The Archive

No goals, no away fans, only one proper team – fears of violence made the recent match between PSG and Marseille remarkable, as Neil McCarthy reports 

For their recent away match against Paris Saint-Germain, Olympique de Marseille travelled without supporters and fielded a B-team made up of reserves and youth-team players. The boring 0-0 draw was described as a winning hand for OM in a game of poker between the two clubs that has lasted for the past 15 years – they earned a point from PSG and spoilt a match broadcast on the TV station of PSG’s owners, Canal Plus. However, the media and the French League have played down the fact that the game was probably boycotted by OM simply because their fans are sick of risking their lives to go to the fixture, the league going so far as to dock both teams their point.

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If you’ve ever been enchanted or mystified by foreign chants, then Ian Plenderleith has found your dream site. Learn Polish raps and Russian ragtime numbers, but steer clear of PSG and Sampdoria 

While football and music may attract the same kind of slightly sad, trivia-driven fan, these two cultural staples have always seemed ill at ease when they’ve overlapped. Yet the website Soccerclips.net , which has gathered more than 1,000 football songs from around the world, proves that while many attempts to fuse the two cultural staples have hopelessly failed, there are a ton of surprising gems that would probably make up a fat and eclectically pleasurable double compilation CD to stick on the car stereo for away trips.

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Dear WSC
The Spurs “yids” thing (WSC 230) is indeed well and truly weird. This derogatory term emanated from Arsenal, a club with a proud tradition of support from the large north London Jewish community. As an eight- or nine-year-old, sitting high in the Highbury east stand with my uncle at my first ever game, even my pre-pubescent jewdar was sufficiently sensitive to know I was among my own. These days it’s a London thing. The term is seldom heard from northern fans, whereas one Chelsea fan website, presumably popular as it is on Google’s first page, proudly lists the lyrics to more than 25 (I stopped counting) anti-Semitic songs. In the mid-1970s, some Spurs fans created an incomprehensibly bizarre variant on terrace youth sub-culture by wearing skinhead uniform, skullcaps and Israeli flags. There’s one for all the sociologists out there. I sit in a different east stand now and for years optimistically clung to the notion that, in reclaiming the word, Spurs fans displayed rudimentary class consciousness and solidarity with discriminated groups in our society. This forlorn hope has been shattered in the face of vicious, sustained homophobic chanting, ostensibly related to Sol Campbell’s predicaments. The lip service paid by most clubs to kick out racism seems positively enlightened by comparison, and if we can’t learn anything from all this then the future’s bleak for football.
Alan Fisher, Tonbridge

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Derby won the title with a low 53 points, as the title fight was between a mish-mash of "town" teams. Roger Titford reports

The long-term significance
If there was a remake of this season it would be called “What Happens When Big Clubs Go Bad”. For the last time, possibly ever, a variety of “town” teams – Ipswich, Burnley, Derby and Stoke among them – contested the League title deep into the spring. It was an unusual year in many respects: miners did relatively better than stockbrokers in the economic crisis, glamrock was dying and punk not yet born, and England’s big three suffered like never since. It was Liverpool’s only trophyless season between 1973 and 1984. Arsenal spent some time bottom of the table, which they haven’t done since. Manchester United weren’t even in the top flight. Revie, Shankly, Nicholson, Greenwood and Sexton had all followed Sir Alf Ramsey out of long-occupied managerial seats in 1974 and a chance emerged for the lesser lights to shine. It sounds now like an impossible feast of equal opportunity, but at the time they said it was dismal, mundane, violent and “the death of football”.

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Steve Menary reports on the increasing shortage of City investors in football's surviving plcs

Sheffield United’s board must be pretty sure of promotion to the Premiership having turned to the Stock Exchange to raise £10.7 million early last month. A large slice of the cash is earmarked for players’ wages, but the club will plough £2.7m into a redevelopment of the corner stand at Bramall Lane due for completion in May and £1m towards buying a £4m health club in Staines. Chief executive officer Jason Rockett said: “We’re trying to create a new model for a club and produce off-field revenue with the club at the centre. It’s got to be a more sustainable business.”

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