The Archive

Having won the Premiership for the sixth time in eight seasons, are Manchester United in a (European) league of their own?

­So, another stroll to the title for Manchester United with records broken in the process for the number of goals scored and the points margin ahead of second place. Is it all getting a bit too easy? The Sunday Times thinks so, suggesting they “are on the threshold of the sort of monopoly Rangers enjoy in Scotland”.  The relative ease with which United won their sixth title in eight years has been contrasted with more closely contested championships elsewhere, with Lazio still pushing Juventus in Italy, Bayer Leverkusen leading Bayern Munich going into the final fortnight of the Bundesliga and as many as four teams with a realistic chance of winning the Spanish league with three games left.

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Football in Greece is turning increasingly ugly, tainted by both hooliganism and corruption. Paul Pomonis reports

When fans of Olympiakos used stones, lumps of wood and petrol bombs to attack a bus carrying AEK Athens supporters to their Greek Cup semi-final second leg last month, there can have been few in Greek football who were either shocked or surprised. Violence and corruption have been escalating for years and the AEK-Olympiakos feud is the  most poisonous of all in the festering domestic game.

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Poor management, failed takeovers and petty squabbling – the struggles facing Cardiff City, West Bromwich Albion, Oxford United and Barnet

“It is almost as if the club has forgotten how to do anything successfully,” one recent visitor to a Cardiff City internet bulletin board re­marked. That includes selling it to a member of the Sullivan family, which has been a reg­ular agenda item since the early 1990s, when David Sullivan first expressed an inter­­est.

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MLS has abandoned the Americanisms in soccer to please supporters familiar with the game as it is played across the rest of the globe. Mike Woitalla reports

When Major League Soccer kicked off for its fifth season last month, there were a number of new rules for the fans to get used to. For once, however, they were intended to drag the US back towards the mainstream of world football. Arguments over the rules in the MLS date back to a meeting in New York some years ago. Those present plot­ted the return of a professional league in 1996. And they believed in enlarging the goals.

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Bill Costley, the Kilmarnock chairman, is a chef with a long term plan for his club. Graeme Jamieson investigates Aryshire's answer to Delia

Distinguishing features A respectable, bespectacled gentleman with a headline writer’s dream name. And a moustache.

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