Search: ' Ferencvaros'

Ian Rands looks at the mixed results of the extensive efforts to export the Sheffield United brand around the world

If I was to tell you that there is an English football club developing a global brand that currently encompasses five clubs on three continents, including the first foreign investment in a Chinese team, I suspect that Sheffield Utd will not be the first club that comes to mind. You might also be surprised to hear that other interests include sponsorship of an Indian football academy and an advisory role with the Syrian FA. Over the last four years this “global Blades family” has developed apace, but not without a few problems along the way and a lingering degree of cynicism among United fans.

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Dynamo Kiev's Soviet Supreme League triumph in 1975 put the club on the way to being the most successful team in league history. Saul Pope reports

The long-term significance
Dynamo Kiev were midway through a run that would ultimately see them win more Soviet league titles than any other side. Spartak Moscow picked up six titles through the Fifties and Sixties but Dynamo accumulated eight through the Seventies and Eighties, leaving them with a total of 13 titles to Spartak’s 12. A large part of Dynamo’s success could be attributed to manager Valeriy Lobanovsky, a pioneer of football science who used physical and psychological testing to evaluate players’ potential and blended the total football of the era’s Dutch sides with tactical discipline. As well as winning the league in 1975, Lobanovsky’s Dynamo won the Cup-Winners Cup. They would repeat this feat in 1986 before Lobanovsky led the USSR to the Euro 88 finals and Dynamo to the Champions League semi-final in 1999. The English FA’s forthcoming National Football Centre is partly based on the training centre he built for his Dynamo side in the Seventies.

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Developing local young talent used to be the way forward for Millwall, but they can no longer see the point. Paul Casella takes up the sorry tale

After a close-season tribunal judged that teenage starlet John Bostock’s sale to Tottenham Hotspur was worth just £700,000 to Crystal Palace, their owner Simon Jordan decided it was time to look for a buyer for his club. And he wasn’t the only south London chairman to question the point of developing homegrown talent this summer. Last season Millwall lost youth hopes David Amoo to Liverpool, Sam Walker to Chelsea and Tom Kilby to Portsmouth for combined fees of £400,000. They were all products of a youth set-up that an ailing third-tier club could barely afford to run. The club’s American chairman, John Berylson, was so enraged by the size of the fees that he closed the Millwall academy.

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The Autobiography
by Tommy Smith

Bantam Press, £18.99

Reviewed by David Stubbs
From WSC 256 June 2008 

Buy this book

“Anfield Iron” (no sniggering, London readers) is the nickname conferred on the former Liverpool captain who improbably crowned a faltering career in the 1977 European Cup final when he quick-wittedly attached his head to Steve Heighway’s blasted corner and scored the Reds’ second goal. However, although acknowledging his hardness and his willingness to intimidate young wingers by threatening to break their legs, Smith protests that he is a fair player. He was, he says, only cautioned twice in his career (although this has increased to three times by page 394). He was famously suspended for feigning an injury in a Cup-Winners Cup tie against Ferencvaros. However, Smith protests, he was only pretending to go down from a bottle hurled from the crowd having been struck by one minutes earlier, unnoticed. So all was fair, really.

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Jonathan Wilson, author of the acclaimed book Behind the Curtain, believe that eastern Europe’s hooliganism problem is real but exaggerated and reflects society’s wider struggles in an era of change

In the late 1970s, fans of Spartak Moscow, clad in red and white, would rampage through city centres and daub their slogans on walls. This season, their ultras have held aloft a giant banner sponsored by a vodka company. Such is the triumph of capital in Russia.

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