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.

The Youngest Players In World Cup History

By Graham Bell for The Analyst

Continuing with the young players at the World Cup theme, these are the youngest players ever to appear on that stage. You’d think that these would all have gone to become major stars. You’d be wrong.

‘But...he’s rubbish.’ How a Championship reject became a 500-game icon.

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

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How an old song from Bosnia went viral

By Chuck Penfold for DW

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.

Fields of the Gods: Mexico’s football pitches from above

By Raquel Cunha & Cynthia Rodríguez for The Guardian

There are few football stadia as iconic as Mexico’s Azteca. Yet Mexico has many other breathtaking football pitches. Or, rather, it has many humble football pitches that happen to be in breathtaking spots.

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: Are Bournemouth now bigger than AC Milan?

By Joey D’Urso

As television wealth reshapes the balance of power, teams once viewed as outsiders in England are finding themselves within touching distance of silverware, both at home and, particularly, in Europe. Which is great for fans of those clubs; less so for the rest of Europe.

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As television wealth reshapes the balance of power, teams once viewed as outsiders in England are finding themselves within touching distance of silverware, both at home and, particularly, in Europe. Which is great for fans of those clubs; less so for the rest of Europe.

Floodlights: Light of my Life

By Guirec Munier for Lower Block

A letter of love to floodlights.

Bonus Read: Any Swaps? Rediscovering the Joy of Collecting Football Stickers

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Sometimes the smallest traditions are the ones we are fondest of.

When Luis Enrique Nearly Took the Nastic Job

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Imagine being given the opportunity to sign not one but two footballing greats. And then imagine saying no.

Bonus Read: Luis Enrique, Arteta and a shared background with Guardiola

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The Champions League final offered a revealing contrast between two modern coaching philosophies shaped by the same footballing lineage.

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How Cornish miners brought football to Mexico

By Henry Cowling for BBC Sport

The story of CF Pachuca, Mexico’s first football club, reveals how migration, industry and community helped carry football across the Atlantic, leaving traces that remain visible more than a century later.

The Subtle Art of the Transfer Flip

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Looking across thousands of transfers, a clear pattern emerges: the clubs that consistently create value are usually those willing to buy potential before it becomes certainty. Success, however, depends on more than spotting talent: it also requires knowing exactly when to let go.

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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

A year ago, Newcastle fans were - rightly - irrate at the prospect of losing Alexander Isak. That feeling was not mirrored when it emerged that Anthony Gordon was on his way out. Why?

The Fall of Ajax

By & 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.

How Senegal became genuine World Cup 2026 contenders – at a cost

By Maher Mezahi for Al Jazeera

As the 2026 World Cup approaches, Senegal arrive with genuine belief and a squad that reflects years of smart planning. Their rise has been fuelled by a mix of homegrown talent and diaspora recruitment, but it also shines a light on a difficult reality. While Senegal continues to produce elite footballers, many of the rewards still seem to flow elsewhere.

Bonus Read: Why you should support Cabo Verde at the World Cup

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If you like underdog stories, you will love Cabo Verde at the next World Cup!

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Wolfsburg’s Silent Slide

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Wolfsburg have spent years drifting, too good to go down but lacking the means to push for the top. Until suddenly, the accumulation of bad decisions meant they weren’t too good. A look at how their relegation unfolded.

What are Real Madrid DOING?

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Real Madrid remain one of football’s great exceptions. While much of the game has moved towards systems, structure and carefully rehearsed patterns, Madrid still place extraordinary faith in personalities, relationships and individual brilliance. Their recent managerial appointment, however, will test that faith to the limit.

Bonus Read: From Ruin to Return: Depor Are Back

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Jose Mourinho won’t be the only one making a return to La Liga after time away: Super Depor are back too!

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Most people find Cultured Football through someone else. You can be that link.

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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?

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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.

The following is an extract by Chris McMenamy from the magazine TIRO: Atalanta and published by Tiro Football. It is available for purchase here.

