Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Doug Everitt is a typical grey-haired accountant – and the chairman of Grimsby Town. Ian Rodwell takes a deeper look at the man who looks odds-on to oversee another relegation
Distinguishing features A typical, grey-haired, middle-aged accountant. Vice-chairman Bryan Huxford, who seems to think of himself as a local celebrity, has most of the contact with the media.
Everyone insists scrapping transfer fees would mean chaos. But, in the first of two articles, Pierre Lanfranchi and Matthew Taylor argue it might finally bring the industry up to date
Imagine football without transfer fees. Journalists, financial analysts and sports lawyers – not to mention directors, managers and players – have apparently been doing little else since the European Commission’s “shock” announcement that the present system of clubs profiting from the movement of players must come to an end. In Britain at least, predictions have tended towards the catastrophic: take away transfer fees and small clubs would die, top players would earn even more and all manner of chaos would ensue.
French clubs, heavy expoters of talent, are pleading with their government for help. Neil McCarthy believes it's an opportunity to make some serious reforms
The threat to the transfer system has come as a blow to French clubs just as they had found new confidence. Nicolas Anelka’s £22 million return to Paris Saint-Germain in the summer was the prime symbol of the new euphoria and, more importantly, the new money in French football. Behind the scenes, club presidents had begun to believe they could actually catch up with their English, Italian and Spanish rivals.
Refs, whines and videotape
Was that really the first week of the Premiership season, or was it an “ironic” imitation? All the familiar elements that we have come to take for granted from the shoutiest league in the world were present: refereeing controversy, managers up in arms, foreign players as victims and/or villains, and everything monitored in excruciating slow-motion by Sky.
Football's new money needs to be managed sensibly to keep the game sustainable, says Matthew Garrahan
When Alan Sugar spoke of the “prune juice effect” in his address to the Oxford Union in 1997 he was not talking about how his stomach felt after seeing Darren Anderton limp off the field for the umpteenth time. Sugar used the term – cogently and correctly – to describe the inability of professional football clubs to manage the huge amounts of money coming into the game.