The Archive

Huw Richards sums up the Championship season whilst asking of whether being at the top of the division correlates with playing better football

Do you want your team to play in the Premier League? Well, yes, me too. But this year’s Championship season shows that achieving what we’re told is the Holy Grail – or at least the answer to a £60 million question – can have unwanted side-effects. When your team is newly risen from the lower orders you have certain expectations. Better grounds, bigger crowds and classier football. No doubt about the first two, but hope of number three went largely ungratified.

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Tom Davis looks back at the League One season and reflects on how the division is becoming more and more seperated with each passing year

Ostensibly, there’s almost a case to be made that League One is taking on as lopsided and unequal appearance as the Premier League: increasingly a repository for badly run big clubs and smaller members who see a place in the top half as the peak of their ambitions. No other division boasts such a proportional gap between the crowds of its best and worst supported clubs, or such contrasting historical narratives. A decade previously, Hereford, Cheltenham, Leeds and Leicester were four divisions apart – this term they competed as equals.

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Dave Jennings reviews a League Two season which proved difficult for a number of teams who started with point deductions whilst the teams at the top struggled to find consistency

Right from the beginning of the season, the League Two table served as a reminder of the ever-present economic perils at the humblest levels of English professional football. The three teams that would finish at the bottom appeared to have been effectively chosen by the authorities before the opening day. Luton’s cause looked hopeless from the moment their 30-point deduction for various monetary transgressions was confirmed, and it seemed a reasonably safe bet that they’d head for the Blue Square Premier in the company of either Rotherham or Bournemouth, who would surely struggle to overcome the 17-point handicaps loaded on to them for their financial failings. However, all three clubs managed to retain relatively strong squads, and the latter two both reached safety, Rotherham recording results that would have put them in the play-offs but for their points penalty.

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Five years ago the Football League became Leagues One and Two and the Championship. Roger Titford assesses the transition

Lord Mawhinney of the Football League is pleased to announce attendances in the competition have risen to their highest level since the early 1960s. The particular star of the show is the Championship where crowds are up five per cent on last season and back to a level last seen in the reign of George VI (apart from a statistical blip in 2006-07).

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To be president of Real Madrid brings vast power and influence, but that is where the problems begin, writes Tim Stannard

It’s Friday night in Colmenar Viejo, a town half-an-hour to the north of Madrid, and Eugenio Martínez Bravo has a tough gig. The 39-year-old economist is fighting a losing battle to convince a group of 20 arms-folded Real Madrid members to make him the next president of their troubled club. The 230 empty seats in the spacious hotel conference room suggest that there were hopes for a slightly better turnout.

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