The Blog
Stories, stats and history for people who like the game a bit too much. New pieces regularly, all free, all made by people who actually watch football.
Tactics
No shirt number defines it, no traditional role contains it — yet the false nine reshaped how football thinks about the centre-forward..
Survival
Administration, liquidation, reformation — for some clubs, survival itself has been the greatest achievement. These are the teams that refused to disappear..
Records
The hat-trick is football's most celebrated individual feat. Its origins, oddest variations, and most improbable examples are far stranger than the scoreline suggests..
Management
How a handful of coaches led nations that weren't their own to football's ultimate prize..
The ones that got away
World-class talents English fans only ever watched from afar.
Against the odds
When the money didn't win.
Fan favourites
The players supporters loved far beyond what the stats justified.
The back line
Before the game fell in love with attackers, these men ran it from the back.
The playmaker
How football squeezed out its most romantic role.
So close
Legends of the game who never got their hands on the biggest prize.
Never give up
The nights the game refused to be over.
Rule-breakers
The men in gloves who were dangerous at the other end too.
Perfection
The teams that made it through a league campaign without losing.
Masterminds
Winning Europe once is hard enough. These men did it twice, in different colours.
Set pieces
The specialists who turned dead balls into goals.
Loyalty
In an era of endless transfers, the men who stayed put.
Journeymen
Seven clubs, six countries, one very tall Englishman. The players who turned club-hopping into an art form.
One of a kind
Sixty years on, Lev Yashin still stands alone. How the Black Spider beat the strikers at their own game.
Upsets
Denmark were on holiday. Greece were 80-1. The upsets that still don't feel real, and the thread that runs through them.
By the numbers
A defender who won the Ballon d'Or, a striker who became a president, and a goal-a-game man who kept it up for nine years.