder each time.

Even so, the old fire remained. In 1994, Itzehoe became a founding member of the Oberliga Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein, then the fourth tier. For a few more seasons, they held their place respectably, even finishing fifth in 1998–99.

But the underlying reality had not changed.

League reforms demanded more money, better facilities and stronger administration. Clubs like Itzehoe were increasingly asked to behave like professional organisations without possessing professional resources. Relegations and restructuring diminished them further, while financial strain became a recurring headache.

The eventual merger with Türk Spor Itzehoe in 2010, creating FC Itzehoe, was a last throw of the dice. German lower-league football is full of these mergers, awkward attempts to pool dwindling energy before decline becomes irreversible.

Even the reversion to the old Itzehoer SV name in 2015 carried a certain melancholy, as though the club understood that nostalgia might be the only remaining asset left to trade on.

By then, the economics no longer worked. The withdrawal of sponsors collapsed their budget transforming competing higher up financially impossible. The team had to be pulled back down the divisions, and though there was one final return to the Verbandsliga, it was not enough.

In January 2018, the club filed for bankruptcy. On 1 June 2018, insolvency proceedings were opened and Itzehoer SV was dissolved. A successor club, Itzehoer SV 2.0, emerged almost immediately, but it could only be a shadow of what had existed before.

Clubs like Itzehoer SV once occupied an important middle ground: ambitious regional institutions capable of touching national football without fully belonging to it. Over time, that middle ground became harder and harder to sustain.

What remains now are fragments. League tables. Old cup results. Stories of refugee footballers from Königsberg. A 9–0 defeat to Hamburger SV. A disputed afternoon in Lübeck. A cup tie against Köln. Photographs with terraces in the background and floodlights cutting through North German fog.

And one season, back in 1950–51, when a small club from Schleswig-Holstein briefly stepped into the highest level of northern German football and discovered, however fleetingly, what it meant to stand among the giants.

Honours

Schleswig-Holstein champions: 1948, 1949, 1950, 1954, 1965, 1985, 1986, 2005

Verbandsliga Süd-West champions: 2011

SHFV Cup winners: 1955, 1964, 1975, 1985

Schleswig-Holstein indoor champions: 2005

The story of Itzehoer SV is now captured in this exclusive Cultured Football shirt. Featuring its original badge and a brief history, if you enjoyed their story you can now own a piece of football’s forgotten past.

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By Matthew Philpotts for

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: The Beating Heart of Phibsborough: How Bohemian FC Refuses to Sell Out

By David Shams for Around the World in Matches

Dalymount Park remains one of those rare grounds where the identity of the club who play there extends far beyond the football itself. Murals, old terraces, travelling supporters and a deeply local political culture give Bohemians a sense of place that many modern clubs spend fortunes trying to imitate. With redevelopment looming, however, there is an underlying tension: whether growth can happen without sanding away the edges that made the club matter.

The following is an extract from the book Echoes of an Italian Summer: Stories from Italia 90 by Paul Grech and published by Pitch Publishing. It is available for purchase here.

Whatever hopes there had been for Cameroon ahead of the 1990 World Cup, a disappointing African Cup of Nations seemingly dashed them. True, there was a level of over confidence among the players, and no one wanted to get injured so close to the World Cup. Yet these were seen as excuses that papered over the reality that there was something missing from the squad.

That was the public opinion and that was how the Cameroon prime-minister Paul Biya saw it.

Roger Milla had been at the African Cup of Nations albeit only as a fan and a part-time consultant to the association. Earlier he had made a trip to Cameroon to play in a former team-mate’s testimonial. Despite his age, many felt that he had retired too early and let him know.

Again, Biya shared those views. So, a few days after the end of the disastrous African Cup of Nations, he called key people within the Cameroon FA for a meeting at his office during which it was agreed that Milla had to be in the squad for the World Cup. Once that was decided, Biya himself picked up his telephone and called Milla, urging him to reconsider his decision to retire.

The plea worked; Milla was in.

**

His career with the national team had been glory filled. He’d been there when they had last gotten to the World Cup in 1982 when they’d suffered elimination without losing any of their games. Twice he had led them to the title of African Champions. He was, to all intents and purposes, a national team legend.

Even though Milla’s inclusion was a boost, the doubts about their prospects remained. That much was evident by the Cameroonian federation’s choice of pre-World Cup base, what the players described as soldiers’ barracks in Sarajevo. Conditions were sparse and equipment basic. Apparently green-lit by coach Valery Nepomnyashchy who was more focused on ensuring that his men where well prepared physically for the coming challenge, the players found themselves doing drills typically reserved for soldiers.