If this reads like a love letter that’s because it is. I’m giving you fair warning not to expect detailed analysis of Josip Iličić’s strengths and weaknesses, instead I’m taking my chance to give much deserved flowers to a footballer I’ve enjoyed watching perhaps more than any other, at least in a team I don’t support.

Football discourse deals in polarised absolutes, often failing to grasp that this is just a game to be enjoyed. Whether you prefer the entertainment of an open game or the gritty siege mentality of a 1-0 defensive masterclass, there’s something for every taste. You just have to know where to look.

My personal preference is to watch a player with grace, flaws and an ability to make the game look effortless in ways we can’t truly comprehend. Josip Iličić fits that trend, especially during his peak years in Bergamo between 2017 and 2020.

A 6 ft 3 wide attacker with the grace of a ballet dancer and precision of a laser. The ball stayed hit when Iličić put his foot through it, nothing ever done without intent despite his languid style perhaps saying otherwise.

His career reads like a Greek tragedy rewritten by an arthouse director. A late bloomer whose career reached its peak moments before circumstances out of his control forced him to almost abandon the game that gave him such joy.

A bold director would set the scene in Valencia on 10 March 2020, scoring four times as Atalanta knocked their hosts out of the Champions League in the competition’s first game to be forced behind closed doors by an intensifying COVID pandemic.

It had hit the city of Bergamo hardest, making it a ground zero for the disease in Europe. Thousands of Bergamaschi lost their lives throughout the grim year that was 2020, but Atalanta still went to Spain for a game that is now remembered as Iličić’s footballing zenith. His world came crashing down shortly after, the images on TV of Italian army personnel loading dead bodies into trucks triggering awful memories from his childhood.

Iličić was born to a Croat family in Bosnia just as the breakup of Yugoslavia began in the late 1980s. His father was murdered by a Serbian neighbour when Iličić was just a year old, prompting his family to leave the country for safer pastures in Slovenia. Seeing the bodies of those from his adopted home of Bergamo depressed Iličić to the point that he was struggling to play when football returned from COVID lockdown in the summer of 2020, so he left for Slovenia with Atalanta facing a Champions League quarter-final, the biggest game of his career to date. He didn’t play another game that season.

He’d been quietly discussed as a potential Ballon d’Or candidate prior to the enforced break, having scored for fun in a landmark Atalanta season but found himself dealing with much bigger issues than football, which famous Milan coach Arrigo Sacchi aptly once described as “the most important of the least important things”.

But rather than ponder what might have been had Iličić not been struck down by an unfortunate string of events, I’d much prefer to celebrate the ultimate romantic footballer in a time when those who take the field are often asked to be robots.

Iličić came to Atalanta in 2017 as a 29-year-old enigmatic attacker who had blown hot and cold across seven seasons in Serie A with Palermo and Fiorentina. But his new team’s boss Gian Piero Gasperini knew him from a brief spell together at Palermo four years earlier and believed that he’d found the man to take his new Atalanta attack up a notch.

He wasn’t wrong. Iličić was Atalanta’s top scorer with fifteen goals in a tough 2017/18 season and things only got better the next year when Gasperini added new signing Duvan Zapata into the mix. La Dea had Papu Gomez’s Argentine flair, Zapata’s physicality and aerial threat, then Iličić’s elegance as he painted his masterpieces.

Accused of inconsistency and laziness prior to his days at Atalanta, sometimes fairly, but Gasperini weaponised his laissez-faire approach in a team built on hard work. Iličić focused on finding space, a key tenet of their attacking philosophy, and was often deadly when he found some room to manoeuvre.

He was a luxury in a team of physical freaks, making his interventions quite divine. Atalanta’s wing-backs would make lung bursting runs, supported by the tireless midfielders and somewhere in the chaos of rapidly moving chess pieces — then the knight Iličić would strike.

The eighteen-month period from September 2018 was Iličić at his most imperious. Cristiano Ronaldo won the official MVP award in 2018/19, but Iličić was the people’s champion. This was a season that began with him in hospital with a serious lymph node infection and mental health struggles as he came to terms with the sudden death of Fiorentina teammate Davide Astori, but he rallied to fire Atalanta into the Champions League, even scoring hat-tricks at Chievo and Bologna along the way.

