Europe is a blast – but more a curse than a blessing if you are not a Premier League super-club I Jonathan Wilson

The four Premier League clubs playing in the lesser continental competitions face each other on Sunday – but three are struggling domestically The sun shone. The temperature was in the high 20s. There was a mood of great conviviality. If you were struggling with the official allo

The four Premier League clubs playing in the lesser continental competitions face each other on Sunday – but three are struggling domestically The sun shone. The temperature was in the high 20s. There was a mood of great conviviality.

If you were struggling with the official allocation, it turned out you could just email the president of Torreense and he’d sort you out. Were these “Nuno-tickets” real? It turned out they were.

Not only that, but you could sit anywhere you wanted in a stadium too big for the game and, if you happened to have gravitated to the comfortable hospitality seating at the back of the lower tier, the beer was inexplicably free. Locals in Leiria seemed bewildered but could hardly have been more accommodating. A beer pump had been installed outside a patisserie on the Praça Francisco Rodrigues Lobo, whose owner soon found fans happy to help stack empty barrels if that facilitated the free flow of Sagres.

“There was a meeting at the town hall to explain these are not hooligans,” said the owner of a radical leftist flammkuchen restaurant between the square and the cathedral. “They told us the club comes from the labour movement and I found that very interesting.” And how had she found the fans? “Noisy, but with a quirky sense of humour.” Continue reading...