Milla had his own, different, doubts. Asked whether he felt that he had the legs to play in such a competition, he replied candidly. “Not really, to be honest, but football’s not just a physical game. I’d always been an intelligent player, so I knew if I got into shape, I had a chance.”

“My first aim was to get fit, and then it would be up to the coach to decide whether I was good enough.”

He was not the only one with doubts; Nepomnyashchy himself also did not feel that Milla was up to it. Not only had the striker been imposed on him but there was constant pressure to pick him. “When I wasn’t playing they wanted him to put me through some really hard training sessions to get me into shape,” Milla confirmed. “But fortunately I was one of our best players in the pre-tournament friendlies, so I won him over on my own.”

If Nepomnyashchy had been forced by higher-ups into picking Milla, he found their backing when he faced criticism from within the team. Bordeaux’s Joseph-Antoine Bell was arguably the best African goalkeeper of his generation and had just been chosen as the second-best player in the French league. He was also highly vocal in his opinions, regardless of who they could offend. Asked about their prospects on the eve of the World Cup, he replied that Cameroon had “no chance of coping with Argentina, or any other team.”

Understandably, this was not well received. Bell, who had been widely expected to be the regular goalkeeper, was unceremoniously dropped from the starting eleven. Fortunately for them, Cameroon had a fine deputy in Thomas N’Kono. Indeed, when the International Federation of Football History & Statistics got to choose the African goalkeeper of the twentieth century, N’Kono came in second, Bell first.

In a 2020 interview, N’Kono shared his belief that he was ahead of his time. He’s right, and his performance against Argentina in the opening game of the World Cup proved that. A game that is more remembered for the tackles and physicality, as well as Cameroon’s surprising victory would probably have had a different outcome without N’Kono in goal. Not because he made any breath-taking saves – he didn’t – but simply because of how he played.

With Cameroon concentrated on making it impossible for Argentina to play through the centre and pushing them to the sides, the only option left for the South Americans was to fling in crosses. Where, inevitably, they found N’Kono willing to come out and catch them. His speed and agility gave him the courage needed to go against the convention at the time where goalkeepers were expected to stay on their line as much as possible. N’Kono was not like that.

N’Kono could read the game and was willing to use that to his advantage which sometimes meant rushing off his line to snuff out a chance before it had the opportunity to materialise. One of the reasons why Argentina didn’t have clearer shots at goal throughout the game was N’Kono’s ability to stop them before they could happen. It was a different way of being a goalkeeper, one that inspired a young boy called Gianluigi Buffon to pick up gloves.

Milla played the final ten minutes of that game as Cameroon tried to hang on with a player less (it would become two less in the final minute) yet his involvement was minimal.

That would not be the case in Cameroon’s second game. The opening exchanges had been rather lacklustre with Romania cautious not to open themselves up knowing that, having won their opening game, a draw could be enough to go through. Cameroon also weren’t willing to go on the offensive so both sides’ reluctance resulted in a rather staid game.

Nepomnyashchy, however, felt that his side could get more than a draw so early in the second half he put Milla on. The move paid off almost immediately. Milla had been on the field for just a handful of minutes when a ball was flung into the box in desperation more than anything else. The ball seemingly hung in the air which made it hard for the Romanian defender beneath it to clear. Milla saw his opportunity. As the ball fell, he barged in to get control and then fired past the goalkeeper.

It was a magnificent display of opportunistic attacking play. Minutes later, Milla showed another side to his game. He’d managed to win the ball just outside the penalty area and lobbed it towards his team-mate on the right-hand side of the box. A Cameroon striker rose with a Romanian defender but neither could get to it. Milla, however, had continued running and latched on to the loose ball before shooting with such accuracy and ferocity that the Romanian keeper couldn’t do anything. A beautiful mix of skill and finishing.

Whilst the goals were wildly different, the celebration wasn’t. On both instances, Milla went to dance in front of the corner flag in what was to become an iconic image from that World Cup. With good reason. Celebrations at the time were often muted, consisting of nothing more than raised fists, enthusiastic cheers and maybe a jump to signal exuberance. Not Milla, however, who celebrated the goal for what it was, a moment of pure joy and ecstasy.

In doing so he became a trailblazer of the modern goal celebration. He single-handedly injected a sense of confidence and flair onto the football field, forever changing the way goals were celebrated. From that point onward, the sheer ecstasy brought forth by scoring would be expressed with even greater fervour and emotion.

