Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
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.
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.
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
A new generation of football magazines has appeared in Europe of late, breaking the monopoly of established, establishment titles. The first of an occasional series looks at the subversion and humour attracting readers in Germany. Philipp Koster reports
The magazine (literally 11 friends) began in April 2000 with a print run of 2,500. There was no marketing department or organised distribution, just two Arminia Bielefeld fans with the desire to produce magazines. Before that we’d had a small fanzine called Um halb vier war die Welt noch in Ordnung (At half three the world was still OK) – and noticed that supporters liked a certain type of writing: ironic and critical of the growing commercialisation of football. We naturally thought that these fans needed a national voice.
After Sheikhgate where next for Sven, and more importantly who next for the FA
So, Sven’s off, to the undisguised delight of his media detractors, who want him replaced with a tracksuited fusion of Henry V, the Duke of Wellington and Bomber Harris, who will spur the team on by sheer force of bellowing, in the dressing room and on the touchline.