Howard Borrell gives us a brief history of Chesterfield
1866 Chesterfield FC founded, making them the fourth oldest league club still in existence. They take their nickname from the town’s twisted church spire constructed from unseasoned timbers.
The Archive
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.
Twenty years after the start of the Alliance Premier League, or Conference, Simon Bell asks if it was all a good idea
Good idea at the time: in a certain light it still does. When the “cream” of the English non-League game were brought together 20 years ago as the Alliance Premier League, the agenda was clear enough and the will firm. The annual farce of election and re-election had to end, giving way to meritocratic promotion from a single, national, non-League division comprising the best and best-run clubs outside the full-time game. At the same time the lower rungs of the non-League game set about a grand overhaul to form a “pyramid” with the Alliance (subsequently the Gola League and then the Conference) at its pinnacle. It was the way forward.
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.