Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Clubs struggling in the current financial crisis by Tom Davies
The financial crisis has inevitably brought with it a swirl of speculation about how football clubs will cope with the first recession since the Premier League breakaway, but given the messes so many got into during the boom years it’s tempting to wonder whether we’ll notice much difference. But there’s no doubt many will find life more precarious.
When Nacional lingered one minute too long in the dressing room, the referee called off their match. Chris Bradley reports
Players from Nacional, one of Uruguay’s most successful and popular clubs, walked down the tunnel on August 31 knowing they needed a win to stay top of the table. Yet by the time they reached the pitch they found their game against Villa Española had been abandoned. Referee Liber Prudente ruled Nacional had forfeited the match by being one minute late. He subsequently left the stadium with a police escort to avoid fans waiting outside, baying for his blood. The unprecedented conclusion to the match plunged the once tranquil world of Uruguayan football into violence, threats, hearings, appeals and intense debate.
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.