Croatian 16-year-old Alen Halilovic has become one of the hottest young properties in European football and been dubbed the "new Luka Modric" after delivering some devastating performances for Dinamo Zagreb this season.

After seeing this video, we reckon he's more like the new Tom Daley.

Manchester City, Manchester United and Real Madrid are all reported to be keen Halilovic, whose worth is said to be in excess of £10 million despite the fact that he has just five matches under his belt for Dinamo.

But while he boasts skills that have made him the youngest ever scorer in the Croatian league

German football fans perpetrated a plucky midnight raid on the stadium of arch-rivals Bayern Munich.

A group of Borussia Dortmund fans broke into the iconic stadium - acknowledged as one of the finest sporting venues in the world - and plastered their own club's logo on the walls of a VIP suite.

Then, they pulled off a masterstroke of both guts, ingenuity and technical knowhow as they switched the stadium's famous external lighting from red - as it is for Bayern matches - to Dortmund's famous yellow.

The stadium is famous for its colour-changing lights, being lit in red when Bayern are

A fan protest over the use of flares at football matches in Germany went horribly wrong at the weekend - after several banners caught fire and five supporters suffered burns.

The protest - which was supposed to rail against a number of repressive measures being brought in by the German Football League to make stadia safer places - was organised by members of Hamburg supporters' club 'The Chosen Few'.

Masked fans made the defiant gesture by lighting flares in the away section of the Espirit Arena prior to kick-off in the Bundesliga match against Fortuna Dusseldorf.

But the protest did not go

Joey Barton normally gets football fans wincing or cringing with his antics - it's only yesterday that he claimed to be "too clever to play football" -  but this time he's provoked gales of laughter.

The QPR player, currently on loan at Marseille, gave a press conference after his Ligue 1 debut for his new side in which he sports the most hilarious fake foreign accent since Steve McClaren pretended to be Dutch.

Has Barton 'gone native' after three months in France? Is he auditioning for a re-boot of 'Allo 'Allo yet to be announced by the BBC?

The answer remains a mystery, though the

It's not often that defenders get the glory at football matches. Week in, week out, they trudge along doing the donkey work while the pretty boys up front pinch all the glory - so long as they don't mess up their hair-dos in the process.

So you'd think that Serbian centre-half Nikola Ignjatijevic would have been only too pleased to have curled a stunning 20-yard header past the keeper in injury time to give Metallurg Donetsk a victory over Zorya in the Ukrainian top flight at the weekend.

There was just one teensy, weensy problem: Ignjatijevic is a Zorya defender, and his bewildering header -

He was made the scapegoat for Brazil's exit from the 2010 World Cup after scoring an excrutiating own goal, but Felipe Melo may now have found his true calling as a goalkeeper for Galatasaray after stepping up to save a vital late penalty.

Galatasaray's actual goalkeeper, Fernando Muslera, conceded a penalty and was sent off in the 89th minute of Saturday's match against Elazigspor with Galatasaray up 1-0.

That gave Melo a chance to become a hero. He pulled on the goalkeeper's gloves to fill in at the all-important moment, and made a diving two-handed save to retain his side's lead - then

Most British football fans will remember the hazy days of the 1990s, when Paolo di Canio shoved a referee and Eric Cantona aimed a kick at a spectator during a match.

But if you thought those incidents were bad, wait until you see the outrageous crime perpetrated by Argentine star Leandro Schiavi, younger brother of Boca Juniors and Argentina star Rolando Schiavi, who has been banned for six years for kicking a referee in the head.

The incident took place 17 minutes into the second half of a Torneo 6 Ligas cup match between Club Jorge Newbery and Huracan de Arribeños, during which referee

Manchester United are certainly not shy about getting their players to help promote the club's global brand.

In the recent past they have appeared in ads for such things as Turkish Airlines, a Pakistani credit card and of course who can forget Wayne Rooney's 'They say he is a legend' acting masterclass for Chilean winemaker Casillero del Diablo.

However, this could be the oddest cross promotion yet as Manchester United's stars have popped up in the music video for the latest single by Indonesian pop-rock band Nidji.

The likes of Rooney, Javier Hernandez and David de Gea all appear in the