The fourth of seven children, Abdullah says his father never attended a match, his mother once.
Brad Parr and Andy Evans were attending a match between the Los Angeles Kings, the side they support, and the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Players get €150 for just attending a match, and progressively more in the case of victory.
The swing towards a clampdown on wages might be explained by the increase in the amount that attending a match costs a typical supporter.
Al Fayed was a friend of Jackson and the singer even paid a visit to Craven Cottage when he attended a match between Fulham and Wigan in 1999.
Two years after she began playing, Bajramaj said, her father, Ismet, attended a match to watch her older brother, Fatos, and by accident learned that his daughter had also taken up soccer.
In 1987, when India and Pakistan seemed about to clash once again, Pakistan's president, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, broke the ice by attending a match in Jaipur, in northwestern India.
FC Bayern Munich, in a soccer stadium that is much larger, limits its season tickets to 20,000 to give millions of fans a better chance of attending a match (and, not incidentally, to sell more trinkets to a fresh audience).
Stoke performed with the kind of raw, rough commitment that someone who had last attended a match in 1958 would have recognised, and with a few inventive moves at free-kicks they would have found utterly baffling.
Touched by the bravery of a boy found wandering the beach, lost after most of his family were washed away in the horror, Ronaldo paid for the boy to attend a match involving his own national team, Portugal.
