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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Rwanda as a nation state was close to extinction a decade ago, but the mixed-race side will line-up against the hosts Tunisia in the  opening game of the ANC after financial backing from the country's president, as Alan Duncan writes

If we are to believe FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s assertion that “the philosophy of football is to offer hope”, then it goes without saying that some nations are more in need of football than others. While it is unclear exactly when Blatter started to spread the word, it would be hard to believe that the minute-long silence that followed his laying of a wreath at Rwanda’s genocide memorial in the central African country’s capital, Kigali, on April 10, 2002, did not help in shaping this view.

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Despite only recently joining England's elite in the Premier League, Birmingham City are a club with big ambitions. Blues supporter Kenneth Jones explains why their rivalry with Villa has been all the more intense recently and why the rapid increase in ticket prices has dissuaded some supporters

Could City’s crowds get much bigger than now?
Undoubtedly. City have big local support and, since promotion, more season-ticket holders than Villa. With the team on the up, the only problem might be the mystifying decision to increase standard tick­et prices by £10, meaning tickets for games which would have been rapid sell-outs last year have been available on general sale leading up to the match. Any increase in crowd sizes is also constrained by the 30,000 capacity at St Andrew’s, but many would agree there is little point having a brand new £12 million main stand in Division One.

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And you think rebuilding Wembley was a saga. Paul Doyle reports on the homelessness crisis that could bring the Republic of Ireland to a ground nearer than you would think

Can Irish football recover from its current crisis? A nation that was last year trying to convince the continent it should co-host Euro 2008 is set to admit that it cannot, in fact, host its own home matches.

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