The Archive

Michel Platini hopes to become FIFA president one day by campaigning against clubs' financial recklessness, explains Ben Lyttleton

FIFA executive committee member Michel Platini has launched a one-man crusade to clean up football and vowed to punish clubs that consistently spend beyond their means. “Football is a game and I will do everything I can to defend it against businessmen,” said the former France midfielder and national-team coach. “Everything has been done to take away the real value of football. These days we’re always talking about the European Commission, G-14 and the Stock Exchange. Of course the game needs money, but money must never come before the game.”

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Laws in Argentina have been changed to protect badly run clubs. Martin Gambarotta examines the peso, the dollar and the 'inflation effect'. 

The president of Argentina, Néstor Kirchner, has a dif­ficult job. The country owes bondholders from Tok­yo to Milan $90 billion (£50bn). That’s a debt no football club can equal. Argentina defaulted on that debt in 2001. Back then the entire debt of the 20 first division football clubs amounted to $291m. The coun­try was about to go up in flames and beloved football clubs were on the verge of burning with it. Boca Juniors, arguably the biggest club, had debts of 40 million pesos. But by 2002 people were asking: “Forty million what?”

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Should books about football violence be on the top shelf? Rob Chapman believes that the success of ‘hoolie porn’ is due to some men’s rather odd obsession with crime

About 20 years ago I used to work in one of Britain’s hardest and most dangerous borstals. I mentioned this fact to the husband of my cousin one day at a family get-together. “Oh good, tell me more,” he said, fetching me another drink. “I love villainy tales. They give me an erection.” Yes, that’s what he said. These people do exist. He wasn’t the least bit discouraged when I told him that all I did was teach remedial English to a stan­dard whereby the average semi-literate car thief or burglar might at least be able to grasp the rudiments of a Sun editorial. I haven’t seen him for years but I bet he reads hoolie-books. I imagine most of the commissioning editors who publish the stuff are a bit like him, too. They love a bit of rough and they’ve created a veritable industry out of “literature” that documents the exploits of former, and in some cases not so former, football hooligans.

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Coming to a ground near you – a broadsheet journalist who knows little about football and less about hooliganism, but is still writing about them, to Barnay Ronay's fury

Football is in the grip of a new and terrifying menace: journalists writing articles about hooliganism. Not to mention low-budget British films about hooliganism, journalists writing articles about low-budget films about hooliganism – and now a new and even more sinister threat: football mag­azines publishing articles about newspaper stories about hooliganism.

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Corruption, maimings, murder – football is a risky business in some countries. As Dan Brennan explains, success can come with an unbearably heavy price in Tbilisi

Football, for Georgians, is the source of ex­treme and conflicting emotions. On the one hand, this country of barely five million people, with an econ­omy still struggling to find its way out of the doldrums 12 years after independence, has a re­markable track record of pro­ducing wonderfully skil­ful footballers.

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