Book reviews

Former star Stefano Borgonovo has motor neurone disease and, as Matthew Barker explains, some wonder if football is to blame

On October 8, a team of Fiorentina veterans played a Milan XI made up of current and former players, in a fund-raising match for Stefano Borgonovo. Now 44, Borgonovo is suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or motor neurone disease (MND), a condition that progressively paralyses the body when nerves that connect the brain to the spinal cord, and then to the muscles, die off. There is no known cause, with the majority of victims dying within two to three years of first falling ill.

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Neil Forsyth recalls a Carlisle takeover bid that turned out to be less than credible

In an era when takeovers of football clubs involve sheikhs, billionaires and intricate financial arrangements, it is worth remembering a simpler time. A time when just about anyone could try to buy a football club and, in the memorable case of Stephen Brown, just about anyone did. Among the vast ranks of dreamers and chancers who have drifted into football for often questionable reasons, Brown stands alone for his sheer daring.

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Manchester City’s owners have divided opinion over the years, but the latest incumbents have been welcomed deliriously. David Conn wonders if the fans’ loyalty is being exploited

The takeover of Manchester City was celebrated uproariously by most of the club’s supporters, but it prompted me instead to question the very basis of fans’ loyalty to their clubs. I am talking not about today’s surreal ownership by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, but a deal that looks positively homely by comparison, the 1994 City takeover by Francis Lee.

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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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Manchester City’s windfall is adding to the pressure on Bill Kenwright over Everton’s proposed move to Kirkby, as Mark O'Brien explains

On the closing day of the transfer window, Everton smashed their record by spending £15 million on the relatively unknown Belgian midfielder Marouane Fellaini. After a trying summer, one that Bill Kenwright described as “the worst I have ever known in the transfer market”, it should have been big news, but like just about every other move that day it was overshadowed by the events up the road.

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