Iličić arguably played his best football in 2019/20, scoring for fun in whichever way pleased him — a Zidane-esque volley against Parma, a free-kick from the halfway on the way to a hat-trick against Torino. He played like he had the world at his feet and for six months he did.

He returned from his mental health issues early in the 2020/21 season and had a decent campaign, but eventually succumbed again towards the end of 2021. Gasperini managed to get him fit enough to appear late on in the last game of 2021/22, just to allow Iličić the adoration of his adopted home one last time as an Atalanta player. He terminated his contract and went home to Slovenia early in the 2022/23 season.

Football’s full of people asking what might have been had the cards not fallen the way they did, but it’s better to view Iličić’s career as similar to a band that released two unforgettable albums and called it quits.

He’s a stark reminder that footballers are human beings and not impervious to the afflictions of life, but more than anything, he’ll always be Josip Iličić. Now I’m off to watch one of his seemingly endless YouTube highlight reels because I fancy feeling pure joy.

About the Magazine: Tiro is an Italian football zine. The second edition featured forty-eight pages of football, culture, food and every other aspect of Bergamasque culture all combine to create Atalanta, the football club that is the city’s pride and joy.

About the Author: Chris McMenamy is the founder of TIRO Football, a platform dedicated to Italian football, established in 2020. He is also a Staff Writer at The Square Ball, the award-winning Leeds United fanzine, which also produces a podcast and blog. Alongside this, he works as a freelance writer and copywriter, with experience across print and digital formats.

Each week on Cultured Football we pick the five best football stories from the previous seven days so you can skip the scroll.

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By Jordan P Hickey for Longreads

In a high school stadium in Arkansas, far from the Pacific, the Marshall Islands men’s national team came into existence. Drawn from a scattered diaspora, many meeting for the first time, they gathered not just to play but to define what representing a nation could mean. A beautiful story about beginnings and how football can still bring people together.

The Rise Of Sant Andreu

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It is not easy to forge your own identity when you’re playing in the shadow of a giant like FC Barcelona. UE Sant Andreu are managing, however, attracting thousands to home games despite playing in fourth tier. At least, till this season. Now promoted to the third league for the first time in a decade, the joy is tinged with worry over where the club can exist next, and whether growth can remain rooted without losing the ground that made it matter.

Bonus Read: Seven games to go and half the league at risk — Who is going down?

[Mark Sochon x La Liga Expert]

This is a bit more topical than usual picks but the relegation battle in Spain this season is too intriguing to pass by.

How does Germany produce such good goalkeepers?

By for The Goalkeeper

Across decades of German football, the figure in goal has rarely been an afterthought. Shaped by strong personalities and visible lineage, this is a culture that treats the role with unusual seriousness. That is why Germany has always produced great goalkeepers. Even so shifting structures now leave that tradition feeling less certain than it once did.

Keisuke Honda: A genuine one-off

By 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.

Short Term-ism In Football

By for

In football patience is spoken about more than it is practiced, and only a few clubs manage to hold their nerve long enough to turn intention into something that can endure. Football clubs speak endlessly about vision and identity, yet the moment results turn, the reset button gets pressed.

Bonus Read: Marco Rose to Bournemouth: Why Coach Influenced by Klopp, Tuchel and Rangnick Makes Sense for Cherries

[David Segar x The Analyst]

One club that always sticks to its plans is Bournemouth. They have moved quickly to replace Andoni Iraola with Marco Rose. Unlike Iraola, however, Rose has had a few disappointing spells in recent past. What made Bournemouth certain he is the man for them?

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: My experience in professional Italian youth football (and everything that’s wrong with it)

By Federico Tomadin for Serie A in depth

A LOT has been written about the demise of Italian football following the Azzuri’s failure, yet again, to make it to the World Cup. I’ve gone with this, however, the thoughts someone who spent years playing in a professional youth set-up in Italy. There is plenty of value in pundits’ expert takes but found this to be more insightful.

