The Archive

A-League clubs are allowed one star signing and Juninho has joined Sydney FC. But, asks Mike Ticher, does the Brazilian have what it takes to match the achievements of his predecessor, Dwight Yorke?

In 1975 the Australian leg-spinner Kerry O’Keeffe arrived in Blackburn for a season as the professional for East Lancs in the Lancashire League. All he heard on his first night there was how brilliant he would have to be to emulate a long list of predecessors – each one ticked off with a resounding: “He were a good ’un.”

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Groundtastic, now in its 50th edition, has documented the huge change to British stadiums at all levels over the past 12 years. The fanzine’s co-editor Vince Taylor explains the motivation

For those of us whose pulses quickened at the sight of floodlight pylons towering over neighbouring housetops, and whose idea of bliss was to be stood in the middle of a crowded concrete terrace, the publication of The Football Grounds of England & Wales by Simon Inglis in 1983 was a moment of epiphany. Though it wasn’t quite “the love that dare not speak its name”, nobody before Inglis had articulated this fascination some of us have for football grounds as entities in their own right. He introduced us to Archibald Leitch, the Scottish civil engineer who more or less invented the British football stadium as it existed before the Taylor Report, and also demonstrated that every football ground, no matter how great or humble, generally has an interesting tell to tale.

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Ciudad de Murcia have been taken over and relocated in the manner of Wimbledon moving to Buckinghamshire – while their fans have been ignored, writes Phil Ball

When I was a kid, a mate nicked a bike that was propped up on a lamp-post. I asked him why and he replied: “It’s not tied up. It’s mad not to nick it.” It was a brutal sort of logic, but I shrugged and let him get on with it. I’d forgotten about the incident till this summer, when Carlos Marsá, a 57-year-old industrialist from Granada, bought the shares, footballing rights and contracts of Spanish second-division club Ciudad de Murcia, and changed them into his own Granada 74, thereby effecting an MK Dons-like take-over – or, more prosaically, nicking the bike. Needless to say, as with Wimbledon, various bodies, among them UEFA, have shrugged their shoulders and let him get on with it.

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With local club Hapoel lurching from crisis to embarrassment, left-leaning fans in the Israeli capital had had enough. Shaul Adar reports on their decision to start again after failing in a takeover bid

In May, Uri Sheradsky, the sports editor for a Jerusalem local paper, wrote a column in the weekly edition. There was only one subject on his mind. While Beitar Jerusalem won their first championship for nine years, his team, Hapoel Jerusalem, were dropping down limply to the third ­division for the first time.

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Just nine per cent of Premier League spectators are aged 24 or under. Sean Barnes asks whether the death of the football-going tradition among young people will mean a struggle to fill grounds in future

When football was invented by Rupert Murdoch in 1992, I was only five years old. Fast forward 15 years through the boom of English football – which we all know too well – and the story of my puberty – which, fortunately, no one knows at all – and here we are, footballers on seven-figure wages and English chairmen the exception to the rule of the modernised Premier League. Other well documented pitfalls include the increasing gap between club and supporter, the sanitisation of the match-day atmosphere and the decline of the ­working‑class fan. One problem that doesn’t get much attention, however, is my problem, and the problems of people like me. My generation may well be the last to appreciate fully the ups and downs of supporting a football club. The game needs to face up to its problem with the lack of English youth. And by that I don’t mean footballers, I mean fans.

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