The Archive

In preparation for Euro 2008, several stadiums are being remodelled and rebuilt. Unfortunately, tickets in these modern but small venues already seem scarce. Graham Dunbar looks towards next summer

Getting all passionate about sport – or just getting passionate at all – is quite an untypically Swiss thing to do. Congratulations then, Team Alinghi, on successfully defending the America’s Cup in July and reminding us that sport matters in an emotionally restrained nation that will co-host Euro 2008 with Austria. The Nautical Society of Geneva clubhouse – nominal home to Team Alinghi, despite the sailing taking place off Valencia – will never make anyone’s list of great sporting venues, but neither, too, will the Stade de Genève, one of four Swiss venues next summer.

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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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Goodwill went out of the window when the British government banned Palestinian youth players from touring north-west England. Richard Bagley explains football’s importance in Gaza and the West Bank

An away match at Chester probably wouldn’t be a highlight of most international footballers’ careers. But, to a group of talented young players from Palestine, it promised to be one of the most memorable experiences in their lives. A project called Palestine: Something to Cheer About had secured the backing of the English FA, the Professional Footballers’ Association and a host of other bodies for its effort to use the positive power of football to help teenagers in one of the most deprived areas on earth. But the Under-19 tour fell at the final hurdle – and, to the organisers’ disgust, without even a squeak of protest from the footballing authorities.

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