The Archive

Mathias Kowoll examines Berti Vogts' managerial history and questions the wisdom of putting him in charge of the Scottish national team

“We’re going to take off his kilt,” Hesse’s reg­ional governor Roland Koch said on hearing that Berti Vogts’s Scotland would be in Ger­many’s Euro 2004 qualifying group. So while the Scottish FA picked “the terrier”, back in Germany a pop­ulist politician feels he can get a few cheap laughs from picturing the former national team coach mooning from the Hamp­den dug­out. Such a difference in opinion needs explaining.

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After two weeks on air, ITV's new soap Footballers' Wives has been met with praise and scorn alike.  Joyce Woolridge explains why she hasn't been taken in by the show

Footballers’ Wives is ITV’s contribution to the small sub-genre of football soaps, which also includes BBC’s Playing The Field and Sky’s Dream Team. It has garnered praise in some un­likely quarters: Richard Williams in the Guardian admired its “lean script, functional direction… [and] underplayed acting” and on Radios 1 and 5 a range of BBC employees from Chris Moyles to the Drive “team” enthusiastically plugged their rival channel’s product.

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Japanese journalists have made more of a mark here than their players. In the first of two articles on Asia, Justin McCurry explains what they are writing about

Japanese footballers, or so the punditry zeitgeist goes, are a talentless bunch, courted by the likes of Bolton and Portsmouth only to generate income – buy one, and get planeloads of spendthrift groupies free. In Japan, most of the salivating is being done not in boardrooms, but in tabloid newsrooms, where the ad­ventures of Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi, Junichi Inamoto et al generate acres of copy – some of it funny, much of it banal, but all of it gratefully received by the football-loving public.

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Ian Plenderleith looks into the legal jusitfication for the Premier League and Football League's copyrighting of their fixtures

Remember the outcry when the Football Lea­gue and the Premier League began charging websites for publishing their fixture lists? How could the leagues possibly hold the copy­right over an item of public information such as a football fixture, many wondered. Al­though the furore has subsided, the ques­tion has never been satisfactorily answered. Mean­while, the leagues, under their joint venture Football Dataco, have been making money for nothing.

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India is a potential superpower of Asian football, but huge support has not been matched by dynamic leadership on the subcontinent. Dan Brennan reports

Last month Brazilian goal-machine Barreto scored the only goal in a fiercely fought local derby in front of 120,000 fans. Next month he will be lining up against Shevchenko. He plays not at the Maracana or the San Siro, but at the Saltlake Stadium in Calcutta, where his team McDowell Mohun Bagan were taking on East Bengal in the opening game of India’s sixth National League season. While cricket may hog the media limelight and the sponsors’ money, in many parts of India, such as Bengal, Goa and Kerala, football is the main sporting obsession. In one half of India’s second city, Barreto is a cult figure.

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