Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
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.
As the anti-racism organisation celebrates its tenth birthday, Tom Davies spoke to Kick It Out co-ordinator Piara Powar about progress made and the battle still ahead
With the well established Kick It Out campaign now ten seasons old, it’s easy to forget just how marginal an issue anti-racism in football once was. In the 1980s it took the brave efforts of supporters themselves, often at the places with the worst reputations such as Leeds and Chelsea, to drag the issue to public prominence. And it’s tempting, now, to congratulate ourselves on just how far we’ve come.
While the Czech Pavel Nedved celebrates being named European Footballer of the Year, Ian Farrell remembers the rapid decline of a previous winner, from slightly further east
Such is the general view of football in eastern Europe today, it takes some effort to imagine teams from there electrifying the sport and winning admirers across the world. But in the mid 1980s, Dynamo Kiev, together with the virtually interchangeable USSR side also coached by Valery Lobanovski, took football to another level with a conception of the game as a living machine. Total Football meets applied mathematics. This lent itself easily to Cold War stereotyping – collectivised football played by faceless automata – but the play was a world away from the drabness of the Eastern Bloc, thanks mainly to Oleg Blokhin, Alexander Zavarov and, foremost among them, Igor Belanov.
Football agents enjoy little in the way of popularity and much in the way of blame. But Athole Still, a man who can claim to be responsible for the appointment of one of his clients as the current England coach, believes his profession is a must in modern football and wants to clean up its image
Do footballers need agents?
Frankly, football is now part of the entertainment business. In the entertainment business worldwide, agents have been established for 150 years or so. So I would say everyone in football who has a desire to have a long-term career must have an agent and it must be one who is fully involved in football, who knows what’s going on. Some use a lawyer instead. A lawyer may do the contracts side perfectly well, but there is infinitely more to being a good agent than doing contracts. It’s much more important now in relation to things like the Bosman rule. At the start of this season, for instance, there were something like 530 players out of work: it’s now a bit of a dogfight, unless you’re a star. But less than five per cent of footballers are what you could call real stars. The vast majority of players need somebody with their ear to the ground who knows what’s going on.
Though far from ever-present, agents have been around longer than you might think. John Harding charts their changing role back to the days when they built whole teams
The term “football agent” first entered the language in the 1890s, as the professional game began to expand. The main purpose of the agent was to place players with clubs. For a time, they did good business: in 1893, Middlesbrough Ironopolis had its playing strength built up from scratch in about three days by one unnamed agent. But clubs soon became suspicious of the ties developing between players and “outsiders”. Control was all-important and, once the maximum wage was instituted in 1900, along with the contractual straitjacket called the retain-and-transfer system, agents faded away. The scout was soon providing clubs with as many players as they needed for a fraction of the cost.