Werder Bremen’s Weserstadion is not the most comfortable place to watch football, with its slightly rickety feel, but it must be one of the most exciting.

Saturday’s 5-4 victory over Hoffenheim in the Bundesliga made it 10 goals in the last two league games for Thomas Schaaf’s side, who have now shrugged off a bit of early-season lethargy to restate the case for being the most entertaining side in Germany, certainly, and quite possibly Europe as a whole.

What’s not to love about Werder Bremen? For a team with relatively modest resources (compared to Bayern Munich or the European bigwigs) they show a refreshing commitment to attacking football. (more…)

Ronaldinho’s great bullet header in AC Milan’s 1-0 win over derby rivals Inter on Sunday surprised the Brazilian as much as everybody else.

The former Barcelona player was so shocked at scoring such a goal that he ran around the San Siro pitch like a headless chicken before being hugged by his team mates and performing his customary dance. (more…)

Franz Beckenbauer’s announcement that the European Championship finals will feature 24 teams instead of 16 from 2016 must have been welcomed by fans of countries that have found it difficult to qualify for recent major tournaments.

But as my colleague Mike Collett argued during Euro 2008, UEFA is running a big risk by trying to fix something that is not broken.

Mike wrote:

As we all know, the competition format (as it stands) is simple and logical and because just the top two advance (from each group) teams have to come and attack.

Add another four or eight teams and we get into the complicated nonsense we had to endure in the 24-team World Cups from 1982 to 1994 because it’s not easy to reduce 24 teams to a 16-team knockout stage.

Defensive, cagey football, from teams who shouldn’t be in the finals in the first place will damage the event.

Euro 2008 was a great tournament and you have to wonder if this expansion is just going to dilute the experience. It’s hard to imagine it actually improving things.

More underdogs might produce more surprises and make it that much more difficult for the likes of Spain and Germany to reach the final as they did rather predictably in Euro 2008. On the other hand, very few people, if any, want to see an additional eight teams just make up the numbers.

What do you think? Is UEFA about to ruin the world’s best football tournament? Give us your thoughts in the comments.

When Aleksandr Hleb and Mathieu Flamini left Arsenal in the close season with no obvious replacements you might have been tempted to question Arsene Wenger’s transfer policy.

Well, Cesc Fabregas was not among the doubters, as he told Reuters this week. Cesc says he always had faith in the man who brought him in from Barcelona as an unknown teenager (as well he might).

Owen Wyatt “caught up with” the Spain midfielder at a trendy London nightspot and clearly picked up some fashion tips while he was there.

Check out the video above, and give us your thought on Wenger and his 2008-09 vintage Arsenal in the comments below, or in a vlog of your own, which we’ll be happy to host here (if it’s any good).

Families will be divided and bars will be filled with talk of nothing else this weekend when Everton host Liverpool on Saturday and the Milan derby takes place a day later.

Despite the plethora of foreign players on show at Goodison and the San Siro, as well as Spanish, Scottish and Portuguese managers, the two derbies will still sum up what is great about being a football fan.

Two packed stadiums will have fans singing their hearts out and every tackle will mean so much more. (more…)

It’s been a torrid time for Newcastle, with Kevin Keegan gone, Mike Ashley going, the fans protesting and the team second from bottom in the Premier League, but news that Terry Venables has decided not to return to football to take over the manager’s job actually means things are looking up.

El Tel’s main achievements in club management came in the 1980s with Queens Park Rangers and Barcelona, before a memorable, but ultimately unsuccessful, ride with England at Euro 96.

Since then, there have been disappointing spells in charge of Australia, Crystal Palace, Middlesbrough, Leeds United, and most recently as assistant to England manager Steve McClaren.

Though thought of fondly by many for England’s style of play at Euro 96, a man who last managed a club in 2003 hardly makes an ideal candidate for Newcastle, who are in desperate need of a steady hand and some smart manoeuvres come the January transfer window.

Newcastle have appointed seven managers in 11 years and there must be someone out there with a more suitable claim on being the eighth than Venables.

Who would get your vote?

PHOTO: A fan wears a Newcastle United jersey outside St James’ Park in Newcastle, September 5, 2008. REUTERS/Nigel Roddis

This one is too good to miss: Bild newspaper in Germany takes an affectionate look at the best Panini Bundersliga stickers down the years, and they’ve even translated the page into English. (more…)

The League Cup came through a difficult birth and a forgettable youth to enjoy a long, proud middle age but the time has come for this doddery old relative to be shuffled off into retirement.

When it was launched in the early 1960s the new, midweek competition was pretty much ignored by the big clubs, as evidenced by Rotherham and Rochdale reaching the first two finals.

In 1966/67 the format was changed, the final switching from a two-legged affair to a one-off Wembley showcase, and with the subsequent additional carrot of a place in Europe for the winners, it eventually became a serious tournament.

