Tag Football League

How the Giants have fallen: Inside Man United’s worst season; what went wrong and is there a silver lining?

The season began with excitement as fans celebrated the return of the prodigal son, Cristiano Ronaldo, back into the team after 12 years. Who knew that nine months down the line, this football season would turn out to be the worst in decades for Manchester United. Going through a tumultuous season, the infighting of team members, lack of a team spirit, continuously changing management, and even a lack of responsibility from the owners can all be attributed as reasons for the awful performance this season. This time, it is not just the players and coaches facing backlash for the performance. After being dubbed as the worst owners in the premiere league this season, the owners of the Manchester United Football Club the Glazer family are also being held massively responsible for the poor performance of the team. Manchester United’s shocking performance: Being one of the top-performing teams of all time, Manchester United shocked everyone this season with its unbelievably inferior performance. Finishing 6th with 58 points on the table, 35 points short of the season champions and local rivals Manchester City, the football season, which opened strongly, got haywire pretty quickly. There were so many…

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Kenyan Football Team Emerges from Slum to Rise to Top

NAIROBI – In the year 2000, a football team was founded in a slum of Nairobi plagued by crime. The football team would later be named Kariobangi Sharks, Kariobangi being the name of the informal settlement the team members hailed from. The team became a source of hope, an escape for talented youth with an interest in football, some who might otherwise be involved in criminal activities. In the last two decades, the team has risen to the top of Kenya’s football league, nurturing talent and giving hope to a new generation of players. When Eric Juma was 11 years old, he spotted a group of young boys training at a football pitch near his house in one of Nairobi’s many poor informal settlements: Kariobangi. This particular team stood out for Juma because it seemed organized. He would join the team soon after. Juma was then 11 years old. Now he’s 25 and captain of the team. “Football has really helped me as an individual,” Juma said. “First it kept me busy. We never had enough money for my further education, so I had to join football. Football has made me who I am today…

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Maidstone United: The demise and rise of an expelled Football League club

This is the story of Maidstone United, the last club before Bury to be expelled from the English Football League. For the past 27 years they have been trying to return to the pinnacle of their football existence. But this is not a club that sees itself as a football tragedy – not with more than 20 trophies and eight promotions won since 1992 and an England international among its alumni. “It is a tragic episode in our story. That is what it is, because the story is still going,” said John Still, Maidstone’s head of football who returned to the club last season after 30 years away. Still says there was no “romanticism” in the reunion, despite them being back in the fifth tier last term, the level he left the club at in 1989 having been the boss that took them to the old Fourth Division. He simply felt his former club had run out of “momentum” – the sort that gets a team from Kent County League Fourth Division to the top tier of the non-league system. The 69-year-old, however, was not able to guide them to safety last season as they…

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