The Archive

UEFA seem intent on changing the transfer system. Guy Osborn & Steve Greenfield explain how this could affect England and beyond

It seems barely a week goes past these ­days without a new proposal to regulate the international movement of players. The most rec­ent have involved reintroducing restrictions on foreigners, standardising transfer win­dows across Europe and effectively abol­ishing the transfer system. Yet again, it appears that poor old Jean-Marc Bosman is the root cause of most of these ideas.

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Most football fans look back at 1981 as the year Ipswich lost the title, and deserved to take it back to Suffolk. David Wangerin disagrees

In the dim and increasingly distant days bef­­­­­­­­­­­­ore the Premiership, live football on TV and the Champions League, it was a widely held assertion that small, settled squads were a desirable thing, and that a collection of a dozen or so talented, mot­ivated and well-organised players stood as good a chance as any of winning the championship – as long as they kept their limbs and ligaments intact and their noses clean.

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Ron Noades continued influence over Crystal Palace and stadium trouble at Oldham Athletic and Swansea City

There are league rules that prevent one person owning two clubs (although as the Peter Johnson case shows, they do not mean much) but there is nothing to stop someone in control of one club from owning another club’s ground. This is the case at Crystal Palace, where the extraordinary terms of their lease with former owner Ron Noades have left him with a significant presence.

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Dan McCauley is not the most popular man in Devon, as David Pay explains

Distinguishing features Slobodan Milosevic lookalike from north Devon. Has also been chairman of Tiverton Town and on the board of Exeter City. According to the Times list of wealthy people, he has a fortune larger than the chairmen of Arsenal, Aston Villa and Chelsea. He is Fat Dan, aka the Fat Controller.

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Friday 1 Dennis Wise, Frank Lampard, Steve Guppy and Trevor Sinclair are the new names in Little Kev's squad to play Belgium. Paul Ince is recalled in place of David Batty, making sure the squad contains no less than the mandatory three players who have been sent off for England in the past 18 months. Newcastle sign Kevin Gallacher from Blackburn for £700,000. A consortium of Icelandic businessmen has made a bid of £6 million to buy Stoke City, hoping to install the national team coach Gudjon Thordarsson as manager in place of the luckless Gary Megson.

Saturday 2 Strugglers' Saturday sees Steve Staunton scandalously sent off in Villa's dismal 0-0 with Liverpool, a game mystifyingly described as "just balloons on sticks" by John Gregory. Bottom club Sheff Wed go goal-crazy against Wimbledon, winning 5-1 in front of a suitably Wimbledon-sized crowd, 18,077. Sunderland are second after pasting Bradford 4-0 at Valley Parade. Everton are reportedly the target of a £50 million bid from Chris Evans and Terry Venables – possibly both in the top two on any fans' list of undesirable owners. India's Baichung Bhutia makes his debut as a sub for Bury, and gets booked after two minutes. "We will probably get more fans than if we'd signed Ronaldo," Bury manager Neil Warnock had predicted. They get 3,603.

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