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Full-back opens up on the difficulty of following the war back home from overseas and positive lessons at Arsenal and Manchester City

“To become a professional football player from the place where I was born and raised was almost impossible. It was super, super tough,” Oleksandr Zinchenko says as his eyes widen and we consider how far he has come from his small home town of Radomyshl in northern Ukraine. “We didn’t have many facilities and we trained only twice a week, for one game, and this is not the way to become a professional. It was a pure joy to play and train with my local team but I was always wanting more. My mother said she saw the fire in my eyes to make it.”

We sit in a light and airy room on a beautiful autumn afternoon in Hampstead. In Ukraine, as a devastating war grinds on, winter will be another brutal test. Zinchenko picks up his phone. “This morning my aunt sent me a video,” he says. “She has been working in a nursery for more than 30 years. The video shows where she was hiding in the shelter from 7.30 until 10.30 because there was a siren. Working with kids, she cannot take any risk.”

Oliver Glasner absolved Dean Henderson of blame after the Crystal Palace goalkeeper’s second-half blunder handed Nottingham Forest a hard-fought victory. Henderson allowed Chris Wood’s first-time strike to slip through his despairing dive to extend Palace’s miserable start to the season.

The game was in the balance when Wood tried his luck from 20 yards following Trevoh Chalobah’s weak headed clearance from Àlex Moreno’s hopeful ball. But Henderson was slow to get down and then allowed Wood’s shot to squirm under his right arm, just six days after he returned to England’s starting lineup for their Nations League win in Finland.

It’s not the moments or the music, the joy in how he plays. It’s something simpler with ‘the eternal solution’

Ferenc Puskas played pregnant, teammate Amancio Amaro liked to say. The day he arrived at Real Madrid in 1958, he was 31 years old, 18kg overweight and, banned by Fifa for defecting after the Hungarian uprising, hadn’t played football for two years. He couldn’t possibly go on a pitch like this: signing me is all well and good, he told the club’s president Santiago Bernabéu, but have you seen me? “I was the size of a large balloon,” he recalled and the coach, Luis Carniglia, didn’t know what to do with him either. That, Bernabéu replied, was their problem not his. As it turned out, blessed with a left foot like no other, 242 goals followed, the only problem that he hadn’t come sooner.

Most called him Cañoncito pum! (Little Cannon Bang!), although Alfredo Di Stéfano called him little cannon big belly. That summer Puskas trained wrapped in plastic and woolly jumpers. By the season’s end, he had scored the goal that took Real Madrid to the European Cup final; a year on, he scored four in the final but gave Erwin Stein the match ball. Old when he came, supposedly finished, he helped Madrid reach three more. He scored a hat-trick in 1962 and played in 1964 but when the 1966 final arrived, eight years after he had, it was over. Left behind while they travelled to Brussels, he was in a makeshift cup team facing Betis three days before and 1,000 miles south.

As fans lose control of the sport and clubs they love to mega-rich owners, they turn instead on a familiar enemy: officials

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Another weekend, another slew of wearying arguments about VAR and refereeing. At Bournemouth, Arsenal fans called the referee Robert Jones “a cheat” and chanted that the Premier League was “corrupt”. On social media, the outrage was even greater. Fans have always complained about referees, of course, but traditionally they called them “blind” and dismissed them as “wankers” or “bastards”. Then came the “You’re not fit to referee” song; the cries of systemic corruption, though, are relatively new.

Perhaps this is just the world we live in, one of distortions and paranoia, shaped by a diverse range of populist cynics from José Mourinho to Donald Trump, social media nurturing conspiracy theories which sprout from the fertile ground left as Covid retreated. Or perhaps there is something more complex going on.

This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition

• State’s de facto leader allegedly approved 2021 takeover
• Premier League believes its rules have not been broken

The Premier League sees no reason to review the legality of Newcastle United’s takeover by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund after reports of crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s extensive involvement in the deal.

Leaked WhatsApp ­messages from the former Newcastle minority co-owner Amanda Staveley obtained by the Telegraph suggest the buyout hinged on the approval of Bin ­Salman, the kingdom’s de facto leader. Although the £305m ­takeover led by Saudi’s Public Investment Fund in 2021 was approved only once the Premier League received “legally binding assurances” that the Saudi state would not control Newcastle, it is understood the governing body will not be re-examining its legitimacy.

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With a minimum of 25 matches still to be played before the 2024 winners of the biggest prize in American men’s soccerball are identified, Sunday’s announcement that Inter Miami will be handed the “host nation” spot that is up for grabs at next summer’s all-singing, all-dancing and newly bloated Fifa Club World Cup came as something of a surprise. At least it did until it became apparent that it was a decision made by the tournament organisers. We implore you to fasten your seatbelts, reader, because Gianni Infantino is at it again. While the shiny-domed Fifa chief is invariably up to something when it comes to commercial opportunism and the cause of personal advancement, his declaration that Miami had “qualified” for the tournament via a process for which there were no obvious criteria beyond having Lionel Messi in their squad seemed a little cheeky, even by his snakebelly-low standards.

Quoted before Saturday’s game against Brentford, Erik ten Hag said of Manchester United fans: ‘We are on the same page and in the same boat.’ Presumably that’s the Titanic and, in the meantime, Erik can rearrange the deck chairs so at least some of those fans can avoid the water cascading down from the Old Trafford roof” – Adrian Irving.

Aston Villa having their best start to a season after eight games in 26 years, or ‘not since the 20th century’ as Big Website puts it, sounds an awful lot better than Aston Villa having made their best start to a season since John Gregory was in charge (and said he would have shot Dwight Yorke if he’d had a gun), Julian Joachim was top scorer, Villa won nothing and even finished outside the European places. It depends on the way you look at it and all that” – Noble Francis.

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• Unai Emery wants side to continue to ‘break barriers’
• Villa host Bologna in Champions League on Tuesday