**

The goals had taken everyone by surprise – the television graphics listed the scorer as Miller – except those back in Cameroon who had exhibited such faith in Milla when they called him out of retirement. Now they could prepare for the knock-out phase since their two wins guaranteed qualification regardless of what happened in the final group game.

In fact, they actually finished top of their group despite a 4-0 thumping at the hands of the Soviet Union. Milla came on mid-way through the first half with Cameroon already two goals down but he could do little to influence proceedings.

The reward for finishing on top of Group E was a game against Colombia. The South Americans had been some people’s dark horses for the tournament but had barely scraped through as one of the best third placed sides. Still, they were hard to beat, favouring a patient build-up that kept opponents at bay.

Unsurprisingly, the game itself ended in a 0-0 draw with very few moments to excite fans. The same went for the opening half of extra time at which point thoughts automatically started shifting towards the possibility of penalties.

Milla had other ideas. Soon after the restart, he took possession of the ball outside the penalty, gracefully adjusting his body position. His swift movement caught a defender off guard as he embarked on a mesmerizing sprint towards the box. Skilfully evading a challenge, he looked up briefly before curling the ball into the top corner.

More was to come. René Higuita, the Colombian goalkeeper known for his flamboyant attitude ran out of his penalty area to sweep up a directionless pass played by the Cameroon defense. Unfortunately, his own attempt to pass the ball to his teammate, Luis Carlos Perea, went awry. Under pressure from the relentless Milla, Higuita failed to control the return pass. Seizing the opportunity, the appreciative veteran effortlessly placed the ball into an unguarded net.

It was the killer blow. More significantly, it was the goal that for the first time ever put an African team in the quarter-finals of the World Cup.

There was an element of serendipity in Milla’s crucial goal. “I was lucky because I played with Carlos Valderrama, the Colombia captain, at Montpellier. We had a great team, including Julio Cesar, the Brazil defender, and a young Laurent Blanc, who had come through the ranks. Through Valderrama I’d seen videos of Higuita dribbling the ball out of his area. I knew if I was quick enough I might be able to take advantage of a mistake. It worked.”

Next up were England and what would turn out to be one of the most iconic games of the competition; one where the goals flowed almost as much as the heavy tackling. Almost.

Again, Milla came on as a substitute at half-time with England leading by a goal. Again his introduction was pivotal.

A swing of the hips allowed him to break free on the right hand side of the England box. He’d almost certainly have scored had Paul Gascoigne not scythed him down. Emanuel Kunde made amends from the resulting penalty to equalise.

Just four minutes later, Milla was at it again. Gaining control a couple of metres outside the England penalty area he used all of his experience to draw defenders towards him before slotting a perfect through ball to fellow substitute Eugene Ekeke who fired in. Suddenly, Cameroon were ahead and, possibly, on their way to the World Cup semi-final. As the England team seemed to tire, the Cameroonians kept on running; enjoying the fruits of Nepomnyashchy’s harsh training.

Their dream lasted for eighteen minutes when Lineker was felled in the penalty area. He scored the resulting penalty and did so again in extra time.

The defeat stung because it felt like such a missed opportunity. “Looking back now, you have to say that. We went 1-0 down, but Paul Gascoigne committed a foul in the penalty area and Emmanuel Kunde equalised from the spot – and then Eugene Ekeke put us 2-1 up. We kept going forward because we wanted to entertain people. For us, first and foremost, football was about entertainment, so we wanted to win spectacularly. But it wasn’t to be.”

About the Book: Echoes of an Italian Summer explores the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. Instead of just recapping match results, it unearths offbeat behind-the-scenes stories, focusing on the cultural and human elements surrounding the iconic tournament.

About the Author: Paul Grech is a prolific author with several books under his belt. Among his notable works are two volumes of Il Re Calcio, which showcase fascinating stories from Italian football. He also wrote The Forgotten Genius of Italian Football, a biography that chronicles the life and career of Carlo Carcano, an early luminary in Italian football management. The book was translated into Italian in 2022. He is also the editor of Cultured Football.

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Italian football still holds a space for strikers who seem to belong to another era; not always the fastest or most complete, but who simply score goals. Yet, even here, figures like Pietro Iemmello and Joel Pohjanpalo are becoming increasingly rare, squeezed out as the modern game reshapes the role.

