Gary Neville scored a total of five Premier League goals across two decades. Two of those goals came in a seven-day hot streak in April 2004. The 2003-04 Premier League season was not a vintage one for Manchester United. Arsenal, the eventual champions, went the entire campaign without losing a match, and Chelsea saw immediate returns on their new investments, finishing second in their first season under Roman Abramovich. The contrasts in the transfer market were stark: Arsenal improved an already strong squad by replacing David Seaman with Jens Lehmann, while Chelsea went for international su ..read more

Bayer Leverkusen are not the most popular club in Germany, but it is still hard not to feel sorry for those involved in their famous run of near misses. We’ve previously looked at some of the best players not to win a major trophy – but what about generations of teams? You’d struggle to beat the Leverkusen side of 1997-2002; they finished as runners-up in four Bundesliga campaigns, a German Cup, and the Champions League, managing all three in the space of just 11 days in 2002. Their reputation as the nearly-men of German football has even earned them the nickname ‘Neverkusen’. T ..read more

On September 26, 2008 Joe Kinnear was appointed Newcastle United manager. He had not worked in the Premier League for almost a decade, but it didn’t take long before he decided to tell everyone to “f*ck off”. How do you define a ‘good managerial appointment’? Is it finding a coach that suits the club, gets on with the players and builds a strong rapport with the fans? Is it finding a boss with proven talent that will deliver immediate results, or is it finding somebody with eyes on the long term — someone who will nurture young, local talent for generations to come? Perhaps a good managerial a ..read more

Germany, Germany, Germany… What the f*cking hell are you doing? The word ‘treason’ is thrown around a lot — especially by your dad’s mate from work with the high blood pressure, who doesn’t reckon we should be having any fun with the design of that flag we literally nicked from Genoa. But Germany are playing with fire. Germany is Adidas, Adidas is Germany. It’s symbiosis. It’s the shark and the remora. It’s Richards & Jagger, Paul & Barry, Magnet & Steel. And yet, Germany and Adidas are going their separate ways. It’s obviously a travesty, and we look forward to the frenzy over the ..read more

Almost eight years have passed since Christian Pulisic made his senior debut for the United States. Undoubtedly one of the biggest stars that American soccer has ever boasted, Pulisic is now the captain and one of the first names on the teamsheet. Jurgen Klinsmann first named him in the squad for World Cup qualifiers in March 2016. He was a teenager back then and had caught the eye during a breakthrough campaign with Borussia Dortmund. He was brought off the bench in the closing stages in an emphatic 4-0 victory over Guatemala. We’ve revisited that XI and checked in on where each player is tod ..read more

In the U S of A you might grow up tossing a pigskin in the garden with your dad or playing catch with a baseball glove, not so in the UK. Football is in the blood over here, and there are myriad variations of the beautiful game played up and down the country. And most of them involve corporal punishment for the loser. Halcyon days. No prize for winning, just physical pain for losing. We’d play with tennis balls, rolled up socks, empty cans of pop (fizzy drinks), and we’d play anywhere. North American friends and people of the world, welcome to your beginner’s guide to UK childhood (and adultho ..read more

The adidas Predator has the football world well and truly tied up in its tongue straps right now. We’re engulfed in it — watching matches purely to see who’s got the Preds with the tongue. It’s been a long time since a football boot caused quite so much excitement among fans of all ages, and we miss that, honestly. We haven’t felt the unique thrill that comes with getting a new pair of boots that your very soul pines for in decades, but that might be changing. In honour of this Predator mania, we’ve come up with our Predator Mania XI based on both ability and simply how much we associate these ..read more

Imagine how amazing it would be if the fastest player from every club in the top four divisions competed against each other to be crowned the fastest of all. Now imagine if the player who eventually won it did it with a steaming hangover. In 1992, that actually happened. If it was to happen in such circumstances these days, sports scientists across the country would have a fit. Raymond Verheijen would break Twitter. But football was very different back in 1992 when League Cup sponsor Rumbelows, an electrical retailer which rivalled Dixons, Currys and Comet – not very successfully, as it turned ..read more

In 2011, Bundesliga strugglers Schalke upset all the odds to reach the semi-finals of the Champions League, where they faced Manchester United. The 2010-11 season was a strange one for Schalke. They struggled in the league and sacked Felix Magath as manager in March, suggesting he had ‘lost the team’ – but he had just guided the side to the Champions League quarter-finals and the final of the DFB-Pokal. Ralf Rangnick took over and continued the good work away from the league as Schalke saw off Duisburg in the domestic cup final and beat Inter Milan 5-2 in the San Siro on their way to the semi ..read more

The legacy of every England manager tends to hang on a single moment or personality trait that sticks in the popular imagination. Think Glenn Hoddle and his musings about reincarnation. Or Roy Hodgson taking a boat trip down the River Seine instead of scouting Iceland at Euro 2016. And take your pick about Graham Taylor from ‘The Impossible Job’, the only TV programme that comes with explicit instructions to watch between your fingers. It’s a peculiarly human trait to condense periods of time into bitesize chunks. And when it comes to Sven-Goran Eriksson, it’s hard not to think of him as a pro ..read more