Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
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.
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).
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.
It may be no surprise that you can get great English coverage of football in Ireland, but Ian Plenderleith tracks down individual sites that cover Poland, Slovakia and even the whole of South America
Sometimes a Google search of your club’s name can take you to interesting places. Sligo, for example. If I hadn’t been looking for an obscure fact about Lincoln City, I would likely have discovered too late that the Imps were scheduled to play Sligo Rovers in a pre-season tournament in July. As it was, I was able to cancel my summer holiday in Tuscany and reschedule for the Emerald Isle instead (some parts of this paragraph are a lie).
How do you buy votes if you are a club chairman in Buenos Aires? Hire Maradona and try to avoid falling out with your star striker, as Martin Gambarotta explains
That football and politics mix in Argentina is nothing new. But rarely has there been such an explicit case than the recent events at Boca Juniors. Mauricio Macri, the club’s millionaire president who runs his own centre-right party, is running for the lower house of congress in Buenos Aires in the election scheduled for October.