The Beating Heart of Phibsborough: How Bohemian FC Refuses to Sell Out

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Dalymount Park remains one of those rare grounds where the identity of the club who play there extends far beyond the football itself. Murals, old terraces, travelling supporters and a deeply local political culture give Bohemians a sense of place that many modern clubs spend fortunes trying to imitate. With redevelopment looming, however, there is an underlying tension: whether growth can happen without sanding away the edges that made the club matter.

Mapping the future of midfield

By Tom Curren for Scouted

Modern football increasingly asks midfielders to do everything at once. Defend space, escape pressure, carry the ball, dictate tempo, then change roles again moments later.. The discussion here centres on a difficult question: what even counts as a midfielder anymore, in a game where the best players are increasingly those capable of becoming several things at once.

Arsenal FC: The Premier League’s Black and African Club

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Around the corner where I used to work a few years back, (in Marsa, Malta) a group of African immigrants opened an Arsenal supporters’ club. Ever since, I have wondered why so many Africans have a bond with the fresh Premier League Champions. Well, that question has now been answered.

Bonus Read: Arsenal, Clapton Orient, and a Forgotten Precedent of Multi‑Club Ownership

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Did Arsenal set up the first ever formal MCO arrangement?

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The Return of Racing

By for La Liga and Beyond

Fourteen years after relegation, Racing Santander are back in La Liga carrying the scars of everything that nearly destroyed them. Fraudulent owners, unpaid players, relegations and the genuine fear of extinction have gradually been overcome. Even better, Racing have rebuilt patiently, with a style of football and ownership model their supporters can finally believe in again.

Bonus Read: The Return of Real Racing Club

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Promotion means that Racing Santander can once again dream of a repeat of the time they made it to Europe.

Each week on Cultured Football we pick the five great football stories from the previous seven days.

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: What the Football Pyramid Stands On

By Guirec Munier for Lower Block

“English football likes to describe itself as a pyramid. It’s the wrong image. A pyramid suggests order, clear lines, something fixed. This isn’t that. This is weight. Everything above depends on what happens down here, but nothing down here is built to support anything.”

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Beer has always been an integral part of German football. From brewery-founded clubs to regional drinking rituals that still shape matchdays, the relationship runs far deeper than stereotype or Oktoberfest imagery. This is an exploration - and celebration - of that tradition.

What the Football Pyramid Stands On

By Guirec Munier for Lower Block

“English football likes to describe itself as a pyramid. It’s the wrong image. A pyramid suggests order, clear lines, something fixed. This isn’t that. This is weight. Everything above depends on what happens down here, but nothing down here is built to support anything.”

Want to hire the next Jürgen Klopp? This is how data can help clubs pick a manager

By Sam Tighe for ESPN

For decades, football clubs hired managers the way families choose restaurants: reputation, instinct, vague memories of a good season somewhere else. Now some are building statistical profiles of coaching behaviour, trying to identify the next Klopp before he becomes Klopp. Yet, how do you measure qualities like charisma and authority?

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The Most loved Owner in Football

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Much of the focus around Coventry’s promotion to the Premier League has centred around Frank Lampard. Yet club owner Doug King deserves plenty of credit. His story is partly about investment and competence, but mostly about tone: turning up consistently, speaking plainly, understanding what fans actually fear after decades of false dawns. Modern football is full of billionaires chasing scale and valuation. Coventry’s owner appears to have realised that attention and restraint can matter just as much.

After twenty years, has the Emirates finally come of age?

By Jessy Parker Humphreys for The Observer

Whilst the move from Highbury to the Emirates brought Arsenal an all new level of ambition, they spent much of the next two decades chasing financial stability and identity. Now, with European nights carrying a different weight and the crowd finally sounding like part of the team, the ground itself seems to have changed too.

Each week on Cultured Football we pick the five great football stories from the previous seven days.

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: Davide Ancelotti: My dad, my tactics and Brazil’s World Cup prospects

By Umir Irfan for the BBC

As he explains why modern defending is increasingly fluid, how Guardiola overloads central areas to dismantle 4-4-2 systems, and why PSG represent the “complete” modern side through their mix of structure and freedom, Davide Ancelotti emerges here as far more than Carlo’s son. He’s a deeply analytical coach shaped by football’s elite minds and years inside top dressing rooms. Yet the piece’s most interesting thread is Davide’s emphasis on human connection: inspired by Phil Jackson, he gifts books to players and views coaching as teaching as much as tactics.

On the face of it, there was nothing especially unusual about FC Stroitel Pripyat. It was a club that grew alongside the community it served, and in time, disappeared with it. For all of its existence, it played in a modest stadium, competing in regional leagues far removed where the real glory lay. There were no great triumphs or trophies that demanded remembrance. There weren’t even any players who carried its name far beyond its immediate surroundings.

