With not much money but spirit to burn, the club are using footage of fan power to drive their La Liga returnBack in the summer, when the recently promoted Osasuna were building a squad for their return to La Liga, they sent videos to the players they were trying to persuade to join them. They didn’t have much money – only three teams have a smaller budget – and they didn’t have success to sell, either: the second division title is the only thing they have won, and they had just done that for the first time in 58 years. But they could offer something different.When the tapes went out, sales pitches carefully edited in-house, they weren’t filled with 101...
In a global city where football doesn’t often take centre stage, it needed someone to seize the moment: enter the Union strikerIt was going to take something to be heard through the cacophony, to guide the way through the fog that sporadically impaired vision of proceedings, and to cut a tension that was quite unusual in the context of Berlin’s football. In a global city where football doesn’t often take centre stage, it needed something or someone to seize the moment. Sebastian Polter was ready.In this first top-flight meeting between Berlin’s two most prominent clubs, Union and Hertha, where nerves crackled and fireworks fizzed, the football had been fractious in the Bundesliga new boys’ atmospheric, old-school home, rebuilt by the...
The Basque club’s book-publishing and literature and film festivals are a model for how smaller clubs can express their identities in an era of super-club domination“They push me against the wall, hands on my head. They frisk me, recriminating me in a language I don’t understand. Something’s happening, but I don’t know what. Before I know it, it’s happening. I respond to their threats by shouting: ‘Please, help, please!’” So begins Togo, a book in which fear is a recurring theme. Written by Óscar de Marcos, it tells the story of the journeys that shaped him, the chapters alternating between his arrival in Africa and at Athletic Club Bilbao.In the book De Marcos says his parents wanted him to be...
Victory over Udinese moved Roma up to fourth, an impressive position when set against their lengthy injury listRomelu Lukaku’s best goal yet for Internazionale. Cristiano Ronaldo bagging a 95th-minute winner to put Juventus back on top of the table. Six players sent off in an evening, and Carlo Ancelotti seeing red, too, after his Napoli team blew their second lead of the night against Atalanta. Serie A’s midweek round was certainly eventful.We will get to all the stories mentioned above, but this also feels like a moment when we need to talk about Chris Smalling. He scored his first Serie A goal on Wednesday, the second of four in Roma’s romp past Udinese. The strike itself was nothing special –...
Real Betis v Celta Vigo was supposed to be the end. But one coach looks like he will still be standing after a dramatic finaleMaybe the best way to grasp what happened on Wednesday night and what it meant is to pause it and watch it back again frame by frame, a thousand things in a single shot, a thousand more in the next. Look at Celta de Vigo: you can actually pinpoint the second where their hearts rip in half. It’s the same second when life floods back into Betis. The clock shows 89.47 and the ball drops to Nabil Fekir, near the penalty spot. Stop it there: everyone’s looking at him, close. Only Iago Aspas isn’t in the...