Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Doug Stenhouse sheds some light on the colourful history of Berwick Rangers
How would you assess the playing standard in Scottish Division Two?
The standard is certainly better in Division One, with some full-time squads. However, clubs such as Clyde have done well with part-timers. It’s possible most Second Division boards are happy to stay where they are, knowing all too well that higher standards mean higher salaries they can ill afford.
Al Needham used to doubt that football could take Asia by storm. But then he saw the film Shaolin Soccer and his reservations were sent flying by surprsingly violent monks
Like most people, I fretted about the 2002 World Cup and FIFA’s latest attempt to foist football upon south-east Asia. I knew about the trials and tribulations of the J-League. I remembered the wave of apathy across America in 1994. I worried about the faddy nature of the area towards western trends. I was a patronising, know-nothing get, as it turned out, but had I seen one of the biggest films to come out of Hong Kong in 2001, I would have realised that well in advance.
Peter Robinson has photographed football across five decades, as his new book records. But in spite of his unparalleled career, the Premier League want him to start again
My first involvement with football came through meeting someone I knew in the street who told me that the Football League Review was looking for a regular photographer. This was the League’s official magazine, produced on a shoestring initially. It was included as an optional insert with club programmes. Most of the lower division clubs took it because they needed something to pad out their programmes, most of which were only the size of the Review itself. Some of the wealthier clubs with bigger programmes didn’t want it, though, and that affected their level of co-operation with me when it came to taking pictures. The League wanted a range of clubs to feature, though you couldn’t hope to cover all 92 in a season even when the Review went weekly.
Want to buy a stake in your club? Need to check whether it's worth what you're paying, or 14,975 times less? Or just keen to know if they're going out of business? Ian Plenderleith takes stock of online football finance
Proving that the internet may still be the last refuge of scam merchants, WSC was recently sent a link to a website called Framed Share that allows fans to buy smartly framed single share certificates in football clubs. “In the past only the richest football fans could afford to be a shareholder in various football clubs and have their say in how the club is run,” says the blurb, as if we had just emerged from an era when only the wealthy had the nous to pick up a phone and talk to a stockbroker.
Monday 1 On transfer deadline day, Chelsea finally snap up Claude Makelele from Real Madrid for, ooh, £80 million or so. Everton fans might be pleased by the arrival of James McFadden from Motherwell, but possibly less excited by that of Kevin Kilbane and the return on loan of Franny Jeffers. Among other loan deals, Marcus Bent leaves impoverished Ipswich for Leicester and Portsmouth take Jason Roberts from West Brom.