The Archive

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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Few players have made more impressive starts at a club than scoring 30 goals in half a season; few have then done less to earn their wages, writes Gordon Cairns

Marco Negri’s four years at Glasgow Rangers is one of the strangest episodes in the club’s history. Signed from Perugia for £3.5 million, the Italian striker scored 30 goals before Christmas in 1997-98, then barely made another appearance as he saw out the remainder of his four-year, £18,000-a-week contract.

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The world’s largest continent wants a World Cup and to end European football’s colonialism. Matthew Hall reports from the latest FIFA congress on Asia’s big plans

“Thank you and enjoy your dessert,” said Youssou N’Dour, the Senegalese music star as he ended his performance at FIFA’s 55th congress in Marrakech in September. N’Dour was the musical entertainment during the “gala dinner”, an opportunity to hit the trough with 600 people from every country on Earth (except Yemen, suspended, and Libya, who got lost on the way, apparently).

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Is Russian football corrupt, internationally and domestically? That’s what Latvia’s captain was reported to have said and some clubs agree, as Dan Brennan reports

Ever since Stalin got together with Hitler to annex the Baltic states in 1940 as part of a secret carve-up, relations between Latvia and Russia have remained strained, something that 14 years of independence has done little to patch over. A Russian newspaper recently called for all good Russians to boycott Latvian tinned sprats – a culinary favourite since Soviet times – in protest at discrimination against Latvia’s Russian community. And August’s World Cup qualifier between the two countries in Riga threatened to spark a new international incident.

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There’s nothing wrong with living in the past: the oldest clubs in England, Scotland and Wales are justly proud of their heritage. But, writes Ian Plenderleith, they can’t agree on who invented the crossbar

Fancy boasting that you’re in the same club as Sepp Blatter and Sven-Göran Eriksson? No, it’s not GOAL (the Grand Order of Ageing Lotharios), but the world’s oldest football club, Sheffield FC, founded in 1857 and still very much proud of the fact. And for £2.50 a month you can boast not just an enamel badge and four free tickets to a North Counties East Football League game of your choice, but fellow membership alongside the game’s balding but well tanned elder statesmen.

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