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Stories
Adam Bate considers why so few former goalkeepers have been managers in the Premier League
Joey Barton may have felt he was insulting Neil Warnock by likening him to the eponymous film hero Mike Bassett, but there is no identikit for the football manager. All sorts of folk have trodden the touchline in England, but only two goalkeepers have ever managed in the Premier League. Nearly two decades on from Mike Walker’s sacking at Everton, it is surely high time we asked the question: where are all the goalkeeper managers?
Ian Plenderleith asks: How will football in America move forward without the newly crowned MLS Cup-winner David Beckham?
Major League Soccer has learned one major lesson from the big leagues in Europe it aspires to eventually compete with, and that is the ability to blow its own trumpet. Crowds are up! Sponsorship and TV revenues are up! New stadiums are being built! We are expanding the number of teams every season! Big name players are coming from abroad!
Steve Davies says that dividing TV deals unequally would make football less competitive but it could also be a legal minefield
Ian Ayre, the managing director of Liverpool, quickly qualified his reported assertion that his club should sell its own overseas TV rights and keep the income. He now says he meant that they should be sold collectively but the income divided on the basis of a team’s popularity, in terms of the number of times their games are featured. Clearly he was under pressure to modify his stance, given that even the other clubs who could have benefited from the move were against it. When Ayre heard Chelsea chairman Bruce Buck condemning his plan he must have realised he was on his own.
From Port Vale to Port of Spain, and now Los Angeles. Andy Fraser charts the progress of a Caribbean cult hero born in Stafford
When Chris Birchall signed for LA Galaxy this summer, it marked a new twist in a once-promising career that seemed stalled in the lower leagues. While Birchall had all but disappeared in the UK following his unlikely World Cup heroics for Trinidad & Tobago three years ago, across the Atlantic his performances for his adopted nation lingered longer in the memory. On signing the Stafford-born midfielder, Galaxy’s coach Bruce Arena spoke of his longstanding admiration for the player Trinidadians hail as a national hero and affectionately refer to as “Me Mum”.