Besides the human loss, it is sad that the attention of the world on African football during a great tournament as the African Cup of Nations, is drawn away by the game, to the catastrophe that happened in Egypt.I am certain that this is not what Egypt is about, with its great people and fans, and it is not what African football is about.

The Manchester City manager is set to be reprimanded by the FA, the English Football Association, for his consistent card waving gestures. The gestures typically involve Roberto Mancini waving a closed hand, with finger and thumb touching exclusively, high above his head, indicating that the referee should award a card, either yellow or red, to an opponent.

If 1 minute is all you have today on this site (or at all), you'd better NOT miss this out... it's our Year End surprise for you! Join Futbolita and our friends in a preview video from England featuring many of your favourite Premiership teams as we embark on an exciting series covering football, culture and everything else next year.

2011 Year of the Neymar is a post from: Just Football

He struts with the cocksure swagger of a born star and not only that, he can play a bit too. 2011 can be seen as the year Neymar truly broke through on the world stage. Just Football's man in Brazil Paulo Freitas looks back at the year of the mohawked one:

Neymar has been hyped since he was a youth player, but he finally established himself as Brazil's new big star in the 2011 season, shining in most competitions.

Christmas is nearly upon us, so it is time for us to sit back by a roaring fire, pour a glass off eggnog and enjoy the first part of a festive morality tale which comes to us courtesy of Jude Ellery of Man & Ball, Football Farrago and, most recently, Strange Bounce.

There is definitely something in the air. If the landscape of the football supporter has been defined by any single theme over the last two or three years, then the notion of protest and a more general feeling of satisfaction at the way on which our game is being run has to come close to the top of anybody's list.

All the futbolitos we've spoken to from Argentina (who support Boca disculpe Independiente fans!) share the same level affection for Juan Roman Riquelme, who is easily one of the club's most respected players. We can also reveal that he's a very level-headed hombre, and for that reason, has struck a chord with many football fans.

In life there are many things you cannot choose: you cannot choose your parents, where you are born, even whom you love is a difficult one: against all logic, a man may fall madly in love with some third-rate, cranky, controlling, selfish, unfaithful and evil bitch with a minority complex. Football is most often a mere reflection of life itself, where a man walks from happiness to sadness, from

Okay, Cup Final. You're the manager. This is the biggest game of your career. You've been exchanging emails with Capello and reading Zonal Marking endlessly, searching for the answers that will bring home the silverware. You've made a list of things to tell you players. Then you made another list.

Bom dia amigos! And what do we have here today? Escândalo from the mouth of Brazil's most-loved grandpa, Pele, of course! The legend, the "best player in the last century", and the only man capable of talking about himself for a total of 2 hours and 40 minutes, has done it again!

This morning's news of the death of Gary Speed at just forty-two years of age is too recent and too raw to pass comment upon in any detail and this particular piece is not here to speculate on the reasons why Gary Speed may have chosen to take his life, but to look at recent comments made by Stan Collymore and The Secret Footballer on the subject of depression in football.

Over the last couple of weeks or so, a debate has been being passed back and forth between football bloggers over both the present and future of what they do. On the one hand, we have seen the introduction of a new news feed service which has angered some that are seeking to make a living from their writing whilst, on the other, the behaviour of an established football website (which could clearly be described as "Mainstream Media") has seen the scales fall from quite a few eyes on the matter of the ethics of established media sources.

FIFA President Sepp Blatter has made another brilliant comment, this time about the scourge of racism in football, saying that on-the-pitch racism is inexistant.Already Mr. Blatter has been harshly criticised, but I would like to give my support to the FIFA President by reminding him of other things that do not exist in football: HomophobiaMatch fixingDopingSexismCorruptionBad language and

Words have become rather a hot commodity in football of late, both the spoken word from those participating in and the written word of those observing and opining on this rather silly game where the players can't even use their hands. Whether it has been alleged racist taunts by individual players or the complex matter of who pays what and where for the consumption of content surrounding football, words have done some damage over the past few weeks.

