The Archive

With the next Premier League deal in the offing, ITV’s Jim Rosenthal discusses changes in broadcasting since the arrival of Sky and casts doubt on Duncan Ferguson’s mystique

What has been the main impact of Sky since 1992 from the broadcasters’ point of view?
They’ve taken football coverage on to a new level and basically, for us, they have created a lot of work within the industry. Foot­ball saved Sky, but in return people in TV recognise what Sky have done for football. They have ob­viously created a vast am­ount of wealth for the game – wealth that football has spent as it always will, not necessarily wisely. If you give football club chairmen £1, they will always spend £1.10.

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Dear WSC
What with Scotland outplaying England over two legs in the recent Euro 2000 play-off and Sunderland returning with nothing after playing Liverpool off the park a few days later, I have come to the conclusion that professional football is a mockery of a game. As a Liverpool fan, I was delighted with the result of the game at the Stadium of Light but as a football fan I would generally prefer to see the best sides winning. With this in mind, I propose a minor change in the rules of professional football. I think that we should lobby FIFA to rid football of goals. At the end of many a game, the best team on the day has failed to get what they rightly deserve just because they have failed to score, which is blatantly unfair. What we should do is replace the “goals system” with a system similar to the one on TV’s Ready, Steady, Cook! programme. If one section of the crowd was replaced by a section of neutral fans, this wouldn’t be too hard to implement. Simply issue them with cards depicting a footballing equivalent of “Green Peppers” and “Red Tomatoes” (meat pies and cold cups of tea, for example) and get the ref to ask them at the end of the game which team they would prefer to win. OK, so Man Utd wouldn’t fare too well as most neutrals enjoy watching them lose, but no system is without its flaws and would this be a bad thing anyway? FIFA has always strived to find a way of ensuring fair play and the best teams winning but up to now have only come up with rubbish like two referees. I think my system may be just what they are looking for.
Phil Griffiths, via email

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The internet is not just for the younger generation. Football managers are learning to embrace it, as Jamie Rainbow found out

The League Managers Association have created a useful website for their members. One outstanding ­feature is a service for unemployed coaches, enabling them to display their CVs (or in the case of Ian Atkins, their ­autobiography) to any potential employers. Atkins’s playing and managerial career are reproduced in painstaking detail – although one wonders whether his time spent playing for Shrewsbury in the late 1970s will have much bearing on his ability to manage a football club successfully today. Nor are his credentials much enhanced by telling us that: “Holding off the challenge of some of the game’s best known faces, I secured the job of manager at Doncaster Rovers.”

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Wednesday 1 Holders Spurs slink out of the Worthington Cup at Fulham, their 3-1 defeat described by George Graham as "by far our worst performance since I became manager". A crowd of 17,000 sees Aston Villa trounce Southampton 4-0. "The crowds have been crap because we've played crap until tonight," says the forthright John Gregory. In the Scottish equivalent Rangers' mini-crisis continues with an extra-time defeat at Aberdeen (yes, Aberdeen). Huddersfield threaten legal action against the Football League for referee Jeff Winter's failure to award a penalty during their Worthington match against Wimbledon. That'll work. Darlington are the lucky losers drawn to play at Villa in the third round of the FA Cup. "I have a direct line to the big man upstairs," says their safe-cracking chairman. The government rejects plans for the new Wembley, on the grounds that it would not be able to stage major athletics tournaments as well as football matches.

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Have Man Utd and its staff become more important than the actual Championship itself?

Manchester United’s participation in the “world club championship” in Brazil this month might have been designed to make a point about the unhealthy imbalance between the English champions and every other club in the land.

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