The Archive

Belgian football is riddled with match fixing, retracted confessions and the accused suing those making the allegations, as John Chapman explains

Belgian football is in despair. Not only are the national team at their lowest ebb for 30 years, but the clubs regularly get thumped in Europe. Crowds have declined and a lack of investment in infrastructure means that watching a match such as La Louvière v Lierse on a wet winter night will be an experience you won’t forget and probably won’t repeat. Most top-flight clubs are run on annual budgets of £1.5 million. If they’re lucky, players receive contracts offering them around £1,400 per month. If they’re really lucky, they get paid. Chairmen try to keep the smaller clubs afloat by bringing in high-rolling sponsors, a risky business at best. Despite this background, money is being made in Belgian football. Unfortunately it’s going to a bunch of characters seemingly straight out of a Damon Runyon novel.

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No need to abandon hope just yet if you missed out in the World Cup ticket lottery, as long as you’re rich enough or gullible enough to buy your passport to Germany online. Ian Plenderleith reports

While millions of fans have faced disappointment in their applications to FIFA for World Cup tickets, there are some organisations that seem to be swimming in excess. If you’ve money to light cigars with, you might just make it to Germany after all.

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With the departure of Florentino Pérez, Spanish football says goodbye to one of the great moneymakers

Few recent moments in football have been more magnificent than Ronaldinho’s goal at Stamford Bridge last season. It’s a moment that bears repeating and its use in an advert for Sky is one of the few reasons to be grateful for the hype that the satellite broadcaster invests in the game. Given that Chelsea won that tie, even Blues fans can enjoy it, not least because they can hope that one day Ronaldinho will be playing for them. Petr Cech will know that there was nothing he could do about it. For Barcelona supporters, it is at least a bitter-sweet memory and (we go to press a few days before the second leg of this year’s rematch) one that may have some sort of delayed happy ending. There’s one man we can think of, though, for whom that should qualify as a nightmare moment: Florentino Pérez.

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Dear WSC
I was on the Kop for the Liverpool v Manchester United FA Cup game and inadvertently found myself slap in the middle of a News of the World headline. As reported by that paper on the following Sunday, SICK and DISGUSTING fans brought SHAME on Liverpool FC by singing a celebratory lyric regarding John Arne Riise breaking Alan Smith’s leg to the tune of a recent popular record (I can’t remember its name, but it has Ooh-Ahh in the middle and the 11 to 16 age range love it). I would like to make three things clear to the News of the World journalist who reported this incident. First, it was a loud but small minority of fans who belted out the offending song; most ignored it, while others were shaking their heads sadly in disagreement with the sentiment expressed. Of course, shaking your head sadly, even by a group of people, can’t be heard across a football stadium. Second, there was no mention of Smith being applauded off by the Liverpool fans. This was a bit of an oversight, which I would put down to the tabloid practice of not letting detail or nuance interfere with damning judgment. Thirdly, I was only reading News of the World because I was hungover and couldn’t face the small writing in the broadsheets. As a postscript, the bloke who started the song off originally was only one seat to my right, one row behind me. I may already be being hunted down as an agent of SICKNESS and DISGUSTINGNESS by police who have trawled through CCTV footage of the crowd. And I didn’t even boo Gary Neville.
Rob Lawrence, via email

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Every World Cup it seems that the pundits BBC and ITV choose are not favoured by the masses. Simon Tyers sees that yet again the likely lads and lasses have hung onto their places

This is the time of the year when the BBC and ITV heads of sport start planning out their World Cup coverage – booking commentary positions, working out who the stunt-casting studio experts will be, testing how many visual cliches they can get away with in location reports. Perhaps mindful of the forthcoming charter renewal, the BBC have moved decisively, casting Peter Reid off to Sky months after changing the locks on Peter Schmeichel’s dressing room, while ITV began their traditional mopping-up of former England personnel with Gareth Southgate’s presence on a Carling Cup night as co-commentator, which was deemed so vital he got a close-up at the start of the game.

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