None of which is surprising.

Stroitel Pripyat was not built to be exceptional. It existed as so many clubs did across the Soviet Union: as a social fixture aimed at providing a healthy outlet for the families of that community. Results were not important, even if there was some ambition, but this was more about familiar faces gathering in a communal place and help build community in a manner only football can.

The name itself told you much that you needed to know about the club itself. Stroitel means “builder” and the club was named, as so many others, after the industry that gave the town its reason to exist. There was Shakhtar for the miners, Metalurh for the steelworkers, Spartak for the sporting societies of the urban intelligentsia. And here was Stroitel for the men who had raised Pripyat out of the marshland, who had laid its pavements and fitted its windows and poured the concrete of a reactor that was supposed to light up the future.

The club was a mirror of the city, and the city was, in the Soviet imagination, a model of what nuclear progress could look like.

Still, Pripyat was unlike most places in the Ukrainian SSR. Founded in early 1970 to house the workforce of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, it was a young city in every sense. The average age of its residents hovered somewhere in the mid-twenties. There were parks and swimming pools and a fairground. The shops, unusually for the Soviet periphery, were well-stocked goods that would require a trip to Moscow elsewhere were available here as a matter of course.

It was a city designed to demonstrate that the Soviet system could provide.

Football arrived as part of the same logic. The workers were young and needed somewhere to put their energy; the families needed reasons to gather. The club was initially just a town team, informally organised but grew out of this necessity in the mid-1970s, drawing many of its earliest players from the surrounding villages.

In time, as the city’s ambitions grew, so did the club’s. Players were brought in from Kyiv and Dnipro and other cities, given work at the plant, albeit not especially demanding work, in exchange for turning out at weekends.

A former Soviet international, Anatoliy Shepel, who had played for Dynamo Kyiv and Chornomorets Odessa, took charge as coach in the early 1980s. The club entered the KFK Championship, a Soviet-wide amateur competition that sat just below the professional pyramid, and began to take itself a little more seriously.

The best of it came in three consecutive years. Between 1981 and 1983, Stroitel won the Kyiv Oblast championship each time, a run of regional dominance that suggested that the club could be something more than it was. There were people in the city who believed, not unreasonably, that a professional future was within reach.

That belief was concrete enough, eventually, to justify concrete: a new stadium, the Avanhard, was commissioned and built on the edge of the city, with a capacity of five thousand, planned to open on the first of May 1986.

That never happened.

In the early hours of Saturday the 26th of April, 1986, Reactor Number Four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. The players of Stroitel Pripyat were, at that point, preparing for a cup semi-final scheduled for later that day, against FC Borodyanka.

They would not play it.

Within thirty-six hours, the order came to evacuate the city. Residents were told to take documents and essentials for three days. They left in buses, in an orderly fashion, having been given little indication that the three days would become permanent.

The city they left behind was already dying. What distinguishes the story of FC Stroitel Pripyat from others is the completeness of its ending; this was not a club that simply folded when the money ran out, but a city switched off at a single moment.

The football stadium still exists although the Avanhard Stadium, with its terracing still intact, never hosted a competitive match. Photographs of it circulate as a kind of haunted curio, the grass forcing its way through the concrete, the stands empty in a way they were always supposed to be temporary.

Some of the players returned as liquidators, joining the thousands of workers who were sent in to contain the disaster, to bury the graphite and hose down the rooftops and dig trenches in irradiated earth. What happened to those men in the years that followed is harder to document.

The club itself was relocated. A new city, Slavutych, was built near Chernihiv to absorb the displaced population of Pripyat, and the football team moved with them, renamed FC Stroitel Slavutych. They played on for two more seasons.

But by the end of 1988 it was over.

The story of FC Stroitel Pripyat is now captured in this exclusive Cultured Football shirt. Featuring its original badge and a brief history, if you enjoyed their story you can now own a piece of football’s forgotten past.

Buy The Shirt

Each week on Cultured Football we pick the five great football stories from the previous seven days.

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By Umir Irfan for the BBC

As he explains why modern defending is increasingly fluid, how Guardiola overloads central areas to dismantle 4-4-2 systems, and why PSG represent the “complete” modern side through their mix of structure and freedom, Davide Ancelotti emerges here as far more than Carlo’s son. He’s a deeply analytical coach shaped by football’s elite minds and years inside top dressing rooms. Yet the piece’s most interesting thread is Davide’s emphasis on human connection: inspired by Phil Jackson, he gifts books to players and views coaching as teaching as much as tactics.

