After years of waiting for a promising young player to develop, Wales have perhaps discovered that young players, just like buses, often come all at once. Their 3-0 victory over Scotland was ample demonstration of the burgeoning potential of players coming through for the Welsh, and while there is a long way to go, as with any journey, the hope must be that Saturday can be a starting point for something special.

Although football today is a multi-billion dollar globalised industry which has spread its commercial influence to all corners of the planet, sometimes it pays to look back into the game's annals and revisit the humble origins of what has now become the most popular sport in the world.

In this article I look at the ten oldest football clubs still in existence today and try and put the magnitude of their impact upon the game into some sort of historical perspective.

We live in a world obsessed with superlatives, constantly being sold by marketing ploys promoting their individual items. Football is sadly no different, how often are we told that Cristiano Ronaldo is the World's best player, only to be told the same thing about Lionel Messi the very next day.

FIFA's official ranking system for nations was officially introduced in 1992. Initially it was a rather simplistic system, in which a win gave a team 3 points whilst a draw gave the team 1 point. This created a number of problems, based mainly around the fact that it didn't take into account that some countries continually played weaker nations and as a result would constantly rank higher than more accomplished sides.

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Considered the pinnacle of personal awards in Football, the Ballon d'Or has had a rich history through out the last quarter of a century, indeed no other award can lay claim to the influence the Ballon d'Or has had. Be it the transformation of great players into legendary players or influencing the transfer policies of some of the world's biggest club.

In 1991, some 30 years after the Ballon d'Or was first awarded to Sir Stanley Matthews, FIFA commenced the awarding of their own award. The FIFA World Player of the Year.

The award uses a Borda Count system to tally votes. Simply put a Borda count involves voters ranking their candidates in order of preference.

Whilst the FIFPro player of the year award itself has a relativily short history (having only been awarded since 2005), the origins of the awards could feasibly traced back to 1898 and the formation of the Association Football's Union in England. Whilst the AFU turned out to be unsuccessful and ultimately shortlived, shutting up shop in 1901, it was a precursor to the formation of the Professional Footballers Association which officially started in 1907.

Think for a moment about the organisation of tournaments such as the UEFA Champions League or the European Championships. How do you decide how many teams are eligible for entry into each competition, when those teams should enter the competition or what about the fixtures of those competitions?

Due to the critisim of the official FIFA world rankings system, alternative rankings systems have surfaced over the years. The most prominent of these awards is the World Football ELO rankings. As the name suggests the system is based of the ELO ranking system designed by Hungarian mathematician Dr.

Due to the critisim of the official FIFA world rankings system, alternative rankings systems have surfaced over the years. The most prominent of these awards is the World Football ELO rankings. As the name suggests the system is based of the ELO ranking system designed by Hungarian mathematician Dr.

Last season Sporting Club de Braga's manager Jorge Jesus stated that the only way they would ever win the league would be on a Playstation. They had just been beaten by Benfica in Estadio da Luz 1-0 to an offside goal and had been denied two clear penalties.

It was a bodyblow that Braga would not recover from and they ended up finishing 5th but  gaining their sixth consecutive appearance in Europe, a feat few clubs in Portugal have equalled.

Ever since the arrival of the Roman Abramovich era at Chelsea, the world of football seems to exist in two separate yet parallel universes.

There are clubs who teeter on the brink of bankruptcy despite brief flirts with glory (a la Leeds United and recently at Portsmouth). Then there are other clubs whose history has been blanketed by anonymity and mediocrity but now whose names, with the financial aid of the multi-billionaire, are dared uttered in the same sentence with title aspirations.

Melbourne Victory vs Newcastle Jets 1-1
Etihad Stadium 15,168

Despite being able to sustain a high crowd, Melbourne weren't able to replicate that luck on the pitch, following another disappointing result, the defending champions sit 7th on the A-League ladder.

With Grays Athletics' Chief Executive Mick Woodward standing down from his role at the club after a 10 year stint, which has seen Woodward taking over as manger twice and splitting fan opinion of his general running of the club. A new regime has been promised to take over the reigns of the Essex side, but with Woodward still having an invested interest, more questions than answers remain at the club with the seemingly revolving door.

On the other side of the world to the eupohoria filled European Champions League, there is another ‘Champions League'. The AFC Champions League. For those of you unaware of this league, 35 teams participate, either though direct qualification, or if you're from the UAE, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand or India, you have the arduous task of a playoff.

The only surprising thing about the violence at Upton Park in the Carling Cup tie between West Ham and Millwall was that anybody was surprised by it.

From the moment the draw was made, all the signs of trouble were there. Two clubs with supporters from the lower-end who genuinely hate each other.

Where I come from, there tends to be two kinds of boys. Car boys and football boys. You can like both of course, but essentially you know at some point you are going to have to choose. Are you a Top Gear guy or a Match of the Day man? It may be a sociological problem at some level, but the fact remains that despite sharing the tag of being "sports", football and motor racing are poles apart.

