Football history, logos, maps and statistics @ albionroad.com

Just a quick note to let everyone know that comments have been re-enabled on Albion Road. I took them down last fall due to some technical issues and have finally got them back up and running. I'm wary as always of the scourge of spam bots that will inevitably descend. I've got a few options on how to combat that.

• I've already set it up so that you must enter an email address. This is probably a very minimal level of protection but it's something.
• I can add a captcha image (a letter/number combo) that you'll need to enter to complete a comment.
• I can make it so that every comment has to be approved by the administrator.
• I can set it up so that everyone has to create a user account in order to enter comments.

I'd prefer not to do any of these but I imagine it will eventually become inevitable. I'll probably go through the steps listed above pretty much in that order. If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know. Until then, let the comments begin!

We here at Albion Road were recently contacted by a group called Buy Stirling Albion about a campaign they're working on and thought we would share a bit about it with you. This is not the kind of thing we normally do but this seems to be a very worthy project. Plus they have a great name!

As you may be aware, Stirling Albion are a Scottish football club based in the city of Stirling, currently doing battle in the Scottish Football League Second Division. The Binos, as the club are known, were founded just after the Second World War and have a long and proud history, winning quite a number of lower division league titles along the way. The current club president Peter McKenzie wishes to sell Stirling Albion and in the absence of other serious bidders the Stirling Albion Supporters Trust is moving forward in an effort to take 100% control of the club.

While there are many football clubs in the UK with supporters' trusts and some have large stakes in their respective clubs, this campaign if successful would make Stirling Albion the first league club to be 100% owned by their supporters. Anyone (Stirling residents or not) can join the Supporters Trust for a £40 membership fee and be involved in major club decisions if the purchase goes through successfully.

We here at Albion Road are solidly behind the Supporters Trust movement and wish the Buy Stirling Albion group the absolute best in their efforts. You can follow all the details in a number of ways:

• The Buy Stirling Albion FC website
• Buysafc on twitter
• and a Buy Stirling Albion Facebook group has been created

The 96th edition of the US Open Cup formally kicks off today June 9th with a host of first round games. To commemorate the occasion Bill Turianski and I have put together a map of the 32 teams entering at the first round stage and will be updating it as we go along. Bill has done the map work and the the emblems and the layouts and I've put together many of the profiles that run along the right-hand side of the map. It's been great digging into some of the teams in this proud old tournament and some of the lower-division entrants have actually been kicking around for quite a little while longer than I realized.

The US Open Cup was launched in 1914 and is the oldest knockout competition in the United States and surprisingly one of the oldest in the world. For many years it was fiercely contested to surprisingly large crowds along the Eastern seaboard and a handful of Midwestern enclaves, St Louis in particular. From the 1960s to 1980s the makeup of the champions spread in both ethnicity and geography, with teams such as Los Angeles Maccabi and San Francisco Greek-Americans taking the titles.

Semi-pro USL teams entered the fray in 1995, followed a year later by the newly-launched Major League Soccer. Since that day the title has remained in MLS hands, with Chicago taking the title more times (four) than any other. The one exception to MLS dominance came in 1999, when the second-division Rochester Rhinos took the crown. Another second-division club reached the final last season, the Charleston Battery, but they came up short against reigning champions DC United.

Gordon Strachan left Celtic having won three championships out of four and having got the club into the last sixteen of the Champions League twice.  Yet some fans were clearly unhappy with him.   There may be reasons that are very specific to Celtic for that discontent.  Nevertheless, one fan interviewed outside the stadium said that the club would not get anywhere until the board put more money in.

As the old joke, the way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one and invest in a football club.   The expectation that because someone is on the board of a football club they should endlessly dig into their pockets to meet the aspirations of fans is clearly unrealistic.   Celtic are simply not as big a club as Manchester United or Chelsea and it is unlikely that they ever will be because of the limited revenues from their domestic competition.

Of course, one way to get round that would be to bring them (and Rangers) into the Premiership.  The boosters of a revived two tier Premiership scheme have advocated just that.   However, there is little support for the two tier Premiership scheme.   Bringing the top two Scottish clubs into the Premiership might also raise questions about Scotland’s cherished status as a separate international team.

Many point to the mercurial Johan Cruyff and his world-beating Dutch team of the 1970s for the first true manifestation of the beautiful game in the modern era. Through Holland and his club side, Barcelona, a new ethos seemed to have been born, taking the free-flowing flare of Pele’s Brazil teams and anchoring it in practical, hard-working physicality. That Cruyff would appear back at Barça in a managerial role was never in doubt, but perhaps the style with which he had his team playing was a surprise to even him. In 1992 Cruyff’s dream team included the likes of Michael Laudrup, Romario, Georghe Hagi and Hristo Stoichkov, but it was more than a sum of these prodigal parts; Cruyff and his Barça team proved that attacking intent, invention and ambition could secure football’s greatest club prize.

17 years on and the Catalan giants still live in the spirit of their former talisman. When asked this week before the Champions League final how to inspire his team, current manager Pep Guardiola told the press: “I want the players to realise they are playing in front of the whole world. I want them to feel good, be daring and play beautiful football. I want them to show that we deserve to be European champions.” It should come as no surprise to learn that Guardiola was part of Cruyff’s 1992 European Cup winning side, and that Cruyff himself currently resides in an official ‘advisory’ role at the Nou Camp.