The Archive

Gary Howard looks back at the 1949-50 Division Two season

The long-term significance
The post-war boom in football attendances reached a peak in 1949-50. On December 27, 1949, a record aggregate of 1,272,155 spectators watched the 44 League games, an average of 28,193. Even a rail strike in London didn’t hamper fans’ enthusiasm – 100 Brentford fans hired aeroplanes to take them to Hull. Second Division Tottenham were the best-supported team in the country, a feat achieved only once since, by Manchester United in 1974-75. Spurs went on to win the League title the next season. They quickly declined after that, but were revived in the late 1950s under the management of Bill Nicholson who had been a wing-half in their back-to-back title winning teams of 1949-51.

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National tensions are expressing themselves through Belgium's two biggest clubs. John Chapman looks at the latest instalment

Anderlecht’s Marcin Wasilewski has twice made the front cover of Belgium’s leading football magazine in recent weeks: once when he was using his elbows to great effect against Standard Liège and then being stretchered off against the same club.

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Having acquired sporting representatives in Austria and the US, Red Bull have turned to Germany. Paul Joyce assesses the fallout

No city exemplifies the decline of East German football since reunification more starkly than Leipzig. Lokomotive Leipzig, European Cup-Winners Cup finalists in 1987, went bankrupt in 2004 and had to restart at the bottom of the league pyramid. They now play in the same fifth division as former GDR champions Sachsen Leipzig, who entered insolvency in March with debts of €3 million (£2.7m).

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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”.

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Taylor Parkes reflects on a new book that paints a gloomy picture of how young players are treated in Britain

In 1997, concerned that English football was falling behind in terms of youth development, the FA brought in Howard Wilkinson (then, as now, the last English manager to win the League). His mission was to produce a document which would outline the problems and propose a fresh approach; the amusingly titled A Charter for Quality still forms the basis of our youth coaching system. Its changes were far-reaching: clubs would take sole charge of recruiting and developing young players, while the age at which kids could be taken on “full time” dropped from 14 to nine. In the first half of last season, just 66 graduates of Premier League academies appeared on Premier League teamsheets, many of them confirmed benchwarmers. What went wrong?

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