The Archive

Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.

The kids are alright?

With the Bosman judgment likely to prove a disincentive for clubs to carry on with youth development programmes, Chris Hall looks at the controversy surrounding the treatment of young footballers by professional clubs

Terry Murphy, the man in charge of the youth development programme at Arsenal, showed me a chart which illustrates how many players the club have in each position, in each age group, from the youngest players at under-10, to the first team. He uses this chart to plan how many boys will be retained at Arsenal’s centre of excellence from year to year.

Fools’ goals

An insight to how everything within the English game revolves around entertainment and how it differs to the rest of Europe

Seen any good goals lately? Chances are you have. Several times over. Plenty of bad ones, too. Match of the Day dutifully catalogues all the Premier League goals and they pop up again – and again – on Sky’s live coverage. Divisions One to Three get the same treatment in Endsleigh League Extra in the early hours of Tuesday. It’s a great programme, sadly on too late for the BAFTA Award judges to see, alternating the spectacular and the messy – own goals lashed into the roof of the net by shaven-headed midfielders who’d dropped back to help out, mis-hit daisy-cutters that trundle through the legs of the on-loan keeper to the despair of the away fans huddled together, heads cradled in hands.