Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Ray Bloomfield explains to Andy Lyons how he was the middle man in certain deals and that not all agents are bad guys
The easiest way to describe what I do is that I am a go-between. I watch several matches a week, sometimes as many as ten. If a club is looking for a particular type of player, I have a look around and try to find them.
Wednesday 1 Leicester's Tony Cottee and Andrew Impey are charged with misconduct by the FA after an investigation into how tickets for the 1999 Worthington Cup final ended up on the black market. A further 25 players and officials at Leicester have been charged with failing to assist the inquiry. "It's an absolute farce," says Neil Lennon. "We were given forms and asked to write out who we gave our tickets to but no deadline was given." The average age of the creaking Middlesbrough midfield will be lowered significantly with the return of Juninho, back on loan from Atletico Madrid until the end of the season. The Rep of Ireland beat Yugoslavia 2-1 in a Euro 2000 qualifier.
Though considered a relatively recent phenomenon, Matthew Taylor throws light upon the role agents have played in football through the years
Alf Common didn’t make much money when he moved from Sunderland to Middlesbrough as the first £1,000 footballer in 1905. In fact, it is not clear that he benefited at all. The Teesside club acquired a powerful centre-forward who helped to keep them in the First Division and the Wearsiders received a hefty cheque in return. Restricted by the maximum wage law, all Common officially made out of the transaction was his £10 signing-on fee. Things would have been different, one suspects, if he had had an agent.
Dear WSC
So Adam Powley thinks Chelsea have “obscene ticket prices” (WSC 151). He’s right, obviously, but having paid £29 to watch Tottenham play Chelsea from a seat situated behind the police control room at White Hart Lane last season, I hardly think Spurs fans are in a position to take the moral high ground. As for Chelsea’s “contrived glamour image”, I can only wonder at how he sees the image of his own club. “Real” glamour perhaps?
Colin Maitland, Ascot
Brian Clough amongst others used to call them cheats. Nick Varley remembers them for a bit more than that
Let’s play a quick game of word association. Liverpool? Bill Shankly and the boot room. Keegan and Toshack. Barnes and Beardsley. Dominance in the late 1970s and 1980s. Manchester United? Sir Matt Busby’s Babes and Sir Alex Ferguson’s Fledglings. Charlton and Best. Beckham and Giggs. Utter dominance in the late 1990s. And Leeds? The cynical and mean Don Revie. Jack “Little Black Book” Charlton and Norman “Bites Yer Legs” Hunter. And David Batty, the modern reincarnation of the aggression of Billy Bremner. Oh, and the odd trophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s too.