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In addition, the winner will then be entered into a draw to win a Golden Ticket which entitles the winner to a pair of tickets to every game their country plays – including the final.

With the recent news of England's successful Rugby World Cup bid, it would appear that another part of what is fast becoming known as ‘The Golden Decade of Sport' has fallen into place. The thought of an Olympic Games and RWC may be enough to excite most sports fans, but for many the big one is still the 2018 Football World Cup bid.

He's obviously finished the brandy. When club president Vadym Rabynovych handed over Ukrainian Premier League side Arsenal Kyiv to the city's mayor, Leonid Chernovetskyi, in January 2009, rumour had it that a bottle of the good stuff came his way in return. Considering that Arsenal went on to barely scrape clear of the relegation zone, with no stadium or training facilities and barely enough players to jump-start a clapped-out old ZAZ, let alone a push for mid-table security, Chernovetskyi probably got the raw end of the deal.

Former England manager Sir Bobby Robson has died of cancer aged 76. He had been battling the disease in various forms since 1992.

Robson will be best remembered for taking England to within a penalty-shoot out at the 1990 World Cup, but he also enjoyed success both domestically and with European clubs and had the kind of record that few modern managers can equal.

After a summer of discussion, controversy and the dominance of Manchester City and Real Madrid in the transfer market, club football has finally returned to our lives albeit in a non-competitive format.

Obviously after the seemingly endless summer break it is great to see your team back in action.

Summer in the east. After a short break in June which felt almost as long as the frozen abyss of winter, football across eastern Europe is underway once more on green fields and under blue skies, half a continent and a whole world away from the frenzied din of a Bernabéu unveiling. And yet something is missing.

What is it with teams from Leeds overstretching themselves in pursuit of glory? First there was Leeds United, the club that was one of the biggest teams in England in the 70s and Champions League semi-finalists as recently as 2001. Their fall was as swift as it was painful and the team narrowly avoided going completely out of business before getting stuck in League One.

The world of football is made up of 6 main football federations; UEFA, CONCACAF, CONMEBOL, AFC, CAF & OFC. These governing bodies look after different areas of world football, roughly along the lines of the geographical continents of the world.

Each federation runs its own competition for both its national sides and its clubs, as well as entering its national sides into the FIFA World Cup and its club competition winners into the FIFA World Club Championship, the two competitions to determine the best national and club team, respectively, in the world.

The first thing you'll notice about FIFA is that the name should be IFAF. Well fear not, the governing body of world football isn't dyslexic, it's just that the name in the title is the English translation, it's proper name is Federation Internationale de Football Association. The name's origin came over a century ago at FIFA's very beginnings in Paris, way back in the summer of 1904, when the world was still black and white and the internet was a long way from being invented (apparently there once was a time when people got through life without relying on the world wide web!

The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) governs the footballing community of Asia and also now includes Australia, but it doesn't include a number of Asian (or part-Asian) countries, who are part of UEFA. The headquarters are located in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia.

The AFC was formed in 1954 (believe it or not on the sidelines of a game), by Afghanistan, Burma, Republic of China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea Republic, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore & Vietnam.

UEFA is the governing body of European football and is by far the most lucrative and most watched of all the 6 confederations of FIFA. UEFA's influence over the world of football is unprecedented and in the last 20 years its success has magnified beyond all expectations. The UEFA Champions League is universally regarded to be the ultimate competition in club football and generates money of unimaginable proportions.

The Confederation of African Football (or Confédération Africaine de Football as it's known to it's mom) covers the giant continent of Africa and is the federation that follows it's geographical continent the closest. It has the most member nations (55), even more so than UEFA (53), and the only place in Africa omitted is the territory of Western Sahara, on the northern section of the West Coast.

CONMEBOL is the South American Football Confederation (officially known as the Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol) which covers the majority of the continent of South America. It is the oldest of FIFA's confederations, originally forming in 1916, almost a century ago. The federation's formation was begun by Héctor Rivadavia Gómez who had a grand plan for a federation for South American football.

The Oceania Football Confederation is the federation for the pacific islands located around Australia, though since 2006 it no longer contains the Aussies. Without them, the OFC is positively miniscule by comparison with the other federations.

The federation was formed in 1966 by the FAs of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia, however it wasn't until 30 years later, in 1996, that it was confirmed as a fully-fledged confederation of FIFA and given a seat on it's committee.

This live report was completely compiled by the Non-FIFA news agency (http://non-fifa-news-agency.netau.net/). I give all redit to them, I am maerely bringing it over to soccerlens and making some grammatical corrections.

It's all over, a one-side match.

In the first half of a month which has seen Real Madrid twice break the football record for player transfer fees paid, the news that World cup winning Brazilian coach Filipe Scolari had recently signed an 18 month contract with the Uzbek champions Bunyodkor barely registered as a murmur on the global game's seismograph.

You may have never heard of the VIVA World Cup. I don't blame you; it's quite a low-key affair. But let me explain to you exactly what this obscure competition is.

Every year (previously every two years), the unrecognised peoples of the world compete for the right to be called world champion.