Criticism of Newcastle United has long since passed from being some form of sport into being a sadistic ritual, but their new change kit for next season is surely worthy of some comment. The two-tone yellow striped number from Adidas has already been described as "custard and cream with yellow shorts" (When Saturday Comes), "the worst football strip ever" (The Sunderland Echo, perhaps unsurprisingly and a "garish orange and yellow stripe number" (The Sun) but, whilst it may well be the worst offender of the summer, it certainly isn't the only terrible football kit that has been designed over the last few months or so.

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The current controversy over the vuvuzela at the Confederations Cup in South Africa is hardly the first debate about "artificial" noisemakers used by football fans. In different forms, their use has been common across the world for over a century. So is the vuvuzela an organic instrument of South African football culture we should respect, or a commercialised nuisance that should be banned?

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The movement to ban vuvuzelas continues to gain supporters and steam. Dutch head coach Bert Van Marwijk spoke out against the annoying horns.

"At home watching TV it really was annoying, but in the stadiums you get used to it but it is still unpleasant," Van Marwikj, who is on a fact-finding tour before next year's World Cup finals, told reporters at the hotel his team will use next year. Click to continue reading...

Why Are They Playing Footy in a Beehive?
or How I Learned to Claw My Own Ears Off and Hate the Vuvuzela.

Meet your worst nightmare...the Vuvuzela, aka. the Lepatata, aka. the Stadium Horn.
Left to it's own devices its a harmless plastic horn that makes a generally annoying sound. Click to continue reading...

Have you been watching the Confederations Cup from South Africa?

So far, so good.

A great game yesterday between African champions Egypt against Brazil, which ended on a controversial penalty called by English referee Howard Webb. 4-3 was the final score for Brazil but the Egyptians have nothing to be ashamed about. Click to continue reading...

As the summer months have arrived, we're going to take a brief look back at some of the football games that have graced your computer screen over the last few years or so, starting with "Football Manager", the grandfather of them all and a game which still exists, albeit in an unrecognisable form to the original.

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Jason Cowley is a British journalist and Arsenal supporter, his latest offering is a book entitled 'Love, Death and Football'. This book is an interesting mix of stories and opinions focused around the author's family life, Arsenal and that infamous Michael Thomas goal in 1989, Hillsborough and football culture in general with a bit of a sociopolitical slant. Click to continue reading...

Paul Ince sacked by Blackburn. Kevin Keegan pushed out of Newcastle. Roy Keane frustrated by Sunderland. Ince was an outright firing after Blackburn only registered 3 wins in 17 matches. Keegan technically resigned, but has made allegations that the club forced him out. Roy Keane left Sunderland after failing to agree on contract negotiations.

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It's almost that time of year again. The non-league end of season play-offs started last night with wins for Hampton & Richmond Borough and Eastleigh in the Blue Square South, and tonight the clubs of the Blue Square North do battle in the first part of their end of season mini-tournament. The Football League ends this weekend, and there is a sizeable group of people that now count the Championship Play-Off final at the end of May as being a more important match than the FA Cup Final.

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Where were you on April 15th 1989? I was at Clarence Park in St Albans, for a Vauxhall-Opel League Premier Division match between St Albans City and Barking. It was a beautiful spring day, but there was little excitement in the air. City were just safe from relegation, whilst Barking were mid-table.

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I have been a little unwell over the last twenty-four hours so, in lieu of being able to write anything myself, I wrapped our usual cartoonist Ted Carter in mittens, a warm scarf and his favourite duffle coat, and sent him to the cinema to watch the film version of "David Peace's novel, The Damned United". Click to continue reading...

It's difficult to think of a football book that has been more unfairly maligned than Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch". At varying points, this book has been variously criticised for the swaggering arrogance that has come to represent Arsenal FC, the gentrification of football supporters, an influx into the game of fake fans that didn't properly understand the culture that they were colonizing (and didn't much care, either), the rise of new laddism and for the glut of sub-standard "football confessional" books that followed it, only a few of which came [. Click to continue reading...

Burton Albion lost 2-1 at Ebbsfleet United in the Blue Square Premier on Wednesday night. There was, in itself, nothing extraordinary about this, but this defeat marks the third successive match that the once runaway leaders of the league have failed to win and, whilst they are still comfortably clear at the top of the [. Click to continue reading...

Those of you that live in Britain will probably be familiar with the concept of the town centre sports barn. These giant stores have several distinguishing features - walls so high that one can barely see what is being sold on the top third of them, a cardboard box full of suspiciously cheap looking footballs [. Click to continue reading...

In November 2001, I (as was my wont at the time) made the short journey from my flat in the centre of St Albans to Clarence Park to watch The Saints play Basingstoke Town in the Ryman League Premier Division. It was an uninspiring match - a flattering 3-1 win - but more concerning was [...] Click to continue reading...

Every Sunday morning, through the mist of breath that smells of last nights drink and Deep Heat on park pitches the length of Britain, a strange, almost tribal dance takes place. It isn't a universal ritual for the amateur footballers of the country, but it is one that most of us have gone through at [. Click to continue reading...

