🇲🇹🏝️ Located in the Mediterranean Sea between Sicily & North Africa, the micro-state of Malta has a fascinating football culture.

From fake funeral parades to club presidents who want to play, here are 10 things you need to know about the beautiful game on the island.

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1) 25-time champions Valletta FC, Malta's third-most successful club, were relegated at the weekend, but we suspect they won't be missed.

Their fans celebrate their titles by holding a funeral parade and carrying caskets bearing the names of the other teams through the streets.

🏆 We all know the recent World Cups - but what about the earlier editions of the greatest sporting event on the planet?

We have chosen a person you have probably never heard of from each of the first 10 tournaments - from 1930 to 1974 - & told their unlikely story.

THREAD 🧵 🇺🇾 1930

Romanian Alfred Eisenbeisser Feraru fell ill on the two-week boat home to Europe & stayed in Genoa to recuperate.

His distraught mother believed the rumour he had died & organised a wake. Feraru returned home on the morning of the ceremony, causing his mother to faint.

✈️ The 96 clubs in the European group phase travelled 862,402.2km - more than the distance to the moon & back - to play their games this season.

Who went the furthest? Which teams never made a journey of over 1,000km? And who had to travel to both home AND away games?

THREAD 🧵 First off, how did we calculate this?

We used distancecalculator.net to work out the distances between the home cities of the two teams in every fixture.

If a club could not play in their home city, we also included travel to the city where they played their home games.

📉 148 clubs have qualified for the Champions League group phase since 1992/93. But 16 of them no longer play in the top division domestically.

Who are these fallen giants? What mark did they make in the competition? And what happened to them?

THREAD 🧵 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Blackburn

Rovers came bottom of a group including Spartak Moscow, Rosenborg & Legia Warsaw in their sole UCL season in 1995/96.

A campaign that will be remembered for Graeme Le Saux breaking his hand in a fight with team-mate David Batty in the away fixture in Russia.

🇬🇱 After 2 years of pandemic-enforced cancellations, the Greenlandic Football Championship - the shortest season in world football - returns this week.

How does it work? Where? And who takes part? We take a look with the help of some people with first-hand experience.

THREAD 🧵 Located in the North Atlantic between 🇨🇦 & 🇮🇸, Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark.

With a surface area of 2.166m km (of which around 80% is covered by ice) but a population of only 56,000, it's the world's most sparsely populated territory.

🇷🇺 Following the country's invasion of Ukraine, UEFA has banned Russian clubs from taking part in European competitions during the 2022/23 campaign.

How has this ban already impacted the clubs in question? And how will it continue to do so over the coming season?

THREAD 🧵 We should start this thread by saying that since UEFA announced the season-long ban on 2 May, four Russian clubs (Zenit, Dynamo, CSKA & Sochi) have filed an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

According to @espn, that case will be heard by CAS on 11 July.

🇳🇴 Bodø/Glimt, one of only two top-flight European football clubs inside the Arctic Circle, demolished Jose Mourinho's Roma 6-1 in the UEFA Europa Conference League last night.

Who are they? What's their back story? And what have been the keys to their success?

THREAD ⬇️ The club, founded in 1916, is based in the town of Bodø, which is situated in Nordland county in the north of Norway and has a population of around 50,000 people.

They play at the Aspmyra Stadion, which opened in 1966 and currently has a capacity for 5,635 spectators.

🇱🇮 Liechtenstein, Europe's fourth-smallest country by surface area & population, is the only one of the 55 UEFA member states not to have its own league.

But why? We explore the reasons behind this and how it impacts football in the country.

THREAD ⬇️ 🇨🇭🇱🇮🇦🇹 Liechtenstein is sandwiched between Switzerland & Austria in Central Europe and is - along with Uzbekistan - one of only two double-landlocked* countries in the world.

*Double-landlocked means that it is landlocked & bordered exclusively by landlocked countries too.