Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
As financial uncertainty looms at Manchester United, Ashley Shaw explores how Wayne Rooney’s interference may have forced the hand of the Glazer family.
So the cat is finally out of the bag. Whatever the repercussions of the Wayne Rooney saga, we now know that concerns over the club’s ownership extend into the dressing room. On the face it, United’s American owners have given in to player power at the risk of losing their most saleable asset for a song in the summer.
The job description of manager in Argentina is far removed from the role in European football. Joel Richards explains why this is causing problems for some of the South American clubs
Carlos Bianchi walked in to rousing applause. Known as “the Viceroy”, the most successful coach in Boca Juniors history was back at the Bombonera and the press room was packed. Yet despite his nine trophies in five years at Boca, Bianchi was not being unveiled as the new coach. In his third spell at the club, he would help out his former team-mate and current coach Carlos Ischia, but from behind the scenes. He would be el manager.
Mark Brophy questions club influence when so many players are caught bending the rules of the game
A lucky viewer watching Sky’s Goals on Sunday show a few weeks ago will have seen the star pairing, Ian Wright and Jermain Defoe, being quizzed on that weekend’s horror tackle furore. Have you, the question went, ever witnessed a manager telling his players to hurt the opposition deliberately? Jermain and Ian agreed that would never happen, though Wright then offered the caveat that no one needed to tell some of his ex-team-mates to do that – they were naturals at it.
With the Soviet national team causing huge disappointment at the 1952 Olympics, Sasha Goryunov explains how the fallout had huge ramifications for the Soviet league
The long-term significance
This was a year of upheaval for Soviet football. After a hiatus of 17 years the national side took to the field again and participated in its first ever official international tournament, the 1952 Olympics. In losing to Tito’s Yugoslavia in the first round, the team failed in both sporting and political terms with grave consequences for the reigning champions, CDSA. The famous “Lieutenants’ Team” had dominated post-war USSR football, with five titles in seven years, but was held responsible for what happened in Helsinki and disbanded. This opened the door for Spartak Moscow, who went on to dominate the domestic scene for the next dozen years.
With players going down easier, Matt Nation believes football is fast becoming a contactless sport
Watch an Over-55s game on my local pitch and you’ll rarely see a foul. The players may regale whoever will listen with stories of how a match wasn’t a match unless they’d broken their jaw at least once and then barged the opposing goalkeeper so hard that the game had to be stopped so that people could go and look for him, but they’re remarkably mild-mannered on the pitch. They have to be. Tackling is frowned upon or, if the referee is getting on a bit himself, banned outright.