The Champions League is back with its top sixteen teams, all qualified from the group stages. …

The onset of January means that we can have the final squads of every European club till the end of the season. …

This past week, history was again re-written in the beautiful game, as Lionel Messi became the first and only player to every win 7 Ballon d’Ors in the stretch of a career. The Argentine pipped Polish striker Robert Lewandowski and Italian Euro Winner Jorginho Frello to lift the Golden Ball…

After a gap of two years, the footballing world will finally witness their best players grace the streets of France, but in a formal attire. With COVID-19 at its peak last year, the ceremony of Ballon d’Or which recognizes the best players in the world for the past calendar year…

The summer transfer window in the European pre-season of 2021–22 was one of the biggest seen in recent years. The biggest news to break was perhaps the transfer of two of the greatest attacking footballers seen- Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo to Paris Saint Germain and Manchester United respectively. …

“Football has to change and adapt. We have to analyse why young people, 16-to-24-year-olds, 40% of them aren’t interested in football.” As Real Madrid president Florentino Perez was quoted saying this in response to the Super League outbreak, there was a divided opinion amongst fans about it. It didn’t go well with the idea of creating a new league exclusively for the giant clubs purely based on financial incentives. …

This is what International football is about. When our expected big nations managed to get out of the group stages comfortably, everyone believed that the unmatched fixtures between the big guns and the relatively smaller nations would be another easy walkthrough for the likes of the French, the Dutch and…

INTRODUCTION Manchester City take on their famed opponents Chelsea in the final match of the 2020–21 UEFA Champions League competition on 29 May 2021, Saturday at the Estadio do Dragao in Porto, Portugal. The Cityzens from Manchester have been designated as the home team for this occasion and one can safely assume that they will also enter it as favourites. However, it has to be noted that quite recently, in the English Premier League competition as well as the FA Cup, Chelsea had unceremoniously defeated Manchester City. In the former, Chelsea went ahead by a 2–1 scoreline while in the latter, they beat them 1–0. This will remain in the collective memory of Manchester City and their fans and ensure that they do not take this encounter lightly at all. The visiting side Chelsea, who are very good at reading situations and converting them into their favour, can take hope from the fact that Manchester City have never played in a Champions League final before.

Manchester City’s English centre back John Stones has had a tumultuous career. To say that he has been through a rollercoaster ride will be stating things very lightly indeed. Born in 1994, the now-26-year-old centre back spent his youth career at Barnsley before being signed by Everton in 2013. He…