The Archive

The player's personal website: a wonderful way for starrs to keep in touch with their fans, or gigantic ego-trips by names big and small wth nothing worth saying? Ian Plenderleith examines the evidence

If footballers have anything of interest to say nowadays, they tend to keep it to themselves, or they save it for their post-retirement, tell-all memoirs. In the meantime, they offload their mental leftovers on to the internet. This month’s column takes you on a whistle-stop tour of players’ online diaries to save you the trouble of surfing the net for trite nothings.

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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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Never mind the Champions League, here’s the Hellenic: the television claims that it’s showing live football – but 125 people in west Berkshire know better as Roger Titford witnesses

It is a dark, wet Tuesday. The leaves are coming down and the league tables are shaping up. It’s a big night at all levels. Manchester United and Arsenal are on ITV in the Champions League. My boys, Reading, are away in the Championship (on local radio) while the LDV parks itself into view. But my eye is caught again by the crude, A4, home-crafted poster on the town noticeboards; no hype or promises, just pure facts – Hungerford v Didcot, Hellenic League, KO 7.45pm.

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Four goals in his first nine Cardiff games have revived the stock of a player who had seemed to be just a momentary over-achiever. Helen Duff investigates

Sod’s law: it’s never the players we want to hear more from who develop a taste for confession. Most of us could die happy if we never had to read any more of David Beckham’s over-publicised disclosures, but – conversely – would love to know what goes on inside the heads of those whose form is so bafflingly inconsistent it must have a root in their psyches.

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What started as a means of compelling pools companies to contribute to football has become a way to harass webzines. Ian Plenderleith reports on the battle raging over the copyright status of fixtures

The issue of copyright for football fixtures (see WSC 181) is in the news again after DataCo – the FA and Football League’s joint commercial venture – closed the Watford webzine Blind, Stupid and Desperate (BSaD) for listing, ahead of time, Watford’s fixture with Leicester City in October.

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