Throughout the 1970s, 80s and early 90s a League Cup winners’ medal was something worth having and the idea of Liverpool, who won it four times in a row from 1981 while still managing to compete and win in Europe, fielding a weakened team in the competition would have been preposterous.

However, the arrival of the Premier and Champions Leagues and the associated money, meant it quickly lost its appeal for most of the top-flight clubs.

Current Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez changed all 11 players from the team who drew with Stoke in the league last weekend for Tuesday’s home game against Crewe, while Manchester United and Arsenal were not far behind.

Even the likes of Sunderland, Fulham and Stoke (for whom the League Cup provided their only major silverware in 1972) felt able to put out weak teams despite the fact that it is the only trophy they now have a realistic chance of winning.

It’s all very nice for Arsenal to field a side with an average age of 19, especially when they hammer Sheffield United 6-0 with a performance the envy of most clubs’ first teams, but it still undermines the credibility of the competition and makes the award of a UEFA Cup place for its winners laughable.

With the FA Cup showing signs of a similar decline, surely the time has come to cut off a limb to save the body and give up on England’s “third competition”.

I don’t hear too many people demanding a return of the European Cup Winners’ Cup.

PHOTO: Crewe Alexander’s Michael O’Connor scores against Liverpool during their League Cup match at Anfield, September 23, 2008. REUTERS/Nigel Roddis

Thierry Henry is in danger of playing a peripheral role in Pep Guardiola’s new look Barcelona with his continued failure to find his feet in Spain.

The France striker missed Sunday’s 6-1 rout of Sporting Gijon due to a throat infection, and that leaves Guardiola with a tough choice as to whether to keep a team that claimed a first league win of the season, or continue rotating his players for Wednesday’s visit of Real Betis.

The latter is the most likely course of events with a derby against Espanyol coming up at the weekend and a Champions League trip to face Shakhtar Donetsk next week.

But the question remains, should Henry feature in Guardiola’s best starting XI?

Against Sporting, who admittedly are bottom of the table, Barca were outstanding. Their pressuring of opponents when they didn’t have the ball was impressive, and when they did hold possession they were a delight to watch.

Lionel Messi and Samuel Eto’o are first choices up front, while Andres Iniesta appears to have filled the space on the left vacated by Ronaldinho with aplomb, creating and scoring goals. Iniesta’s versatility means he can play in a variety of positions, but he will always play.

With Xavi and a holding player like Yaya Toure or Seydou Keita almost guaranteed places, Henry is in effect competing with one of the youth team products Guardiola seems keen to blood in the side.

Winger Pedro Rodriguez and midfielder Sergio Busquets have won over the home fans, something Henry has yet to achieve after a year in Barcelona. Aleksandr Hleb’s injury means his former Arsenal team mate doesn’t enter the equation just yet.

Is Henry simply going to be first-change striker behind Eto’o, competing with another fan favourite Bojan Krkic? It’s looking that way.

In Zimbabwe people joke that when you join the queue to buy a ticket for a major football match, chances are the price will have gone up by the time you get to proffer your cash at the kiosk.

Rampant inflation in the southern African nation has robbed life of its conveniences, leading instead to shortages, blackouts and a set of bizarre daily rituals, like customers racing around the supermarket to keep up with the employees changing price tags.

The power sharing agreement signed by Robert Mugabe and his arch rival Morgan Tsvangirai was the first bit of good news in a long time for the beleaguered country; now there has been a second fillip as Zimbabwe’s most popular club have unexpectedly made it to the African Champions League semi-finals.

Dynamos have not been immune to the crisis in the country. Twice they have almost missed out on making away trips in the competition because they could not find enough foreign currency to pay for airline tickets.

They were forced to turn to fans and benefactors to scrape money together for trips to north Africa, eventually arriving just hours before the scheduled kick-off.

It has demanded a level of patience and tolerance from the players that few other footballers, in similar circumstances at the same level of a competition anywhere in the world, would ever be capable of.

But even the Dynamos squad has a limit and at the weekend there were threats of a strike as players haggled over bonus money … and just how much it would go up to keep pace with the ever-changing level of inflation.

Remarkably, 24 hours later they were overcoming Zamalek of Egypt in Harare to win their last group match and ensure progress to the semi-finals of the continent’s top club competition.

Dynamos were surprise Champions League finalists a decade ago but had not played in the competition since. Now back, they are again threatening to dispel all the accepted norms of success in the game.

Sometimes adversity provides the fuel which drives players to extraordinary feats and given the cricumstances this is some achievement.

Mark Gleeson covers the African Champions League for Reuters

FILE PHOTO: Lazarus Muhoni celebrates scoring for Dynamos against Al Ahly during their African Champions League soccer match in Cairo Stadium, August 17, 2008. REUTERS/Amr Dalsh