The Archive

The Old Firm's proposal to join the Premier League

Ten years ago this summer, the FA published its Blueprint for Football, which first made explicit its support for the breakaway Premier League, to be for­med for the start of the 1992-93 season. At the time it was seen by many, including us, as a radical and damaging step which threatened to undermine the trad­itional bonds between the top of the game and the bottom. The desire of the Prem­ier League clubs to keep a greater proportion of the game’s revenue for themselves, scandalously endorsed by the FA, seem­ed likely to send many of the smaller clubs to the wall.

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The choice of Colombia as the host nation for the Copa America caused much controversy and country's ability to host the tournament was called into question. Simeon Tegel reports

Allowing Colombia to host the Copa América was either a very brave decision or a very fool­ish one. Unfortunately for the officials of the South American Football Confederation (Con­mebol), it was the second alternative which increasingly looked the more accurate description in the run-up to the July tournament, the region’s biennial equivalent of the European Championship.

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Justin McCurry reports on how the rising political tensions in South Korea and Japan should not affect the 2002 World Cup

Logistically, awarding the 2002 World Cup to Japan and South Korea was a classic FIFA fudge, but it did raise hopes that the countries would put aside their historical differences and co-operate to make the tournament a success. With kick-off less than a year away, however, “football diplomacy” is proving no match for emotions stirred up by events of more than half a century ago.

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The global trade in young players is reaching disturbing new levels. Neil Wills details some of the cases that have led to European clubs being accused of abuse and then slavery

In June, a 12-year-old, Marco Quotschalla, was sold by Bayer Leverkusen to Cologne for £60,000. Re­markably, it wasn’t even his first transfer, since Co­l­ogne had sold him to Leverkusen just a year before. Marco’s signing caused a stir in the Ger­man media principally because he is German and there’s a sense that such a thing should not happen to a nice European child. Sadly, much less attention is paid to the thous­ands of youngsters who are being brought over to Eur­ope from South America and Africa in increasing num­bers with promises of big money and stardom.

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In the first of a series on players who have had an unusual appeal to fans, Al Needham mourns the failure of his schoolmate to hit the heights

It’s a galling experience when you realise you’ll never make it as a football star, but even more of a kick in the nuts when you live vicariously through someone else and they don’t manage it either. Only two people I grew up with made it in football; one was a call girl pictured on the front of the News of the World with Alan Hudson. The other was Wayne Fairclough. 

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