Apalak

The first ever World Cup staged in Montevideo, Uruguay, feels today like a dreamt-up patchwork of events and/or myths ranging from ridiculous to profound. A tournament held 95 years ago was almost nothing like the behemoth World Cup has…

Barcelona halted Madrid's undefeated run in the round of 16 in the 1960/61 European Cup, but Madrid were back playing their sixth final in the seventh iteration of the tournament. A 28-year-old Paco Gento was captaining Los Blancos against…

Paco Gento maintained that he was “a dissatisfied player”. Such a suggestion would feel outlandish because Gento won 12 league titles and 6 European Cups and etched himself deeply into the folklore of the game. Still, it is a testament to…

The Swedish top division, Allsvenskan, has been operational for more than a century now. Never in its history has Sweden been considered a powerhouse of the club game. Among its clubs, only Malmö FF has been sporadically present at European…

It was always on the cards. The notorious Forest owner had never seemed quite patient, and the winless run that the newly appointed Ange Postecoglou was overseeing had finally plunged the club into the relegation places. Minutes after the…

The magical day on which Cape Verde achieved their first FIFA World Cup qualification will be remembered for a really long time. Cape Verde had been under Portuguese rule up until 1975. Its football team played the first ever match in 1978.…

Ernst Kuzorra had been associated with Schalke 04 since his boyhood. In the years before the formalisation of players’ wages and transfer fees, most German footballers were essentially one-club men. Kuzorra also spent his whole playing…

Through the grainy monochrome of a minute-long footage from a match that happened more than ninety years ago, one can still see a robust footballer dribbling past a nagging defender with confident ease. He enters the box, which came without…

Four months before he led Boca Juniors to the club's latest Copa Libertadores crown, Angel Miguel Russo was seated alone at a bar in Buenos Aires. Jonathan Wilson, one of the most accomplished football writers of our time, had incidentally…

When Chelsea met Leeds United in the final of the FA Cup in 1970, it produced one of the most exhilarating contests for what was then the most prestigious prize in English football. It was, in many ways, a clash of styles, the flashy and…