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In the aftermath of the First World War, the city of Fiume’s passage to Italy emerged from the instability that followed the collapse of Austria-Hungary, which left it suspended between competing national claims.

Both Italy and the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes saw it as their own, turning the port into one of the Adriatic’s most symbolic disputes. In September 1919 the poet-soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio marched in with a band of volunteers and proclaimed the Italian Regency of Carnaro, an audacious, short-lived experiment in nationalist politics and spectacle.

A year later D’Annunzio was expelled from the city by Italian troops leading to the creation of the internationally recognised Free State of Fiume, a fragile compromise that survived only a few years.

Political instability, a coup, and the rise of Mussolini in Italy paved the way for the Treaty of Rome of 27 January 1924, which dissolved the Free State: the city was annexed to Italy, while Sušak passed to Yugoslavia, fixing a border that reflected the tensions of the age.

By the time of D’Annunzio proclamation, football had already formed deep roots in the city. Club Sportivo Olimpia had been founded in 1904 with its football section beginning official activity on 25 November 1906.

In 1917, Club Sportivo Gloria was founded as a workers’ club of the city. The two sides quickly became the main rivals in local championships, representing respectively the wealthier and the more popular classes of Fiume.

All this changed in 1926 when both teams were compelled to join forces to form Unione Sportiva Fiumana.

The origins of the merger, as with many others that took place around the same time, were rooted in the deep crisis that shook the FIGC in the spring of that year, a moment the fascist regime used to reshape Italian football along new political and organisational lines.

The Viareggio Charter of 2 August that year created the Divisione Nazionale, the direct forerunner of Serie A, and promoted a model based on stronger, unified urban clubs. Internal rivalries were seen as wasteful and socially divisive; in their place the regime ‘encouraged’ mergers that would mirror its ideal of collective discipline.

In a border city such as Fiume, where questions of identity were already politically charged, the policy was applied with particular speed.

There was, however, also a clear sporting logic. By bringing together the two strongest local sides, the city aimed to present a single, competitive representative capable of holding its own at national level, especially after the construction of a new stadium gave Fiume a stage worthy of higher ambitions.

That stadium, opened in 1925 in the Borgomarina district, had been carved dramatically out of the mountainside. Known in the Italian years as the Stadio Comunale del Littorio and today as Kantrida, it became the physical and symbolic home of the new entity.

The club’s identity drew consciously on the recent past: its cardinal red, blue and yellow colours echoed the tricolour of the former Free State of Fiume. On the pitch this translated into cardinal red shirts, blue shorts and blue socks trimmed with maroon and yellow.

The team began its life in the interregional Prima Divisione, then the second tier of Italian football, carrying with it both the weight of political design and the more familiar, universal hope that unity might bring sporting strength.

On the field the new club grew into its role with a mixture of steady progress and abrupt turns that mirrored the volatility of the era. In its first championship, 1926–27, Fiumana finished fifth in Group B of the Prima Divisione, a respectable placing that suggested consolidation rather than immediate prominence. The following season brought a sharper rise: third place out of ten and, above all, victory in the Coppa Federale, the first tangible silverware for the unified side and a sign that the project carried real competitive weight.

Its entry into the expanded Divisione Nazionale in 1928–29 came not only through sporting merit but through politics. Initially excluded, Fiumana was admitted at the last moment to replace the vacancy created by the enforced merger of Inter and US Milanese, part of a broader strategy to strengthen the presence of clubs from the “redeemed lands” on the national stage.

Yet the step up proved too demanding. A fourteenth-place finish consigned the team to relegation to the newly formed Serie B, and a year later, after finishing bottom, it slipped back into the interregional world.

It was in this third tier that Fiumana spent most of the 1930s, first the Prima Divisione, then, from 1935, Serie C. There was to be on final ascent, however, as the Serie C title of 1940–41 returned the club to Serie B, only for survival to be missed by two points the following year, behind Savona.

War, however, was already closing in.