By Eric Beard

The idea of community, however tangible or intangible, real or imagined, flourishes at the very core of football. Without fans, football doesn't exist. Similarly, without readers, AFR would have died a long, long time ago. Conversation is the greatest source of sustenence in the beautiful game.

And so it ends. Ninety-three years of England's ignominious and unpatriotic failure to wear poppies on their shirts comes to a deserved end, and a nation can rest easy, safe in the knowledge that now football has fallen into line, people will actually start wearing poppies for the first time ever.

In the twenty-first century, few things are sacred. For many football supporters, traditions are being ripped up at such a dizzying pace that it can feel impossible to keep up with what is current. In some corners of the culture of the game, though, traditions are kept alive and one of the most enduring is that, at five o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, the BBC will cut away to a supremely jaunty piece of military music called "Out Of The Blue", which will be followed by some brief headlines and the classified results.

When we look back to try and trace the history of football on the television in Britain, there are several dates that stand out as being of significance. The twenty-second of August 1964, for example, saw the first episode of Match Of The Day, whilst the sixteenth of August 1992 saw Nottingham Forest beat Liverpool in the first live Premier League match on Sky Sports.

I just bought an A4 print of a 1992-1994 Manchester United home kit Subbuteo player. I'm not a massive fan of Subbuteo, but there's something about the aesthetic of it all that pleases me on a very base level. So much so that having ordered the print I had to stop myself from going to Ebay and buying numerous teams decked out in classic United kits.

"Soccer attracts more hackneyed hyperbole than most sports. We talk about "tragedy" when we mean "disappointment" and "disaster" when we mean "defeat". When real tragedy and disaster occur, we tend to be stuck for the rights words." Those words, written by David Lacey of the Guardian a quarter of a century ago, ring as true today as they did when they were written in the aftermath of the Bradford fire of 1985.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that football matches and in particular local derbies can bring out the worst in people. Where, however, is the line in the sand? What is the definition of what acceptable behaviour inside a football ground? This week, we have seen an example of a national newspaper attempting to draw that line, and they ended up looking a little "odd" as a result themselves.

If football has changed almost over the last twenty or thirty years or so, one of the more comforting ways to reach back into the past is to delve into the all too rare BBC radio commentaries of matches from days gone by, and in particular to locate the lush, almost melodic vocal range of Peter Jones.

There will be a new category of posts here. Every week we will write about a random match, and I will start today with Liverpool - Manchester United (which starts in less then an hour), but as the weeks go by, you might find all kinds of unheard teams being commented, from Argentina to Moldova.

There has long been a strand of anti-intellectualism within football which can occasionally be somewhat distasteful, to say the least. It's the culture that saw Graeme Le Saux labelled as "gay" because he read a broadsheet newspaper and collected antiques. It's a culture that keeps professional footballers in a state in artificial infantilism until the end of their careers in the misguided belief that this will engender some sort of "team spirit".

We're kicking off another new series on Twohundredpercent this evening, on the subject of the commentators that have brought the game to life. This evening, as an opener, here's a look at a many that celebrates the fortieth anniversary of his television debut this weekend, and a man who went on to become a voice of football in a way that perhaps no-one else in Britain did: John Motson.

The result, in the end, was something approaching an honorable draw, which both sides of this particular argument will now likely try to claim as a victory. The Premier League vs Karen Murphy had gone to the European Court of Justice to try and determine how the concept of a single European market weighs up against the country by country rights selling system which, amongst many, many others, the Premier League uses to sell coverage of its matches.

Football Travel: Best European Cities To Watch Football In - originally posted on Soccerlens.com

You can travel to just about any different city throughout the European continent and your footballing experience will differ in one way or another.

Here at Soccerlens we have conjured up a list of some of the best cities in Europe to indulge in a mix of football, culture, sightseeing and maybe a drop of alcohol.

One of the more dispiriting cycles in which an element of English football support finds itself trapped reared its ugly head again last night. The unfailing of a flag with the word "Istanbul" spray-painted across the middle of it was yet another example of the culture of perpetual abuse and contempt that some seem to actively enjoy these days, and those of us that sit on the outside peering in can only watch in wonder at the mentality of anybody that would seek to revel in the death of anybody in the name of what passes for "banter" these days.

