Uefa Cup 2005.

My oh my, the Uefa Cup is going to be interesting next year. For non Europeans perhaps I should explain. Over here the major sport is soccer, and amazingly we actually have international competitions (unlike say the World Series, which has one non US team in it, or the Superbowl which has none) over and above each country's domestic competitions. In soccer pretty much every country has two competitions domestically: a league, in which you get points for winning, less for a draw and none for a loss, and a knock out competition, most of them modelled on the FA Cup in England and Wales. There are different attributes needed to win each, the league requiring consistency while in the Cup competition, one loss and you're out, you require luck as well. It is the cup competitions that provide the upsets, sometimes allowing more minor teams to win, or nearly so.
Anyway, getting to the European wide competitions, there are two: Champions League and Uefa, which is sort of like a second best alternative. If you win either the league or the cup in one of the major countries (England, Germany, those sorts of places) then you go straight into the Champions League for the next season, on top, of course, of the normal domestic games. If you come second or third in one of the majors, or first in one of the more minor countries (Russia, Israel, to give two examples) then you go into Uefa.
Yes, the qualification rules are more complex than this but the above is really all you need to know. The best soccer clubs go into the Champions, the next best and best of small nations go into Uefa based on the performances of the previous year.
So what's so interesting about this year?
Via the Torygraph we see that the winners of Israel's Cup competition were an Arab team from Galilee.

In addition to the team captain, Abbas Suan, 13 other members of the Sakhnin squad are Arab Israelis. The club also boasts seven Jewish and four foreign players, from Poland, Cameroon, Brazil and Ghana.

Also, via Siberian Lights I see that the winner of the Russian Cup was a team from Chechnya.

For some background information on the club, check out this Moscow Times story which dents the fairy tale image a little by pointing out that they are one of the best financed teams in Russia. Their annual budget runs into the millions of dollars, largely courtesy of Chechnya's recently departed President, Akhmad Kadyrov. It also reveals that Shamil Basayev, Chechnya's most notorious terrorist leader, used to play for the club. Sadly, he appears to have misplaced one of his legs, so I don't think he'll be planning a comeback. Still, I wonder if he caught the match on tv?

Now then, don't you think that's going to make some interesting security headaches?
Ah, the joys of international sport.