The 1942–43 Serie C campaign, which saw US Fiumana finish in an honourable third place, became the last Italian championship the club would play.

In the spring of 1943 Fiumana dissolved, its story ending quietly after a 4–1 victory over Vittorio Veneto on 14 March.

The war brought to an end not only a championship but an entire civic and cultural framework. After the Italian armistice of September 1943, Fiume passed under German occupation, becoming part of the collapsing architecture of the Axis frontier. The change was abrupt and heavy with uncertainty, and when Tito’s Yugoslav army entered the city in May 1945 it marked the definitive end of Italian rule and of the world in which Fiumana had been created.

The political settlement followed soon after. The Treaty of Paris in 1947 formally transferred Fiume and the whole of Istria from Italy to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, turning a military reality into an internationally recognised border. What had been a contested Adriatic city for decades now began a new life under a different name, Rijeka, and within a different state.

The transition was not merely administrative but reshaped the human geography of the city. Between twenty and thirty-eight thousand Italians - from a city that had previously contained around sixty thousand souls - left in the years that followed, part of the wider Istrian exodus that emptied the city.

In 1948 the former Yugoslav suburb of Sušak was formally merged with Rijeka, completing a process that created a single, unified city out of what had long been divided space. What emerged was not simply a renamed Fiume, but a new place, carrying within it the layered memory of the one that had disappeared.

Football still managed to survive. In 1946 the local Trade Union Representative Team looked to take part in the new Yugoslav championship that was due to begin the following autumn despite the city of Fiume designation as a military occupation zone.

Participation in the competition could only be achieved with a name and a legal identity that would be acceptable to the new authorities; continuing with the US Fiumana was not an option.

The solution was to found a new club, Società Cultura Fisica Quarnero a deliberately neutral title that, soon afterwards, was joined by its Croatian form, Kvarner, making the institution officially bilingual.

In substance, it was a continuation. The founding members, players and directors of Fiumana passed almost entirely into the new entity.

That fragile balance between languages and identities lasted less than a decade. In 1954, at a moment of heightened tension between Italy and Yugoslavia, the Titoist authorities abolished the city’s bilingual status. The club was compelled to follow suit, dropping the dual name and becoming simply Rijeka; a final, symbolic step in the long transition from the world in which Fiumana had once played.

And yet, the story of US Fiumana still echoes on. HNK Rijeka, the club that replaced it and changed the kit to an all white one, would go on to win Rijeka two Croatian First Football League titles, two Yugoslav Cups and seven Croatian Cups. Its official year of foundation, however, remains 1904, a quiet but telling acknowledgement that the teams which represented the city in different states, languages and championships all belong to the same unbroken narrative.

Honours Won:

Coppa Federale Winners: 1927–28

Serie C Winners: 1940–41

Serie C Second place: 1942–43 (Group A)

Prima Divisione Second place: 1934–35 (Group A)

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

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Late March in the plains of northern Serbia brings lower-league football back to life, where village derbies carry names that echo far beyond their fields. Across Vojvodina, clubs hold traces of migration, language and memory, their identities shaped as much by history as by results.

High‑Risk, High‑Reward: Dick Schreuder’s Intense Football Philosophy Is Rewriting History for N.E.C.

By Joris Van Den Ban for The Analyst

Long overshadowed by the giants of Dutch football, N.E.C. Nijmegen now find themselves on the brink of a season that could bring silverware and a first genuine breakthrough in Europe. Much of it is down to manager Dick Schreuder.

My experience in professional Italian youth football (and everything that’s wrong with it)

By Federico Tomadin for

A LOT has been written about the demise of Italian football following the Azzuri’s failure, yet again, to make it to the World Cup. I’ve gone with this, however, the thoughts someone who spent years playing in a professional youth set-up in Italy. There is plenty of value in pundits’ expert takes but found this to be more insightful.

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How Manchester City Grew a Die-Hard Fanbase in Uganda

By Adam Marrett for Esteemed Kompany

There is no doubt that Manchester City’s successes have won them admirers from all over the world. Yet the passion for them from Uganda seem to be on a different level. How and why?

