Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
The murky cycle of sponsored news articles by Ian Plenderleith
It sounds like a late-night conspiracy theory to maintain that corporate interests dictate the news agenda, especially when we’re talking about something as relatively unimportant to human destiny as football. But it’s not untrue to say that the internet has allowed the game’s major sponsors to have a say in the way that news is generated. A closer look at one of October’s headlines demonstrates why.
Only formed in 2005, Bunyodkor are luring South Americans to Tashkent and taking Asian football by storm, says Marc Bennetts
After almost two decades of post-Soviet obscurity, football in Uzbekistan hit the headlines this summer when league leaders Bunyodkor mounted an audacious bid for Samuel Eto’o.
Could you live on £7,000 a season? If so, and you can also play a bit, you could be a star in the MLS, writes Mike Woitalla
David Beckham’s Major League Soccer salary – not including his endorsement deals – pays him more in one day than MLS players such as Kevin Souter earn annually. Souter hails from Portsoy, Scotland. He was drawn to America by Graceland – not the Elvis estate but a small Iowa university with an ambitious soccer programme. At age 24, Souter attended a two-day open tryout with 200 other hopefuls and won a contract with the Kansas City Wizards that pays him $12,900 (£7,000) for the season. And a Wizard he must be to live on that.
Directors of football are a little-loved breed. Paul Joyce looks at changing attitudes in Germany, where despite successes many clubs now have doubts
Kevin Keegan is hardly unfamiliar with outside interference in managerial affairs. His move to Hamburger SV in May 1977 was engineered by one of the Bundesliga’s first general managers, Dr Peter Krohn. A football layman who saw sport as “show business”, Krohn changed HSV’s blue shirts to pink to attract female customers and made the team ride into the stadium on elephants. Viewing himself as more important in the club hierarchy than “overvalued” coaches with “insufficient school education”, Krohn’s meddling meant that HSV finished only tenth in Keegan’s first season.
Neil Rose welcomes a familiar voice back to 6.06 – a broadcaster who believes football phone-ins are not just about the match
For a radio station never more than a few minutes away from a trail, the return of Danny Baker to 5 Live was curiously unheralded. The addition of an hour from Baker on Tuesdays means that you are now more likely to hear 6.06 of an evening than not, but – and this is the good, nay joyous, news – his show shares only a name and sidekick (Issy Clarke) with those of Alan Green, Tim Lovejoy and Spoony.