The “Barclaysman” is a term thrown around in general pub chat while watching the Premier League Sunday fixtures with a few mates and a few more beers. But what is a “Barclaysman”? Often used to describe a player with cult status amongst fans, not necessarily the best players, but one that embodied what it was to be a footballer in the Premier League during the Barclays Bank sponsorship era from 200 to 2016.

With that in mind, we have devised a starting XI full of prime Barclaysmen. Let’s take a trip down memory lane.

Russia, not a popular country in the current era amidst all the happenings with Ukraine and the threats to other nations. Thankfully, this is a football article, so we don’t have to get into the weeds with all that. Instead, let’s focus on the Russian Premier League, which has just kicked off.

The league consists of the usual names, such as Zenit Saint Petersburg, Rubin Kazan and the Moscow clubs CSKA, Spartak and Lokomotiv. All clubs that have represented the country on the European stage.

There are always those players who, when mentioned, strike fear into opponents. The likes of Roy Keane, a bruiser of a central midfield player who would leave it all on the pitch, and sometimes off it, to give his team the best chance of coming away with three points.

In a different vein, there are the likes of George Elokobi and Adebayo Akinfenwa. Both are extremely strong and use size as an advantage. Aggression, size, mentality and strong desires to win, all combined, can produce a somewhat ‘scary’ footballer. However, these are all traits and abilities used on the pitch. Who then is the most dangerous footballer off the pitch?

By now, we are used to seeing British footballers play abroad. Harry Kane scoring goals for fun in Munich, Bellingham lighting it up in Madrid, and more recently, a gold rush of players to the Saudi Pro League.

But beyond the headlines, there’s a wave of British footballers making names for themselves in unexpected corners of the world, away from the bright lights of Europe or the money from America or Saudi Arabia.

As football fans, we all choose a team and the majority keep this team close to their heart through thick and thin, and for many, through a lifetime. It’s the beauty of the sport. Internationally, there is the opportunity to support the nation of your birth, your ancestral nation or even the nation you reside in.

What if, though, your nation stepped away from the sport? To top this off, what if the people behind the scenes did not give an official reasoning for why the beloved game was pulled? Amidst all the controversy, a story emerges.

Ali Dia claimed to be George Weah’s cousin, tricked his way into Southampton’s squad, and delivered the most infamous cameo in Premier League history.

Loyalty, almost a forgotten concept in the modern game. Big money transfer moves are tempting the very best to the Goliaths of football. Nearly every top player dreams of that big move with the ambition to win countless trophies and play amongst the best every year. Is there more to this game than winning, though?

Well, once upon a time, yes, loyalty to a club wasn’t uncommon. Now, though, finding a player to be a one-club man is very rare. Even some of the greats, such as Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, albeit club icons, weren’t one-club men.

In most leagues, a Player of the Match award earns you a handshake, a sponsored trophy or maybe a bottle of champagne. In Norway, it can mean walking off the pitch with four trays of eggs, or in one case, a freshly slaughtered pig.

In the modern era of football stadiums, many of these multimillion-pound establishments feel like sterile concrete bowls that just seem to lack something.

Maybe a bit of personality. They are supposed to be theatres. Places where thousands of people’s cherished memories and heartbreaks are stored. And yet, for a lot of top-level stadiums, they seem to follow a similar pattern, rectangular pitch with plastic seats and overpriced pints and pies.

Football is a sport full of fate and folklore, superstitions and coincidences, curses and prophecies. Throughout the history of the sport, there have been many examples of strange hoodoos that follow certain players and clubs, and never seem to let them go. Here is a quick tour through some of the strangest stories that refuse to go away.

When Crawley Town let fans vote on a transfer decision using NFTs in 2022, eyebrows were raised across the football world. To some, it was a revolutionary new model of supporter ownership powered by blockchain. To others, it looked like a tech gimmick and a novelty more at home in Silicon Valley than in League Two.

The last six years will have felt like an eternity for AIK Solna fans. With a last league title coming back in 2018, AIK has fallen victim to Malmö’s sustained dominance of the Allsvenskan in recent times, as the club has found itself languishing with underachievement in the Swedish top-flight.

The what games? You may be thinking. The Te Runga Games. Quite possibly the most obscure event many readers would have ever heard of. A competition so remote and so unreported, it’s almost a surprise that the small snippets of available information have made it to the World Wide Web.

The Champions League is the holy grail of club football. The best of the best compete at the top level to be crowned champions. Each continent has its own rendition. Europe has the UEFA Champions League. Africa has the CAF, and Asia has the AFC Champions League Elite. Concacaf has the Champions Cup, and South America has the CONMEBOL Libertadores.

The least-spoken-about Confederation, Oceania, has the OFC Champions League. Teams from the most remote places come together to compete for the title of the best club in Oceania.

Flares and pyros are almost certainly found in football when in Turkey, Serbia and similar places. It’s potentially dangerous but exciting to see on the screen. Since banned in many countries, people are becoming creative in the way in which they sneak flares into games.

Napoleon Bonaparte, a famous and successful General during the French Revolution. Known for his diminutive height, although this is a common misconception as he was actually of average height for the time.

Sudanese football has had to adapt in ways unimaginable to most. The country in Northeast Africa has been facing ongoing civil conflict for nearly two years. It has been entrenched in enormous challenges—displacement, disruption, destruction, and uncertainty.

Money. That is the be all and end all of football nowadays. Millions upon millions being spent on players, players that can be a revelation to a club and bring a legacy with them, sometimes it ends in failure though and players are shipped on just as quickly as they come in.

Football, the beloved sport that spans the globe, from the top of Norway to the bottom of New Zealand, no matter where you are there is always at least someone who is a football fanatic. People from more populated nations have better accessibility to the sport, but what about the off-the-beaten-track places?

If you have followed this page for articles or the podcast for the narrative stories then you have more than likely heard of the Island Games, the biennial international multi-sports event. Tiny island nations such as Jersey, Bermuda, Shetland and the Isle of Wight all compete to be named champions.