Book reviews

Coventry's fall from the Premiership in 2001 and financial decline have now led to a team reliant on players borrowed from others, to the confusion of Neville Hadsley

Standing on the temporary, open, terrace on a freezing day at the National Hockey Stadium watching Coventry recently, I found myself squinting at our back four, feeling puzzled. It wasn’t the garish Ajax-style red away shirts, incongruous as they were. Nor the fact that the numbers on the four shirts seemed to add up to a rid­iculously high number – 98, in fact, a total sur­pas­sed the following week when it reached 114. It was the fact that I didn’t recognise two of our defenders.

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Football’s history remains largely untouched by the marketeers – but FIFA are determined to do something about that. Barney Ronay ponders Pelé’s official hot 100 selection

History is written by the winners. Pelé, twice a World Cup winner and the highest-earning 20-years-re­tired sportsman on the planet, is in the process of taking this process to a ludicrous extreme. As part of FIFA’s centennial celebrations the great man has been commissioned to draw up – possibly in biro on the back of an envelope – the “FIFA 100” list of the greatest living players, due to be unveiled this month after a mildly snowballing web-centred publicity campaign. As FIFA-run web­site The-100.com explains: “For the 100 years of FIFA, Pelé has chosen a living footballer that represents the best, most outstanding, crea­tive, play­ers of their generation.”

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Tributes have been pouring in after the very public death of Miklós Fehér, but Phil Town believes Benfica's mourning smacked more than a little of hypocrisy.

Miklós Fehér’s untimely death at the age of just 24 set into motion a wave of popular feeling not seen in Portugal since fado diva Amália Rodrigues passed on in 1999. The fact that it all happened live on television, and that it involved someone playing for Benfica, by far the best sup­­­ported club in the country, went a long way to stoking up the hysteria.

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Though the extent of Leeds’ problems fluctuates from minute to minute, Duncan Young has tried to get a grip on it all

The conspicuous problem for Leeds is that not only do they not have the money to pay back their debts, they do not even have enough to maintain the obligations that must be met now. As recently revealed by chief executive Trevor Birch, a £60 milli0n loan is already secured against the stadium, a £3.5m debt is secured against the training ground and most of the key players are leased from a company in Jersey. Foot­ball finance expert Professor Tom Cannon of Checksure, an organisation that provides credit ratings on companies, describes this not unreasonably as “test­ing securitisation to its limits”. Even the status of the three valuable players that Leeds might actually own is in doubt, though selling even one would be tantamount to run­­ning up a white flag in the eyes of Leeds fans.

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Exeter City are trying to get to grips with their financial crisis, with potentially serious effects for all Conference clubs and football rules, as Howard Pattison writes

Watching Exeter play football may be un­rewarding, but the club’s adventures off the pitch are rich with in­cident, controversy and intrigue. Hav­ing seemingly headed off their most pressing financial worries by entering into a corporate voluntary ar­rangement (CVA) with their creditors, whereby they agreed to pay just ten per cent of their debts, they were immediately ser­ved notice of a 12-point penalty, the punishment set by the Conference at the be­ginning of the season.

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