From shame to pride - inside Europe’s most exciting league

By Guillame Balague for the BBC

With spring closing in, Poland’s Ekstraklasa where those at the top and the bottom are bunched together. Years of investment, modernisation and renewed belief have lifted attendances and raised standards, restoring a sense of pride in the domestic game. Still the doubts remain whether competitiveness alone is enough to carry Polish football forward.

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: AGF Aarhus’ Story: What made the Danish “sleeping giant” suddenly wake up?

By Bergas Brillianto for Analytics FC

Aarhus has long seen itself as something bigger than its recent past; a club with memory but little to show for it. Now, despite lacking any obvious financial strength or star power, that gap is closing.

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It may be difficult to imagine now, but one of the most revered football shirts of all time was met with uncertainty on its release. Now considered a classic, in 1990 West Germany’s kit marked a move away from tradition, shaped as it was by an outsider’s perspective and emerging technology. For some, it was quite simply too much.

AGF Aarhus’ Story: What made the Danish “sleeping giant” suddenly wake up?

By Bergas Brillianto for Analytics FC

Aarhus has long seen itself as something bigger than its recent past; a club with memory but little to show for it. Now, despite lacking any obvious financial strength or star power, that gap is closing.

The Yellow Wall is Dortmund’s only real (glorious) tourist attraction

By Uli Hesse for Glory / Football 365

When you’re from Paris, people will often ask you about art, fashion and food. When you’re from Rome, you will regularly have to answer questions about landmarks, history or architecture. When you’re from London, conversations might turn to music, films or museums. But when you’re from Dortmund, there is only ever one thing non-locals are interested in – football.

The unlikely story of the first English manager to reach a World Cup final

By Chris Evans for The Set Pieces / The Guardian

In England, George Raynor struggled even to receive a reply when a job opened up. Abroad, he built one of international football’s most remarkable records, winning an Olympic gold and reaching a World Cup final. To this day, however, recognition at home has never followed.

The Egyptian King

By for Dan Krishan

There are players you admire and players who come to define your life as a supporter. Mohamed Salah became the latter at Liverpool. Records explain part of his emotional pull, but not all of it. Now he is leaving, and with him goes a way of experiencing the game for a generation of fans.

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In Case You Missed It Here’s Last Week’s Most Read: Everything Frank McCourt touches turns to crap

By Brendan Dentino for Out in Left

In modern football ownership, wealth often arrives with promises of revival and ambition. Yet the distance between money and stewardship can be vast. The career of Frank McCourt offers a stark example of that, where clubs become stages for financial ambition rather than sporting care.

Bonus Read: Botafogo on the brink: From South America’s champions to relegation candidates

[Nathan Joyes for The Copa Club]

Poorly though McCourt’s teams do, that is nothing compared to what John Textor seemingly does at every club he owns.

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I love a good underdog story and that of Recoleta FC certainly is one. The club from an area mostly known for a cemetery and a women’s prison, they’ve experienced a recent upturn in fortune that will see them play continental football for the first time.

The Accidental Hero of El Salvador

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Vladan Vićević arrived in El Salvado as an outsider but became something much more than that, carried by circumstance, conviction and a country willing to claim him. This is the story of how, in a country where the game can feel like a matter of national pride, a Serbian defender found himself unexpectedly at the centre of it all.

How assistant managers handle players, personal ambition

By Tom Hamilton for ESPN

Assistants managers occupy the space between; carrying ideas, sharing thoughts and acting as the bridge with the players. Their influence is constant but rarely visible, built on trust, timing and restraint, and measured less by recognition than by the stability they help create around others.

BUY TIRO ISSUE TWO

Superstition

By Jonee for Football Heritage

In a sport that now measures and tries to explains almost everything, superstition still thrives. Football’s rituals, whether private, collective or inherited, reveal how players, managers and supporters try to live with uncertainty and stay close to hope.

