Search: ' Panathinaikos'

Jon Spurling reports on Michel Platini's ambitious plans

“Football is a game before a product, a sport before a market, a show before a business,” said Michel Platini in January. The new UEFA chairman has since claimed that all his proposals – including his suggestion in August to cut the number of Champions League places allocated to Europe’s leading leagues from four to three and his aim that European finals be played on a Saturday afternoon with 75 per cent of allocated tickets going to the finalists’ supporters – are based on “sporting philosophy and not anything financial”. Others don’t share Platini’s altruistic vision.

Read more…

Hooliganism in the city that is hosting the Champions League final is getting worse. Unfortunately, as Paul Pomonis reports, government action seems sure to be ineffective

Speaking in the aftermath of the police death in Sicily in February, Giorgios Orfanos, Greece’s minister for sport, unfavourably compared the measures the Italian government had just announced with his own anti-hooligan policies. “Our decisions have been much more radical than a league shutdown. As a result, football-related violence in Greece cannot even compare with what is going on in Italy,” he said, adding: “For the last three years the number of sport-related violent incidents has been dropping… We have an ongoing problem and we’re dealing with it aggressively.”

Read more…

Sunday 1 The SPL title may have been decided at Tynecastle, where Hearts go two up against Celtic but lose 3‑2 to two goals in the last three minutes. Celtic take a seven-point lead. Lincoln manager Keith Alexander is sent “on leave” by the club, who are 15th in League Two.

Read more…

Dear WSC
A three-sided stadium (WSC 221)? Luxury. Here at The Shay we’d probably settle for such an arrangement. We do have a quite impressive three-sided stadium but the embarrassing fourth side, a large main stand down the full length of one touchline, has remained incomplete for several years. Originally intended to raise ground capacity to around 12,000, it’s a mocking reminder of the brave, but ultimately doomed, ambitions of a previous board and their vision of Halifax Town as a thriving League club and Halifax RLFC as a successful Super League side. Today, as both clubs struggle to attract crowds of two and a half thousand, those dreams seem a very long way away. Various scaled down proposals for the East Stand are currently under consideration but, as those of us who remember being promised accommodation in there as part of a season ticket deal stare mournfully across at the handful of blue and white plastic seats dotted randomly along the concrete rows, the idea of knocking the whole lot down and turning it into a car park doesn’t seem such an outrageous idea after all.
Charlie Adamson, via email

Read more…

What defines a career, money or medals?

If Rio Ferdinand succeeds in getting his Manchester United salary increased to £120,000 a week, he will receive in a month what someone on the average wage would take 19 years to earn. In recent newspaper reports on his contract negotiations, Rio was depicted wearing a Che Guevara baseball cap, so he may have plans to redistribute his bloated income in a manner befitting someone who identifies with a Marxist revolutionary. But it is none the less fair to assume that he will receive advice to the contrary and that his wages will continue to be spent on fast cars, holidays in exclusive resorts and helping Jody Morris to release fire extinguishers in hotel corridors.

Read more…