The Archive

The top two teams in the Deloitte Football Money League are Real Madrid and Manchester Utd. But as Roger Titford finds out, the income they rely on differs greatly

We live in an era when there are prizes for everything: player of the season, calendar of the year, the best pie, the most improved website and many more self-regarding baubles. Combine this with the obsession to put a value on anything in football – press red now for a cost-benefit analysis on that through ball – and we have (hopefully tongue in cheek but probably not) the Deloitte Football Money League (DFML).

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Is it offensive to taunt people with a word they use about themselves? Some believe neither Arsenal nor Spurs fans know what they’re saying, as Jon Spurling reports

In November 2005, Alan Sefton, the overseer of “Arsenal in the community”, announced that the club would be setting up five soccer schools across Israel. Arsenal are already involved in working with a number of primary schools in mixed Jewish/Muslim areas of London, and children are encouraged to co-present religious festivals before playing football together. Sefton later confirmed his and the club’s belief that “…football unites people of different classes, social groups, races and nationalities… We don’t want it to focus on divisions and tribalism.”

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  An attempt to measure racism in the politically charged world of Israeli football appears to be back-firing, reports Shaul Adar

With Maccabi Haifa on their way to a third consecutive championship, the Israeli league isn’t the most exciting, bar daily news about Russian oligarchs pumping in money. But every Monday another Israeli football league is a source of drama and shocks. Every week, 50 observers from New Israel Fund, an über-liberal institution for promoting democratic values, go to the premier league grounds and file reports on racist chanting. All those chants are calculated by a complicated mathematical equation based on the severity of the events, their length and the number of fans taking part; they end up negative points published in a league table.

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Barney Ronay and his friends spent many a happy hour following football on Ceefax, but teletext is firmly on the retreat thanks to the digital revolution

The disappearance of a defiantly non-interactive, distinctly uncool and often misspelt page of blue-and-white text might not seem such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But so far the imminent demise of Ceefax seems to have gone pretty much unnoticed. No public protest, no online petitions, no angry letters to national newspapers. Not that it’s happened yet, but it will. Ceefax, Teletext and the vaguely knocked-off looking versions that have recently ceased appearing on Channel Four and Five are all about to be sacrificed for good at the altar of digital communication. The government’s plans to replace all existing analogue TV signals with digital (the Big Switch Off, in irritating New Labour speak) get into gear later this year. The first transmitters will be junked in 2008, with Scotland’s Border region leading the revolution from above.

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Sunday 1 The SPL title may have been decided at Tynecastle, where Hearts go two up against Celtic but lose 3‑2 to two goals in the last three minutes. Celtic take a seven-point lead. Lincoln manager Keith Alexander is sent “on leave” by the club, who are 15th in League Two.

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