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• Ramat-Gan, Israel | 31 October . . . Israelis love the big clubs like Maccabi Tel Aviv, Maccabi Haifa, Hapoel Tel Aviv and Beitar Jerusalem, but apparently they also want their Arsenal and Real Madrid, too. According to Haaretz, Hapoel co-owner Moshe Teumim this week sent a letter to the Israel Football Association asking that games from England and Spain be blacked out during local pay-per-view broadcasts. The IFA is resisting, but negotiations continue. "In my opinion, the sides will thrash out some understanding," an "industry insider" tells Haaretz. | back to top
• Plovdiv, Bulgaria | 24 October . . . Boris Dimitrov of the Sofia Echo gives a mind-boggling account of political machinations in upcoming municipal elections. All of these maneuverings involve footballers and referees, playing on supporters' affinities for PFC Lokomotiv Plovdiv: "The Movement for Rights and Freedoms put up international linesman Konstantin Piskov as their favourite for the chair of the current mayor, Dr Ivan Chomakov. Chomakov, who is asking voters to give him a second term on October 26, managed to recruit Locomotive Plovdiv's fan club to his side. It is widely known that the black-and-whites are supported by one of the greatest [armies] of fans in the country." The story continues in this vein, noting, however, that Sofia has bucked the trend toward "sports people." . . . As a side note, the article mentions Bulgarian legend Hristo Stoitchkov's lack of success backing a candidate in 1994. A long Washington Post profile of Stoitchkov explores his many contributions to the game as well as his volatile nature. Stoitchkov explains:

Soccer is very, very hard. You must prepare every day. You must not waste a day. . . . Prepare. The game is only 90 minutes. It is nothing. It is over like this. You must work the whole week. Monday, one step. Tuesday, second step. Every single day, step by step. It is impossible for good training Monday, then cheat on Tuesday and Wednesday. Good training Thursday. Nothing Friday. Impossible to win the game Saturday. No. Every single day, I bring water to the tree. One day, I pick the fruit. | back to top

• Hyderabad, India | 23 October . . . The football competition at the inaugural Afro Asian Games, 10 years in the planning, is underway. With some of the best players not participating due to commitments in Europe, however, expectations are low. The Associated Press reports: "[O]rganizers apparently forgot about the annual northern monsoons that dump rain on the region at this time of year, and the Hyderabad city authorities were blaming each other for failing to clear clogged storm drains that left ankle-deep water around the town and on the field. 'We've never played in these conditions before. They affected our team badly,' said [Rwanda coach Dujkovic] Ratomir. 'My players didn't have the shoes for these conditions.' " (Update: India lost the Afro Asian final 1-0 to Uzbekistan.) | back to top
• County Durham, England | 22 October . . . A strange story in the Times (London) about the Chester-le-Street Town Ladies Football Club. The Durham County Football Association has nixed the club's efforts to gain £15,000 by wearing "No bollX" on its kit, which would have promoted a book by Keith Brown, True Masculinity, No bollX. The club is now backed, however, by a Northern Ireland hypnotist, John Grierson—and gaining moral support from elsewhere, judging from the website picture of Newcastle United gaffer Sir Bobby Robson. Grierson came to a recent FA Cup tie, but Chester-le-Street coach Pauline Godward (right) was not happy with a 3-1 result. "[I]t was abysmal. I hid in the dugout I was that embarrassed. We had about 200 spectators and I was glad we hadn't charged them." The side's kit now says, "New Life Hypnosis." | back to top
• Frankfurt, Germany | 20 October . . . S. L. Price shares his experience of the Women's World Cup final from local sports bars ("Where the Girls Are," Sports Illustrated, p. 23). Few people seem interested except one woman, who mutters "bitte . . . bitte . . . bitte" at the screen, praying for a goal. Celebrations after the victory are anticlimactic—"I'm sad about the attention this got in Germany," the woman says. "The women showed very good football, very elegant. But it's very machismo here." Attention paled to that paid to the European Championship qualifiers the previous day. In Europe, Price writes, "sports reveal best what bubbles beneath: The frightening passion, the national pride, the bald chauvinism that seemingly trumps all—even the fact that the women's final was better than any of the men's games played the day before." . . . In contrast to Price's account, though, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports that television ratings for the women's final exceeded those for the men's European qualifier (link opens PDF file). So whom are we to believe? Could all the televisions have been on with no one watching? | back to top
• Pyongyang, North Korea | 15 October . . . Makers of the documentary Game of Their Lives—about North Korea's 1-0 upset of Italy at the 1966 World Cup—tell the Amateur Athletic Foundation's (Los Angeles) SportsLetter that they are being allowed "total and unrestricted access to daily life" in creating a new documentary, about North Korean gymnasts. Director Dan Gordon and producer Nick Bonner had been permitted rare interviews with the North Korean players while making Game. A depressing aspect of their work is that there has been no U.S. distribution. It is "really upsetting as it has been shown worldwide (including North Korea and South Korea)," says Bonner. "Is this censorship? . . . We believe that what the film has captured is the spirit and humor of a much-maligned people. The film allows the 'outside world' to see Koreans as individuals, as real human beings." Odd that Bonner lists Victory (Escape to Victory in the U.K.), with Sylvester Stallone and Pelé, as one of his favorite football films. Can he be serious? . . . Football in the Americas will be the focus of a conference from 30–31 October in London. Among the presenters is Alex Bellos, author of Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life. He will speak on Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil's recently elected president, and the nation's first "fan-president." "Football is part of his life," Bellos writes in his abstract. "[H]e plays it at the presidential palace on weekends, and he conspicuously supports a club, Corinthians." | back to top
• Nairobi | 9 October . . . A Kenya-based program that allows youth to organize football and to perform community service has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) was nominated by Inger Lise Gjoerv of Norway. The organization, started in 1987, now has some 17,000 members and 1,200 football teams, in addition to girls' teams. The MYSA website states:

