Golaço Stories

In the 1986/87 season of the English fourth division the fight against relegation went down to the last matchday. With many teams within few points of each other, and all matches being played simultaneously, tensions were high. Torquay United was playing at home against Crewe Alexandra down by 1-2. With relegation looming over the stadium the fans were at the brink of rioting so local police decided to bring out the German Shepherds to reinforce the access from the stands to the field. With 7 minutes left Torquay defender McNichol was running down the wing when one of the dogs,...

Brazil's soccer stadiums have a characteristic that is unique to very few countries in the world, they almost all have considerable space in between the stands and the field. This is due to a series of reasons that merit a post of their own but can be boiled down to safety, size and ability to host other non-soccer events. This space in between the stands and the field today is mostly used for players to warm up, for journalists to work during broadcasts and sponsor activations. However, in the 80's and 90's that space used to have big telephone booths...

Internacional and Grêmio are the protagonists of what many consider to be Brazil's biggest and most violent derby, the Gre-Nal. The hatred between the two clubs from Porto Alegre is on par with any other you can name from anywhere else in the world. Off the field however the teams share a surprising feature, they've almost always had the exact same sponsor who paid them the same exact amount. Inter was the first of the two to have a sponsor on its jersey, a Brazilian private pension company called APLUB in 1983. Grêmio didn't get its first sponsor until 1988...

The OFC (Oceania Football Federation) is the only one in the world without a single fully professional club. Australia is geographically part of the region but moved to the Asian federation in 2006. New Zealand has two professional clubs, Auckland FC and Wellington Phoenix, but they participate in the Australian A-League. As it stands the entire continental federation is either fully amateur or semi-amateur, but this seems like it's about to change thanks to the proposed OFC Professional League. The league was first proposed in 2019 and set to start in 2021 but got postponed to 2026 due to the Covid-19...

Just 24 miles off the southwestern coast of England lies an archipelago called Isles of Scilly (not to be confused with the Italian island of Sicily). The archipelago consists of over 140 tiny islands of which only 5 are inhabited with a combined population of around 2,100 people. Today the Isles of Scilly host the smallest official league in the world with just 2 participating teams. It all began in the 1920's with an Inter-Island Cup amongst all 5 of the inhabited islands, however by the 1950's only 2 teams survived. Those teams where called Rangers and Rovers, but by...