Sponsoring a taxi is one thing, but sponsorship on shirts can be quite a contentious issue for fans – many would probably admire the route that Barcelona and Sheffield Wednesday have gone down by featuring a charity on their shirts, but the money that a sponsor brings into the club is probably quite handy in keeping a lot of clubs afloat.

Last weekend, Lyon went down an interesting route by featuring a local rapper on their shirts. Kool Shen, who handily has a new album in the shops, featured on the shirts during the French club’s massive game against Marseille, an event which was captured over at Football Shirt Culture. I wonder if this unusual step had any influence on the match, which ended up a 5-5 thriller? This isn’t the first time music and football shirts have come together though – Clydebank and Wet Wet Wet came together in the 1990s, as did Brighton and Fatboy Slim’s record label, Skint. Any local bands you’d like to see on the front of your team’s shirt?

Tomorrow’s World Cup Playoffs are the biggest football matches to look forward to over the weekend, with a lot of the attention focused on the Ireland versus France match. Relations between the two have been a bit frosty since Raymond Domenech called Ireland ‘England’s B Team.’ Thankfully things haven’t escalated any further, but this impressively official-looking sequence of letters from the Irish Soccer Insider images the trouble that might be stirred up if French President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to attend tomorrow’s match.

Of course, England are also playing tomorrow, in a friendly against Brazil, in Qatar. Non-competitive matches can often be a non-event, but at least this match might provide an insight into how England cope against a top team, whilst also giving players such as Darren Bent a chance to stake a claim for South Africa (former manager Alan Curbishley talks up DB’s chances on the BBC website here). Talking of the World Cup, Pelé has normally cursed England’s chances by now by saying that he thinks we can win it. Instead, Brazil’s latest football hero Kaka has done it instead in this interview with The Guardian, proclaiming that he has ‘no doubt that England can win the World Cup.’ That’s our chances blown then!

Last week, we mentioned some of the footballers that are regular on Twitter (handily compiled in a list here), but there’s a new addition who has to get a special mention. Jozy Altidore, currently playing at Hull City, is a regular Tweeter, particularly about adjusting to life in England. He recently posted this video of what happened when he encountered a particularly English problem – sheep on a country road.

Finally, credit should go to Hellowearefootball, the Flickr user who captured that very British-looking taxi in their native Bilbao. Cracking pic!