The Archive

There’s very little entente cordiale between the presidents of Marseille and Lyon. James Eastham examines their latest row

Some transfer sagas leave no trace; Hatem Ben Arfa’s summer move from Lyon to Marseille does not fall into that category. The 21-year-old attacker’s transfer marked a new low point in the increasingly fractious relations between the clubs. The sticking point was a contractual clause stating Lyon had to pay Ben Arfa €1.5 million (£1.19m) if they sold him. Instead of reaching an amicable agreement, Lyon president Jean-Michel Aulas and his counter­part at Marseille, Pape Diouf, used it as an excuse to verbally beat each other up over a deal for the second time in three years.

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América de Cali are the South American continental also-rans. They lost three successive Copa Libertadores finals in the 1980s and four in total. But the drugs barons who financed their success in getting there are now the cause of the club’s demise. Henry Mance takes up the tale

 “If they say I’m the best Colombian footballer ever, I must have done something right,” smiles Willington Ortiz. The former striker, who now runs a football coaching school, helped América de Cali to four of their five consecutive league titles in the 1980s with a style of play he recalls as “mucho dribbling”. Yet there was something else that “Old Willy” Ortiz and the América team built around him could not do: win South America’s major club competition, the Copa Libertadores. Three successive years América marched to the final, only to shuffle back to Colombia empty-handed. Few clubs can match América’s serial failure. Valencia have a decent claim, being the only club to have lost two Champions League finals in a row without ever having won the trophy; they also chalked up three consecutive Copa del Rey final defeats in the 1970s. In England, six teams – from Newcastle (twice) to Old Etonians – have lost consecutive FA Cup finals, but all won finals on other occasions.

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Debt is a fact of life for football clubs, but how damaging will it become?

“We obviously can’t compete with the money Manchester City have so there’s no point trying. We’ve got to succeed some other way.” So said a Premier League chairman in late September. But this wasn’t a pragmatic view from someone at a club that would be happy with a mid-table finish. It was Arsenal’s Peter Hill-Wood, whose comments were reported on the day that his team went top after a win at Bolton. The Arsenal board are bucking the current trend by actively discouraging interest from outside investors, in their case Alisher Usmanov from Uzbekistan, who owns a 24 per cent stake in the club.

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John Toshack’s reorganisation of Wales’ youth teams under Brian Flynn has paid dividends, as Paul Ashley-Jones explains

It’s typical that when Wales finally escape a qualifying group it leads to a play-off rather than the tournament itself. It’s also typical that, despite finishing top of our group, we draw a side as strong as England in the play-offs. Nonetheless, being so close to the 2009 European Under-21 Championship finals is a huge moment, for players and fans. Participation in such a tournament would help towards changing a losing mentality that Welsh players, at all levels, have had for a very long time.

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Who stands to gain from the brouhaha at West Ham?

The summer sales at West Ham that triggered the departure of Alan Curbishley were explained in a splurge of back-page headlines in late September. Hammered! said the Daily Mail, who were a day ahead of the pack in reporting that the club had anticipated a huge fine for their illegal dealings with Kia Joorabchian of the MSI agency, suppliers of Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano. The tribunal that examined Sheffield United’s claim for damages for having been relegated while West Ham stayed up won’t decide on compensation for several months. But United’s claim for over £30 million, made up principally of the TV and merchandising income they lost after relegation, is likely to be met. Indeed, unless West Ham are relegated this season and Sheffield United come up, £30m seems like light punishment. Most of the coverage sympathised with the claimants, with Neil Warnock telling the Times that he’d still be at Bramall Lane if the club had stayed up. “It knocked us back no end. Relegation is on my CV, which it shouldn’t be.”

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