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The Archive

Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.

 

Honesty test

The problem with a campaign to clean up sport's governing bodies is knowing where to start, as Steve Menary reports

Anti-corruption coalition Transparency International has put together guidelines aimed at stamping out corruption in international sport, including football.

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The back of the net

Live football helped Sky transform the UK television market – and now Rupert Murdoch hopes it can yield similar profits on the internet. Bruce Wilkinson reports

The current spat between the football authorities, Sky and the European Commission may be little more than a sideshow to the most significant media  business event of 2005 – BSkyB’s acquisition of the broadband internet provider Easynet for £211 million, part of a major drive to acquire new media interests around the world. As the EC worries about Murdoch’s monopolistic grip on English football, his henchmen are gaining a stranglehold over what many experts predict to be the future of sports broadcasting – the live coverage of matches over the internet.

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Bidding wars

The 2007-08 Premiership season will not be live on just one channel. Neil Rose explores how much competition there'll be

“For the first time in the history of the Premier League, free-to-air television will have a realistic opportunity to show live Premier League matches.” So said the European Commission. Not during the current shenanigans over competition for television rights, but two years ago when it persuaded the Premier League and Sky to sub-license a measly eight matches (out of 138) to be shown by another broadcaster. Nobody took up the offer.

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Heirs apparently

Sepp Blatter’s weird ways attract derision yet, as Ben Lyttleton reports, the FIFA president is skilfully lining up Michel Platini to succeed him. But Lennart Johansson still hopes Franz Beckenbauer can ride to the rescue

FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s most recent interview in the Financial Times was an odd one, even by his unconventional standards. He laid into Wayne Rooney, urging his coaches to teach him some respect, and claimed that a mystery West Brom director had told him that Chelsea were too good for the Premiership. That was before he criticised the salary players were getting as “pornographic”, which is not the word most people would have chosen to use.

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Court in the act

An injury suffered with Morocco by a Charleroi ‘star’ has put FIFA in the dock in Belgium and, as John Chapman explains, it could hit international football hard

Mogi Bayat’s uncle, Abbas, used to be big in fizzy water. He bought Chaudfontaine, the company not just a bottle of the Belgian eau minérale, and later sold it on to Coca-Cola. He was Chaudfontaine’s CEO and somewhere along the way he purchased the Royal Sporting Football Club of Charleroi, known affectionately to their fans as “the Zebras”.

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