The Archive

Dermot Corrigan reports on the very different approach of a club bucking the trend of financial chaos in the League of Ireland

The self-made millionaire who takes over a football club, bringing initial success followed by disappointment and disaster, is a stock character in football, as fans of English clubs as disparate as Chester City and Crystal Palace know well. But the story of Wexford Youths and Irish property developer/philanthropist/philosopher Mick Wallace is different. Or so it seems anyway.

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Maidstone United hoped that the sale of a talented young player would allow them to return home. As John Bunyard explains, this hasn't happened

I first saw it one Saturday as I walked down the side of the Sittingbourne pitch. It was best described as a half-Fellaini: an attempt at an afro curtailed by an over-zealous barber. It sat atop the head of the kid deputising for our regular centre-back, absent for the unlikely reason of being under arrest on a charge of attempted murder. Though a tall lad, he looked too young to buy a drink.

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Owning your country's biggest club is a sure-fire way to boost public profile, or even become president. Simon Cotterill explains

For all the allegations, infidelity and plastic surgery, the most surprising aspect of Silvio Berlusconi’s time as Italy’s prime minister is his ownership of AC Milan. It’s not surprising that he finds the time – the mystery is why the fans of Inter, Juventus and all other rival teams don’t form a significant political resistance. Were a Premier League chairman to run in an election, most rival club fans would surely put political preferences aside and vote against him.

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Bottom of the league with no points from 27 matches in the Unibond Premier Division, Owen Amos takes a look at what has gone wrong for the ambitious Durham City

According to the Northern Echo, Durham City are “the worst team in the country”. While that may not be true, they are by some distance the worst team in the Unibond Premier Division, one step below the Conference North. After 27 games, Durham had won none, drawn none and lost 27. They’d scored 16 goals and conceded 121, an average of over four per game. In fact, the only match they’ve won all season was at home to Washington – who play three divisions below – in the Durham County Challenge Cup.

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Derek Brookman looks at how a Champions League experiment fared (and failed) in the Netherlands

The play-offs were introduced in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 2005-06 season for an initial period of three years, with the intention to extend this if they proved successful. The second- to fifth-placed teams would scrap it out to determine who would be the second Dutch representative in the Champions League (the champions qualified automatically), while the next four sides would contest qualification for the UEFA Cup.

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