The Archive

Fans find their voice as 20,000 people become part of an internet revolution, reports Vince Taylor

It’s only natural that Ebbsfleet United’s supporters should feel apprehensive about the impending takeover of their team by MyFootballClub, and a visit to the organisation’s website will do nothing to allay their fears. Invited to part with £35 and in the process become the owner of a football club, would-be investors are reminded that this is no more than the cost of a computer game. With a proud history going back to the 19th century, have Ebbsfleet United unwittingly turned themselves into a real-life version of Championship Manager?

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Where did it all go wrong this time? Harry Pearson assesses the tenure of the man under the brolly and Ashley Shaw looks at why the England team fail to unite the support of the country's biggest clubs

It was hard to look at him as he wagged his left arm in some forlorn attempt to get his players to deliver a decent cross and not think of Stevie Smith: “I was too far out all my life/and not waving but drowning.” Though sadly for the poet, she was not about to pocket £2.5 million on her way to a fortnight’s holiday in the Caribbean.

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Even bigger than the headlines about England's exit were the figures estimating its cost. Roger Titford looks at what it will really mean for sponsors, business generally and the marketability of football

Euro 2008 will be the first such tournament without an English-speaking nation since the eight-team European Championship finals in France in 1984. For the football purist, this may be a good thing. For the marketing man, it is a bit of a disaster. On Thursday November 22, Britain’s marketing community awoke to see an enormous hole blown in media plans and promotional schedules across the entire range of consumer goods. Worst affected will be the official commercial partner companies with events and activities planned around England’s summer participation. The typical, rudderless bloke in the supermarket won’t be wearing his new Umbro England shirt and loading his trolley with cases of cheap Carlsberg in anticipation of Austria v Romania. Eat Turkey! Drink Greece! Sleep Switzerland! This tournament is not going to work for the uncommitted UK target audience.

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Rioting marred a dramatic final of Africa's Champions League, a competition that struggles in comparison to its European namesake and shares some of its drawbacks. Chris Taylor reports

It was not perhaps the showpiece culmination to the year that the Confederation of African Football (CAF) had hoped for. The Cairo Stadium was full to bursting, with Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak on hand to present the Champions League trophy to the winning team in the presence of massed ranks of dignitaries, and the match itself was certainly exciting. But the occasion ended in mayhem as the victorious Etoile du Sahel players were pelted with missiles and attacked by a mutinous crowd. And by the dignitaries. And the gentlemen of the press. At least no one could accuse them of not taking the competition seriously enough.

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Helen Chamberlain’s former sidekick has celebrated leaving Soccer AM for 6.06 with a book. Taylor Parkes wants to know why anyone – anyone – thought it was a good idea to expose the presenter’s ego and prejudices across 288 smugly written pages

Soccer AM is a bad memory: hungover mornings in other people’s flats, disturbed by a crew of whooping simpletons, the slurping of pro and ex-pro rectums, cobbled-together comedy that made me long for the glory days of Skinner and Baddiel’s old shit. Yet Tim Lovejoy himself, with his fashionably receding hair and voice oddly reminiscent of Rod Hull’s, I remember only as an averagely blokey TV presenter – in fact, one of the few averagely blokey TV presenters to make me clack my tongue in irritation, rather than buff my Gurkha knife. Other than as a namesake of The Simpsons’ self-serving man of the cloth, he barely registered; just a bland, blond ringmaster in a cocky circus of crap. Almost a surprise, then, to find that his new book is not just ­tedious in the extreme, it is utterly vile.

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