A mild night in the Jetisu region of Kazakhstan produced one of the most remarkable stories in football from the last decade. The once capital city of Kazakhstan, Almaty, brought fever dreams to life with the performance of the football club, Kairat. A nation with a league ranked 34th in the UEFA Coefficient rankings has produced an incredible feat by reaching the Champions League, League Phase.

This is not the first time a Kazakhstan side has reached the promised land. FC Astana appeared in the Champions League in the 2015-16 season, although they did not progress past the group stage. Historically, Astana are the most successful team in Kazakhstan, winning the title on seven occasions.

The Chinese Super League was a hot topic of conversation five to ten years ago. Attracting the biggest stars from the beautiful game, offering outlandish wages and incentives to bring the very best to the country. With all the money and all the attention globally, the Chinese Super League still has not been the success it once tried to become.

Referees are the mutually agreed-upon unpopular figure on the football pitch. Fans hurl abuse at officials at every game, players argue with a lot of their decisions, and managers will get in the ear of the fourth official. The majority of what happens is just an exchange of words, usually people telling how the referee got a decision wrong. All is forgotten afterwards, and everyone from both sides moves on to the next game.  

The ultimate football quiz is here to test your footballing knowledge—20 questions of football trivia. Test yourself and see how you score.

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 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.

Welcome to the land down under, Australia. The home of kangaroos, wallabies and for the creative imaginations, the Tasmanian devil. From moustaches and mullets to snakes and spiders, Australia really is a unique place.

The great Manchester United of the nineties, the invincible Arsenal, the dominant Barcelona era. All incredible teams with immense success. Even more recently Manchester City winning it all, Bayern Munich and PSG overwhelmingly succeeded in their respective nations.