Everything Frank McCourt touches turns to crap

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In modern football ownership, wealth often arrives with promises of revival and ambition. Yet the distance between money and stewardship can be vast. The career of Frank McCourt offers a stark example of that, where clubs become stages for financial ambition rather than sporting care.

Bonus Read: Botafogo on the brink: From South America’s champions to relegation candidates

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Poorly though McCourt’s teams do, that is nothing compared to what John Textor seemingly does at every club he owns.

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: How a kid from Northampton earned a Barcelona trial while on holiday.

By Jack Kenmare for Sports Bible

A family trip to Barcelona once gave a seven year old from Northampton an unlikely route into football’s grandest academy. And whilst that was something of a fairytale, the ending wasn’t exactly one you’d see scripted in a movie.

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Few careers in football have wandered as widely as that of German goalkeeper Lutz Pfannenstiel. From lower league England to distant corners of the global game, his is a path shaped by an insatiable appetite for experience. The result has been a life marked by brushes with danger, flashes of absurdity and the determination needed to keep moving through football’s farthest outposts.

How a kid from Northampton earned a Barcelona trial while on holiday.

By Jack Kenmare for Sports Bible

A family trip to Barcelona once gave a seven year old from Northampton an unlikely route into football’s grandest academy. And whilst that was something of a fairytale, the ending wasn’t exactly one you’d see scripted in a movie.

Who Protects Young Players When It All Goes Wrong?

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Should managers be expected to look after the mental health of the players they lead? Especially when there are young players involved?

BUY TIRO ISSUE TWO

Premier League to Isthmian League: My Story

By Jacob Waller via for

For Jacob Waller, following West Ham was what he did; what his family did. Yet a return to a small ground in Sittingbourne reopened another version of football, one built on volunteers, familiar faces and shared effort. The shift to a game that felt closer than ever began on that day.

Bonus Read: On Football, Localism and Pub Pianos

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This is a reflection on localism, on the value of smaller clubs and amateur fields, where the meaning of sport lies less in spectacle and more in shared belonging.

San Diego Maradona

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On the streets, Diego Maradona moved through crowds that seemed to swallow him whole, every outstretched hand reaching for a fragment of the legend. Fame offered adoration but little peace. On the pitch he found brief clarity, yet even there the myth was already forming. The man and the icon slowly separated, until Maradona the symbol began to eclipse Diego the person.

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: Is Serie A really ‘disappearing’?

By Simon Binns for More Than Just Football

Once the centre of football’s global imagination, Serie A now lives in a different landscape. The league still carries the weight of its history yet attention seems to have shifted elsewhere.

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Once the centre of football’s global imagination, Serie A now lives in a different landscape. The league still carries the weight of its history yet attention seems to have shifted elsewhere.

Uncommon People

By Mike Bayly for Terrace Edition

In a quiet corner of south Manchester, far from the spectacle of the professional game, West Didsbury & Chorlton have quietly built something rare: crowds grow, songs travel beyond the terraces and a small ground begins to feel like a gathering place. If you’re looking for an antidote to the football of the Premier League, this must be it.

Monchi and San Fernando: Redemption

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On the island of San Fernando, just across the water from Cádiz, football is finding its way back. After the sudden liquidation of their club, the community restarted in the ninth tier and the first promotion has been ticked off. At the heart of everything is Monchi, a man who has built the success of many others but is now working for the happiness of his own people.

Ferry Days And Step 5 Dreams

By for How The Game is Lived

On the Isle of Man, football has always lived with a quiet sense of distance. By joining the English pyramid, FC Isle of Man pushed away from that isolation. Ferry crossings, crowded stands and long weekends on the mainland now shape the club.

Why Jesse Lingard has left Seoul for Sao Paulo

By Nathan Joyes for

Few careers travel as unpredictably in football as Jesse Lingard’s. From Manchester to Seoul and now São Paulo, his path has rarely followed the expected route. Brazil offers another unfamiliar stage, one that seems shaped by ambition as much as revival.

