The Archive

As well as looking at sad stats for transfers and appearances, Jamie Rainbow takes in unofficial Stoke City and official Accrington Stanley

You get what you pay for, we’re often told. Not in the world of football you don’t, where, according to a site devoted to the transfer market, Transfer News, financial outlay bears little or – in the case of Newcastle – no relation to success. Since the inception of the Premier League in 1992, the three heaviest spending clubs have been Newcastle, Liverpool and Everton, none of whom currently show any signs of justifying their massive investments. 

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Neil Wills reads Tom Finney's book from 1958 and cannot help but think that, despite certain differences, parts of the game remain the same

An evil press fabricates stories to provoke trouble. Players are paid to throw games. England’s administrators are out of touch with reality. Italian football is dogged by too many foreign signings and the chican­ery of top industrialists. The skewed allocation of Cup final tickets leads to a healthy market for touts. Fans invade the pitch to assault players, and talk of a Eur­opean super league continues unabated. Welcome to 1958.

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Paul Whitehouse tells WSC about his love for Spurs, the basis of Ron Manager and the first ever pop record he brought

Who did you want to be when you were a kid in the playground?
George Best, Alan Ball. I did play all the time when I was a kid, I wanted to be a footballer more than anything else. I liked the ad hoc games best, playing on concrete.

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Ian Plenderleith remembers the night when it felt like Lincoln could beat anyone

It wasn’t the size of the Sheffield United team that came to Sincil Bank that had the home support wor­ried. It was the number of away fans. You could see them crossing the bridge from the coach park in the gap between the old wooden South Park and St And­rews stands. It was a never-ending stream and, for the only time in all the matches I ever saw at Lincoln, they took over the entire swath of open-top terrace that stret­ched alongside the ground, leaving the home fans to cram in behind the goal at the Railway End.

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The Euro 2000 play-off draw has pitted the two oldest foes in Football against each other, but does anyone outside of Britain care?

“I would not be Kevin Keegan if I did not get excited about this,” said the England manager in a blinding flash of self-awareness on hearing the Euro 2000 play-off draw. Unfortunately, he is Kev­in Keegan, and his face was splashed all over the papers after England and Scotland came out of the hat together (or what passes for a hat at UEFA headquarters these days).

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