Pitch Invasion

What’s going on with the rich men running Liverpool and Newcastle?

Did the Glazers mislead the government when they promised not to raise ticket prices?

A sad tale via Reuters, as hundreds of Guinea fans won’t be able to make the trek to Ghana for the African Nations’ Cup because of safety fears when the route passes through Ivory Coast.

The Messiah returns to Newcastle. What happens next?

I’m going to try to round-up interesting links more often, from blogs and the press; let me know if this is useful or not, and feel free to leave anything else you think is worth reading in the comments.

Will the newfound peace between Fifa/Uefa and the clubs last longer than the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact? (Ian Plenderleith)
G-14 [...]

Good news: Watford’s Alhassan Bangura has won his appeal against deportation to Sierra Leone, and been granted a work permit to stay in England.

Investors gambling on the Championship (The Guardian)
Considering the Elfin Jermain Defoe (Run of Play)
Football in Barbados in crisis (NationNews)
Remembering Ipswich at the 1981 Uefa Cup Final (Extreme Groundhopping)
Photos of African football supporters (Road to 2010 World Cup)
The most politically charged match on the planet? (The Guardian)
Outcasts: The lands that Fifa forgot (Culture of Soccer)
The [...]

As we’ve noted in our historical series, the European Championship (originally European Nations’ Cup) started out on a small-scale in the 1960s: just four teams played in the finals, allowing an exciting knock-out tournament as qualifiers.
Now Uefa is considering expanding the Championship finals to take in 24 teams, greater than the number of teams [...]

You may have heard Fergie’s rant about the fans at Old Trafford for the 1-0 win over Birmingham on New Year’s Day — “That was the quietest I have heard the crowd, it was like a funeral,” Ferguson said, “The players need the crowd sometimes but the atmosphere inside the ground wasn’t good.”
But what most [...]