You’d think that football fans and trainspotters would be quite different, but in fact they share a few similarities: a love of statistics, a fondness for strong tea served from a flask, and an ability to stand in cold, windy places in order to observe their favourite pastime. The two were brought together in one big geek-hug this week by The Guardian’s Knowledge team, who produced this map when faced with the question of what is the greatest number of football league grounds that can be seen during a single train trip across Great Britain. The answer, in case it’s been keeping you awake at night, is 20 – but you’ll have to sit through a journey from Plymouth to Aberdeen to see them all.

The chances of seeing non-league Paulton Rovers’ ground from the train must be pretty small – Winterfield Road has a capacity of just 2,000. Tomorrow however, there’ll be plenty of people watching, when Paulton take on League One Norwich City in the FA Cup First Round. It’s a perfect FA Cup tie, with possibly the biggest club in the competition at this stage coming up against the smallest. Unprofessional Foul, which is run by a Norwich fan, have a great preview of the game here, complete with some great pictures of the West Country ground.

Scottish football can be unfairly mocked sometimes, so it seems important to note when something positive happens over the border. The emergence of Islam Feruz at Celtic is certainly a positive step for the Scottish game. Feruz has already represented Celtic at a number of levels, but his recent appearance in national Scotland youth squads is a significant step, considering that he wasn’t actually born in the country and has no family ties to the place. However, Feruz is the first person to benefit from changes in Scottish football rules that allow people who have lived in the country for a set number of years to represent the country of their choice. Good news for Feruz, some may say, whose family sought asylum in Scotland after fleeing from Somalia. Other people might say that it’s more likely to be good news for Scotland, who can now pick someone with Feruz’s talent. Either way, it’s a significant step, which is examined in more detail in this excellent article over at When Saturday Comes.

Other big news in football this week came from Wayne Rooney, and the birth of his first child. You can already follow Kai Rooney here on Twitter (something tells me it isn’t the real Kai however) whilst these cartoons over at Studs Up offer some interesting perspectives on that choice of name.

This week’s picture is a classic bit of Umbro kit we discovered on Flickr, after we decided that these pics of Katy Perry in a special West Ham shirt were a little racy. Uploaded by TonyTheTiger69, it’s the shirt worn by Man City in the 1974 League Cup final. Check out the classic Umbro logo!

As an antidote to the last post featuring some post production work, I found this image whilst browsing through our archive.  This image was in the National press in 1965 featuring two girls wearing the shirts of both Umbro teams in the FA Cup final (Liverpool and Leeds United).  I think the setting in front of the radiator really makes the picture!

Laura from our marketing department has been working with the archive for about one and a half years and has been scanning in some of the old imagery. This advert is one of her favourites. Back in 1967 we sponsored a lot of great football teams, and this advert used a jigsaw style to reveal the Umbro logo.

We’re going to try and scan in a few more old ads from our archives whenever we get a spare bit of time, and we’ll be slowly adding them to our Flickr set.