Font problem in Joomla

I have a table, in joomla I'm getting the following data:

1. fc k��ln - vfl wolfsburg
germany 1. bundesliga 

so I created a test page, I set up the header as utf-8, and everything was fine, I received the wanted data:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [id] => 4e36e64eb34d2
            [team1] => 1. FC Köln
            [team2] => VFL Wolfsburg
            [league] => Germany 1. Bundesliga
            [sport] =开发者_StackOverflow中文版> Soccer
            [time] => 2011-08-06 15:30:00
        )

)

I also check the joomla header and it's contains the charset:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

What am I doing wrong? Do I need some extra commands before I'm fetching the data?

DISCLAIMER : I do not use Joomla

This is really a Joomla Problem not a MySQL Problem. By any chance, are you using Joomla 1.0 ?

Here is something showing in the Joomla Documentation how to activate the MySQL Query SET NAMES using utf8.

You may also need to play with the collation setting within the DB Connection

Here are the default settings for MySQL 5.5.12 running in Windows 7

mysql> show variables like 'collation%';
+----------------------+-------------------+
| Variable_name        | Value             |
+----------------------+-------------------+
| collation_connection | latin1_swedish_ci |
| collation_database   | latin1_swedish_ci |
| collation_server     | latin1_swedish_ci |
+----------------------+-------------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> show variables like 'char%';
+--------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                           |
+--------------------------+---------------------------------+
| character_set_client     | latin1                          |
| character_set_connection | latin1                          |
| character_set_database   | latin1                          |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                          |
| character_set_results    | latin1                          |
| character_set_server     | latin1                          |
| character_set_system     | utf8                            |
| character_sets_dir       | C:\MySQL_5.5.12\share\charsets\ |
+--------------------------+---------------------------------+

Try setting the character set and collation variables within the session or set this in my.cnf and restart mysql