‘Who Will Win the Championship Play-Offs in 2025-26? The Opta Supercomputer Predictions’

By Matt Furniss and Matt Sisneros for Opta Analyst

The Championship play-offs are often a clash between momentum, style and statistical weirdness. This makes Southampton rated favourites after an explosive turnaround under Tonda Eckert and a 19-game unbeaten run. Even so, and despite all statistical analysis, the Championship’s annual habit of making predictions look silly by Wembley weekend, so there is still plenty of room for chaos.

‘“We bring in hungry, humble players”: How Cesc Fàbregas is leading the incredible rise of Como’

By Sam Dalling for The Guardian

Como are a club that that through obsessive long-term planning and the magnetic pull of Cesc Fàbregas, have been transformed from Serie D obscurity into genuine Champions League within barely seven years. Fàbregas emerges as a demanding but self-aware modern coach, blending Guardiola-style possession football with relentless pressing while building around young, “hungry” players. Ultimately though, you can’t escape the sense that Como are trying to become more than a football team: a lifestyle project that just happens to play exceptional football as well.

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Inside Fleetwood Town’s Ownership of Waterford FC

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Multi club ownership is all the rage these days so a new one barely makes the news. But a League Two side owning a League of Ireland team? Really?

The inevitability of Liverpool and Arne Slot

By for Game Over Ball Burst

Arne Slot’s dazzling beginning at Liverpool has been thoroughly forgotten after a season of awful defeats and even worse performances. Many Liverpool supporters no longer believe there’s someone on the touchline worth “running through walls” for. Slot may survive because there are few alternatives and Champions League qualification papers over the cracks, but Liverpool now feel close to that dangerous space where mediocrity becomes acceptable, hidden behind words like ‘transition’.

Each week on Cultured Football we pick the five great football stories from the previous seven days.

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: From Café to Catapult: How Football Training Lost the Plot (or Found It)

By Woz for Headers and Volleys Fanzine

Brian Clough took his European Cup winners for a coffee. Pep Lijnders ran triple sessions and tracked every heartbeat. Both won everything. So what changed?

By for

Brian Clough took his European Cup winners for a coffee. Pep Lijnders ran triple sessions and tracked every heartbeat. Both won everything. So what changed?

Daniele De Rossi Delivers the Miracle of Ostiamare

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This has been quite some season for Daniele de Rossi. Not only has he managed to take over Genoa CFC and dragged them away from relegation but the club that he owns (and where he started playing) won promotion to the Serie C for the first time in their history. Proof that someone with De Rossi’s character, influence can stretch further than any single dugout.

Bonus Read: The Miracle of Torres Vedras

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The Portuguese Cup has delivered a unlikely finalist. One that will surely have most neutral rooting for it.

Ultra-high pressing isn’t dead

By Mohamed Mohamed for Transfer Flow

In a Bundesliga season shaped by tight margins (well, except for the top of the table), Hoffenheim have moved from the edge of trouble to the edge of the Champions League places. Christian Ilzer has built it on pressure without the ball, a restless, coordinated aggression that unsettles opponents and creates moments before defences can settle. It is not without risk, but it has given the team a clear identity. Understanding how it works tells you something about what modern football is still willing to become.

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The Challenges of Phoenix Clubs

By André Encarnação for Football Heritage

Far too many clubs across European leagues have had to learned to begin again after collapse. Phoenix clubs rebuild on memory, sustained by supporters who refuse to let identity disappear. And, whilst a few manage to thrive immediately, for the majority progress is slow and uncertain.

An Unkindness of Ravens: How Bromley became League One’s newest club

By Matt Watts for

Bromley’s rise to League One - their second promotion in three seasons - feels extremely unlikely. Built on patience and a structured plan, they have turned modest means into momentum and made Hayes Lane matter in new ways without losing the sense of place. In a game increasingly drawn to the stories of wealth, this is a reminder that success can still be built without losing your soul, and that such journeys are still worth paying attention to.

Each week on Cultured Football we pick the five great football stories from the previous seven days.

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: Keisuke Honda: A genuine one-off

By John Duerden for How Football Explains Asia

I had no idea that Keisuke Honda was still playing. Then again, Honda has always been one to move in directions that don’t make immediate sense. Across continents and roles, from player to unofficial coach, his path has been about resisting the idea that there is a correct place to stop. A genuinely intriguing player, may there be many more like him.