The Archive

Tuesday 2 Rio Ferdinand is dropped from the England squad for the Moldova game after being arrested for drink driving. His mum blames it on alcopops still in his system from the day before when he'd celebrated his England call up with West Ham team-mates. If we're reading Glenn's complex moral code correctly, Rio would have been OK if he'd only beaten his girlfriend. Scottish Secretary Donald Dewar criticizes the SFA for not postponing their World Cup match against Belarus due for Saturday, the day of Princess Diana's funeral, saying, "The government wants Saturday to be a day of remembrance not a day of sport." "Colin Hendry is out and big Donald would be a welcome addition to the back four," chirps the SFA's Jim Farry.

Wednesday 3 Scotland's match is moved to Sunday afternoon after it is established that FIFA weren't opposed to the rescheduling. The Rangers players in the squad had threatened to pull out if the match went ahead on Saturday, their decision possibly not unconnected to the fact that the club's vice-chairman Donald Finlay has led the calls for Jim Farry to resign. In the First Division Nottingham Forest lose their 100% record with a 3-1 home defeat against Manchester City.

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Did Terry Venables take illegal bungs during Teddy Sheringham's transfer to Tottenham?

Church bells peal across the land as the Premier League bungs inquiry finally publish their report. Crowds gather admiringly around anyone who has managed to read it all the way through. The report’s 300 pages, and the ten thousand pages of evidence, focus mainly on the transfer of Teddy Sheringham from Forest to Spurs in 1992. It’s a massively complicated tale, likely to defeat even the most diligent reader in much the same way as the famous Panorama programme on Terry Venables’ dealings at Spurs lost many viewers long before the fiftieth photocopied invoice flashed onto the screen.

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Laura Vanauskas looks at the father and son millionaires who own Belgium's biggest club

Distinguishing features: Constant is a self made millionaire of the old school who presided over the club like it was his family. He liked to think he knew what was best for everyone and was known to have meddled in the daily running of the team. His eldest son, Roger, who took over last season, is simply a chip off the old block.

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Simon Evans tells the tale of how he co-wrote The Rough Guide to European Football

The Hungarian train conductor thought we were two very strange young men. Two Englishmen sat in a train travelling to see Videoton, UEFA Cup finalists in 1985, in a relegation play-off in Salgotarjan, a small ex-mining town in the depressed East of Hungary.

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Scotland's biggest clubs are threatening to resign from the league. Paul Hutton details their bizarre plans

Even the most casual observer of Scottish football can hardly have been surprised by the news that Scotland’s Premier League teams were planning to resign from the League at the end of the season. It was, after all, common knowledge that they had already employed an accountancy firm to investigate how the Scottish game might be improved (bless ’em). More importantly perhaps, almost five whole years had elapsed since the leagues were last tinkered with.

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