The girls football started in the year 1992. It was started by Samuel Karanja who is the current chief executive. He had seen that there was a need to indulge the girls in sports since most of them were doing a lot of domestic work but had nothing interesting to do during their free time. . . . MYSA was determined to expose girls to football and they believed that the girls could do it.

For more background on MYSA, see Hans Hognestad and Arvid Tollisen, "Playing against Deprivation: Football and Development in Nairobi, Kenya," in Football in Africa: Conflict, Conciliation, and Community (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 210–26. | back to top

• London and Istanbul | 9 October . . . There has been a spate of articles on problems besetting English football: the alleged sexual assaults and gang rapes, as well as the strike threats before England's crucial Euro 2004 qualifying fixture against Turkey. "Football does seem to be all-pervasive," writes the Guardian's Matthew Engel. In advance of the 11 October match, The Observer's Ed Vulliamy gives a rambling, rollicking account of the Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe derby in Istanbul.

This is the battle between two clubs from the same city but different continents—Europe and Asia—divided by the Bosporus, astride which a metropolis of 16 million sprawls from either bank. It is a confrontation up there in the league of loathing with Roma-Lazio or Celtic-Rangers and devoid of that Samba carnival nonsense that makes Rio's Flamengo-Fluminense so limp. "This is war," declares the Fenerbahçe fans' leader, Sefa. "In Glasgow maybe it's religion, in Rome maybe it's politics. Here it's pure football. We hate each other, that's all."

On the sex angle, we refer you to Simon Kuper's Financial Times article, in which he observes that "English footballers sin in packs. . . . They get into trouble together. They even watch each other having sex. This is because there is a strain in English football that regards drinking and group sex as forms of teambuilding." | back to top

• London | 6 October . . . The Burma Campaign UK urges football fans to boycott the sportswear firm Kappa, which supplies Tottenham Hotspur, Wales and Italy with kit. The advocacy group claims that many of the products sold in Britain are made in Burma. "The money that is being made by Burma is being used to pay for rape, torture and the suppression of human rights," says Mark Farmaner, the group's campaigns officer. (On 10 October, Burma Campaign reports that Kappa has stopped sourcing clothes from Burma.) | back to top
• London | 5 October . . . The Scottish Football Writers' Association has voted to bar women from its annual dinner, to the chagrin of The Observer's Will Buckley.  Waitresses, however, will be allowed. Especially in the context of rape allegations swirling around the Barclaycard English Premier League, Buckley calls the decision "mutton-headed." "But then," Buckley continues, "hypocrisy and prejudice have long been a cornerstone of Scottish football." The occasion is fatuous, yet the time for such male bonhomie—if there ever was an appropriate time—has long passed. Buckley writes:

[I]f the Scottish dinner is akin to its English equivalent, no sane woman, other than a well-paid anthropologist, would consider accepting an invitation. The company of a hotel ballroom full of football writers eating chicken à la king and drinking Pinot Grigio is as grim as socialising gets. | back to top

• Berlin | 1 October . . . Rebecca Santana of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports on the fascination with East German ersatz, 13 years after reunification. This fascination is reflected in the football-themed movie Good Bye Lenin! in which a boy, whose mother was in a coma when the Berlin Wall fell, tries to convince her that nothing has changed. The football part comes as entrepreneurs try to sell satellite TV based on the attraction of the 1990 World Cup finals. For more on the film, see the Guardian's article of 24 July. | back to top