Leicester City. For the way they took the piss with administration. The game hasn't been the same since. There's never a season starting now without some team on minus points.

That Bosman guy. Wages went from sky high to farcical afterwards and it's usually the supporter that pays, one way or another.

Will second Murdoch. Between Sky and the Tabs footy has turned into a circus.

I hate the fact that when teams are relegated from the PL, commentators just go on about the financial consequences and the millions lost. The 'it's a £40/50/60 million pound game' intros to relegation games leave me sunk in a fuzzy depression.

Which also leads to the innane, servile, complacent mainstream media nominated elsewhere. It's one that allows Garth Crooks to sit on a sofa most saturday afternoons gradually mutating into the angriest man on television. Someone needs to remind him that he is getting good money to talk sh*te about football. Good gig.

But we still tune in, buy the season tickets etc. Goddamn the pusher man, to cite Neil in the Young One's Book.

Oh, and companies buying the rights to a stadium's name. The Abbey in Cambridge is now named after a recruitment company. Sigh.

Welcome Mr. Kite.

And best of luck to you (and Janik, as well as to Max and Rogin) at Wembley. It's a shame that you can't both go up.

Thanks Ursus

The natural pessimist in me has been predicting glorius playoff failure since February...

Relevant to this thread (this is really a reply to The Liquidator), there's a clip on YouTube from BBC1 on the last day of the 86/87 season (which, as usual from then until Sky came along, went untelevised anywhere) where the once and future MOTD slot was being occupied by ... American basketball.

Football's great "revival" was only achieved by Americanising the game's presentation - even the way that analysts now play a much greater role in match commentary was lifted straight from Channel 4's coverage of American football and the role of the "colour commentator" in US sports coverage generally (watch any pre-Sky coverage, even after summarisers were introduced, and you'll notice that Motson/Davies/Moore speak for several minutes without interruption - the summariser just comes in from time to time in a more formal structure). And I think that's where much of the resentment over the changes comes from. I know full well that those changes had to happen to ensure that football survived the seismic shifts of the 1980s. It's just that some people feel that Britain would have been better off without those wider cultural changes of the 1980s happening.