Manchester United are on something of a roll this season. Having despatched ‘top' sides Arsenal, Spurs and Chelsea and scoring an astonishing fourteen goals against them in the process, the current incarnation of United looks absolutely irresistible. The remarkable thing is that on paper they look significantly weaker than in previous seasons.

He shoots, he scores! Or, if you happened to be Fernando Torres yesterday afternoon, you didn't. There are several reasons why a Premier League match which had, as they say, a little bit of everything, will most likely remembered for one moment of aberration, some connected to the eye-watering amount of money that Chelsea played for said player, others through a sense of a relief that it effectively ended much chance of a tight finish to a match that Manchester United should have long since wrapped up, but most for reasons of good, old fashioned schadenfreude.

A curious article appeared on the online version of the Wall Street Journal earlier today on the subject of the economic woes that European football is facing. It was, largely, a thoroughly reasonable article, talking of the gap between rich and poor in terms of the tensions that this may come to create within the infrastructure of the pan-European game (even withstanding the at best mixed week that the biggest European clubs endured, which can easily be justified as unfortunate timing), the debt levels that clubs have racked and are racking up in the pursuit of success and the unsustainable amount of money being squandered on players' wages.

Last week Denmark won a crucial home victory, 2-0 (two goals by Nicklas Bendtner! I didn't know the guy could score any more!), against Norway on the way to the EURO 2012. Denmark now has all the cards to qualify, while Norway has to be very lucky if they are to be in Poland/Ukraine next summer.As is often the case in these matches, the build-up was further motivated by the neighbourly rivalry

Perhaps best left in the hands of pop culture or professional music critics rather than some stodgy old football blog, it still bears mentioning that today would have been Farrokh Bulsara's 65th birthday. Or course, we knew him better as Freddie Mercury, the original front man for Queen, who died from complications due to HIV/AIDS in 1991.

We emerge blinking into the sunlight, with Sky Sports News still gibbering away to itself in the background. Transfer deadline day, the weirdest day in the entire football calendar, is over and now, perhaps, things can start getting back to normal. There is nothing edifying about this day. There is no outlet for those concerned to behave with a great deal dignity and it has come to feel in recent years as if, for all of the chaos that it seems to throw all clubs into for twenty-four hours or so, the clubs, managers and players are willing participants in this particular circus.

We'll be giving over a lot of time to the non-league game over the next few days on Twohundredpercent out of deference to Non-League Day, which is to be held this Saturday. We'll have more on this later in the week, but first of all here's NLD's co-founder, Mike Bayly, on the decline of terrace wit.

Far too often we take things for granted. This might sound trite and at times can come across as somewhat hypocritical depending on who is saying it, for it is usually referenced as part of a guilt-inducing prose by one who is afforded similar luxuries in life to those to whom they are admonishing.

In life there are many things you cannot choose: you cannot choose your parents, where you are born, even whom you love is a difficult one: against all logic, a man may fall madly in love with some third-rate, cranky, controlling, selfish, unfaithful and evil bitch with a minority complex. Football is most often a mere reflection of life itself, where a man walks from happiness to sadness, from

It doesn't take much to bring out the obsessive in many men of any age, and this is something that advertisers and hawkers have been aware of for a long time and acting upon this sort of impulse with greater and greater sophistication in recent years. Football supporters, of course, can be amongst the worst for obsessive behaviour, and one of the more obvious manifestations of this comes in the form of football programmes.

I was recently in the most wonderful country in the world, Colombia, where the U-20 World Cup is currently taking place. The atmosphere is great as Colombians greet the world with their usual smiles, hospitality and friendliness.Except if you are Argentine... I had made nothing of an incident between the Argentinean team during a match against Egypt and the fans in Medellín until, last Saturday,

Mike Bayly went to meet a football club that is potentially at the start of a journey up through the divisions.

Non-League supporters are the Bill Brysons of the football world. Whereas a trip to most Football League grounds comes packaged with the familiarity of large urban conurbations, the grass roots experience can lead a man (and for the sake of parity one had better add ‘woman') into the wilds of the British provinces.