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 Worst Premier League Season Ever

By Steve AQ for CannonIQ

That this is the worst Premier League season ever has been a familiar refrain these past few months. Which, I guess, means that people have forgotten how last season was labelled as the weakest Premier League season ever. Still, beyond the usual exaggerations, there might be something to the complaints.

By & for

In Belgium clubs work in the knowledge that there is a value beyond the final result in every appearance. Players are brought through and given chances with the exit already in mind. Yet, despite the transactional nature of it all, this is a competition that seems to have made peace with its place.

Ellison’s turnstiles: The unsung Salford invention hidden in plain sight across Britain

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At grounds across Britain, the match still begins with a narrow passage and a mechanical rhythm first cast in Salford. The turnstile was designed to count bodies and control the crowd. Somewhere along the line, it became the most personal part of the experience.

The Worst Premier League Season Ever

By for

That this is the worst Premier League season ever has been a familiar refrain these past few months. Which, I guess, means that people have forgotten how last season was labelled as the weakest Premier League season ever. Still, beyond the usual exaggerations, there might be something to the complaints.

The Hawthorns: Where love goes to die

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This, if you haven’t been watching, is turning out to be a bad season for West Bromwich Albion. And it threatens to get even worse. In the meantime, a club long sustained by effort, characters and shared defiance now watches a team that seems to return nothing of the feeling invested in it.

A Glimt in the eye: if the plucky Norwegians can do it, why can’t we?

By Max Rushden for the Guardian

In the Champions League, Bodø/Glimt have briefly made the hierarchy feel negotiable. A small-town side, run with rare competence, are beating opponents who normally turn nights like this into formality. For a moment, the dream feels so real that others are sharing it.

Bonus Read: Why Fulham’s Premier League success may have hit a glass ceiling

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A counter-point to Bodo-Glimt’s success are the new rules in the Premier League that seemingly limit a club like Fulham from progressing.

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: Soccer managers’ latest source of inspiration? The rugby pitch.

By Tom Hamilton for ESPN

Purists might not like it but football has a lot to learn from rugby. That some leading managers are already borrowing ideas off it is proof enough of that.

By Tom Hamilton for ESPN

Purists might not like it but football has a lot to learn from rugby. That some leading managers are already borrowing ideas off it is proof enough of that.

Remembering Siniša Mihajlović

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In the football memory of a country that no longer exists, Siniša Mihajlović remains a figure both unifying and unresolved. His left foot, his temper, his loyalties and contradictions carried the marks of the place that formed him, while his final struggle was faced with the same defiance as a free kick on the edge of the area.

Lleida CF: A fight for survival

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In the crowded landscape of Catalan football, Lleida live with the threat of disappearance for a second time in a generation. Between municipal pressure, a rival project with money, and unpaid debts, the club survives on reduced means and collective will.

Bonus Read: Celta’s Vigorous Approach to Youth is Flying Under the Radar

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Not enough is being made of the club that is giving 40% of minutes played to home grown players.

Why is Uruguay so good at football?

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In Montevideo the pace might be unhurried, but football sits at the centre of the national story. Uruguay’s triumphs feel less like miracles than the legacy of a moment when wealth, reform and leisure combined to give the game purpose and prestige. The old stadiums, the duopoly of Nacional and Peñarol, and the lingering myths all point to a country that once shaped the sport and still measures itself against that memory.

How do Brentford keep appointing the right managers?

By Simon Stone for the BBC

In a league that increasingly devours managers and demands instant change, Brentford move to a different rhythm. Successive appointments emerge from within a structure that outlives any individual, where continuity matters more than reputation and expectation is carefully managed.

Bonus Read: Why Spurs Fans Turned Against Thomas Frank

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Thomas Frank must have known that leaving the ideal football project for a big club was going to be hard. But he underestimated just how hard it was going to be.

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: Before Data Departments, Football’s Greatest Managers Were Already Running Systems

By James Callan for How the Game is Lived

Long before performance departments formalised process, certain managers had already turned training grounds into laboratories of repeatable behaviour and quiet control. Their teams moved with an internal logic that outlived results and eras. Crucially, they were given the time to do so.