Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
A weekly dose of Champions League is not necessarily proving to be a hit in Europe
There’s more than a slight air of desperation hanging around this season’s Champions League, and it’s not just emanating from Bob Wilson. “This first stage of the competition doesn’t interest me,” says Johan Cruyff, and frankly we’d have to lump ourselves in with the thousands of fans who appear to agree with him.
Manchester City fan Mike McDonald is not the most loved figure at Sheffield Utd as Peter Salt explains
Distinguishing features Big reputation, big ego, big car, big company, big money, big mouth, big cigar, big Man City supporter, big chip on his shoulder. He is, without a shadow of a doubt, Big Mac.
The various clubs to be affected by Reg Brealey and Steve Morgan
Sheffield United fans will be only too familiar with the reputation of Reg Brealey, the chairman of their club in the 1980s. The one-time jute magnate is now officially bankrupt and has 20,000 luckless shareholders from a previous company failure on his conscience, but he has been far from idle since leaving Bramall Lane. In conjunction with sidekick Steve Morgon he has recently embarked on an unlikely groundhopping tour, sowing further confusion, debt and dissatisfaction wherever he goes.
Mike Ticher talks to Graham Kelly about the formation of the Premier League, England's World Cup bid and the possibility of a future breakaway
When the Premier League began, you maintained it would benefit football as a whole. How successful has it been?
I think in two respects it’s been very successful. Firstly, commercially. The Premier League wasn’t set up in exactly the way that I envisaged at the start. We didn’t set up the Premier League within the structure of the FA, it was set up as an autonomous company, with its own board of directors and, not unnaturally, it was jealous of its own commercial properties. So to that extent the pattern isn’t as we envisaged. But nonetheless, helped by other factors, such as the Taylor Report and the emergence of satellite television, commercially the FA Premier League, standing alone, has been spectacularly successful. The second respect is the impetus it gave to the development of players. We argued for a number of years about getting the best young players more time with the best coaches, without a great deal of success. The Football League tended to operate at the pace of the slowest club rather than the fastest. Setting up the Premier League has led indirectly to the formation of the academies, and in time, hopefully, we will see more good English players coming through.
Despite going well in Euro 2000 qualification, scandal has hit Romania. Richard Augood reports
These are strange and troubled times for Romanian football. Yet just a couple of months ago everything seemed to be going so well. Romania were in a strong position in Euro 2000 qualifying group seven. On June 5th, Gheorghe Hagi, who had been back at his magnificent best with Galatasaray, was persuaded out of retirement for just one, very important, match. Inspired by Hagi, Romania beat bitter rivals Hungary 2-0. Almost unbelievably, this was the first time Romania had ever beaten the Hungarians in 20 games spread over 68 years.