In July 2008, buoyed by their promotion into the Football League, Aldershot Town announced a new sponsorship deal. From the start of this season, EBB Paper would be the clubs new sponsors, and would have their name emblazoned across The Shots' shirts. More importantly than this, EBB also signed a naming rights deal from Aldershot's [. Click to continue reading...

While England was fixated on the FA Cup and doing its normal trick of simultaneously going on about it at great length and telling anyone that will listen that it is both The Greatest Cup Competition In The World (and if that phrase hasn't been trademarked by the FA, it surely will be soon) and [...] Click to continue reading...

Ho ho ho. Twohundredpercent is off on its Christmas holidays tomorrow. The high excitement of waking up in the morning and seeing the back garden covered in snow, considerable amounts of wassailing and, of course, egg nog. It's pretty certain that none of these things will actually happen (I don't even know what exactly wassailing [. Click to continue reading...

They were different, different times. Foreign players started appearing in English football in something approaching significant numbers in the late 1970s, but foreign managers remained anathema for more than a decade. There was, however, one notable exception - Viktor Boskovic of Danefield United. Boskovic was a true trailblazer, breaking down barriers that eased the way [. Click to continue reading...

The slow burning feeling that football is set to turn into little than a reality TV show has been growing over the last few years. Whether through Setanta invading the dressing rooms before, during and after matches or Ebbsfleet United and the ongoing row over whether their supporters should pick the team (not to mention [. Click to continue reading...

Joe Kinnear, one suspects, has been out of football for too long. If he hadn't been, he wouldn't have been as completely unaware of the FA's much publicised "Respect" campaign, and could have save himself a journey from Newcastle down to Soho Square to answer some questions that the FA might have to ask him [. Click to continue reading...

It is always surprising when it snows in England, and the fact that it takes everyone by surprise causes a few problems. The trains, which seem to have been designed to only run properly when the sky is fair and the temperature sits at between seventeen and twenty degrees, grind slowly to a halt. Pavements [. Click to continue reading...

Football has changed in many ways over the last twenty-five years. If you were to put the average twenty-five year old in a time machine and transport them back to 1983, the first thing they'd ask would be probably be, "where is the football"? Confined on the television to an hour on Saturday nights and [. Click to continue reading...

I'm not much of a one for merchandising. I mean, I'll stop and look at it when it's on sale, and I love football shirts, though I suspect that I am now too old to be able to wear them in public. I don't much like the idea of being "identified" as a football supporter [...] Click to continue reading...

Life in the Highland League could hardly be described as glamorous. The majority of the better known names are now playing in the Scottish Football League and, while there are still agitants requesting automatic promotion and relegation between the lower leagues and the Scottish League, the door remains firmly shut for the time being, unless [. Click to continue reading...

Perry Boys is a memoir written by Ian Hough and covers the 'Casual' gangs of Manchester and Salford. However, if you're thinking that this is simply another book on hooligan culture, you're quite wrong. Hough takes the reader on a journey into the subculture of fashion that defined many of the soccer gangs of the [. Click to continue reading...

It seems almost difficult to believe now, but there was a time when, if you saw the football on the television, that was it. You'd see the goals once, maybe twice, and then they'd disappear into the vaults of the BBC and ITV, only to resurface once or twice at random intervals on the likes [...] Click to continue reading...

<! @page { size: 21cm 29.7cm; margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } > The question is often asked. A lot of people think that Finland has no football culture, that this country does not understand or properly appreciate the game, that its players are unloved and it's teams ignored. Click to continue reading...

The collapse of the holiday firm XL has had a significant effect on tens of thousands of tourists that found themselves stranded without anywhere to go on holiday, and it also caused an unusual sight on Saturday evening's "Match Of The Day". XL were the shirt sponsors of West Ham United, and the sudden non-existence [. Click to continue reading...

One of the great innovations of modern football is the ability for someone sitting at home to keep up to date with the latest scores in almost many match the you care to think of. It wasn't so long ago that this was impossible. If you supported a non-league club, the chances were that you'd [...] Click to continue reading...

This piece has been written with due deference to an article in the Guardian Sport Blog this morning, reappraising the career of the BBC football commentator Barry Davies. I felt that this was an appropriate time to add my thoughts on a legend of British sports broadcasting. There has long been a strand of anti-intellectualism [. Click to continue reading...

It usually takes approximately three matches before the rumour mill starts to rotate, so it is that time again. Already, there is talk that Alan Curbishley is going to be kicked out from West Ham United, and that Harry Redknapp is going to make a "surprise" return to the East End to take over there. [. Click to continue reading...

From the multitude of unofficial fan clubs that crowd the terraces to the carefully choreographed chants that ring out for ninety minutes, J. League fans have arguably borrowed as heavily from their native baseball league as they have from European and South American football culture. Michael Tuckerman explains. Click to continue reading...

What constitutes a local derby seems, on the face of it, to be a question with a pretty obvious answer. However, if we take a couple of minutes to actually examine it, it becomes more nuanced that you might at first think. Derby matches are usually local, but they don't necessarily have to be. The [. Click to continue reading...