The Archive

Tom Lines looks back on the season in League One, and the considers the divide between many clubs in the division and their well-to-do guests who have fallen from the Premier League

The FA’s decision to hold England matches around the country during the rebuilding of Wembley is generally agreed to have been a great success. Football’s heartlands got to see the national team in their own backyards while the players benefited from performing in front of passionate, knowledgeable crowds. Fans in League One are now enjoying a similar scheme involving former Premier League clubs. This season the division contained no fewer than four sides that have graced the top flight in the last six years. Charlton, Southampton and Norwich were making their first visits, while Leeds Utd had married a local girl and were trying to make a go of things.

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Thirty years ago this month Mossley AFC went to Wembley. Drew Whitworth remembers the club's greatest day and the story of a once-formidable Northern Premier League side on a very personal level

Between Oldham and Stockport, where the huge Greater Manchester conurbation breaks against the rocks and moors of the Pennines, there lies Tameside. This metropolitan borough has no historical centre, being a collection of old mill towns of which few people have ever heard. In football terms it is a backwater, without representation above the Conference North.

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Events at the interval have chnaged greatly since the days of the police dog-handling display. Matthew Gooding highlights the tedious, the surreal and those for a good cause

You expect to see certain things at football matches – grumpy old men, over-excited children, pies containing meat of dubious origin. But in all my years watching football I never expected to see Timmy Mallett taking penalties against a moose, using a pair of giant testicles, while a Sven-Göran Eriksson lookalike watched on. As anyone who was at the recent Blue Square Premier match between Cambridge Utd and Oxford Utd will tell you, it really happened, and it was glorious.

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Greg Norman explains why both political and sporting reforms are needed in South America's poorest country

Despite playing at La Paz’s atmospheric Estadio Hernando Siles, the world’s highest international venue, the national team is, at 67, the lowest ranked South American side. Meanwhile, a league whose second most successful team in history is called The Strongest is, unsurprisingly, statistically the continent’s weakest in recent years. The last 16 of this year’s Copa Libertadores featured teams from eight different countries, yet Bolivian teams Bolívar and Blooming finished bottom of their groups with five points between them.

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FIFA's approach to safeguarding profit from this year's football tournament is particularly aggressive. Simon Cotterill reports

FIFA has generated a record $3.3 billion (£2.2bn) in marketing and television rights ahead of this summer’s World Cup. Big brands have paid big money for association with the tournament. In return they’ll be protected by FIFA’s strict trademark regulations which prevent unofficial associations diluting the messages of official sponsors. Many in South Africa have criticised the heavy-handed way FIFA have been enforcing their often ridiculous regulations.

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