Search: 'Ken Bates'

Adam Brown looks at how the political interaction of fan culture has developed since the disenfranchisement of the mid-1980s

The year 1985 was a nadir for English football in a decade of great change for football supporters in Britain. And May was the pit of the trough. Supporters were caged in decrepit stadiums and 56 of them died in a fire at Bradford City’s ground on May 11. Violence was rife at home and abroad, policing was brutal and on the same day a 14-year-old was killed during fighting between Leeds and Birmingham fans and police at St Andrew’s. Just over two weeks later, these two factors came together killing 39 and injuring 600 at Heysel.

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Simon Hart looks back at the 1980s experiment that was the Screensport Super Cup

Football loves its anniversaries but not even the most nostalgic-minded supporters are likely to dwell for too long on the Screensport Super Cup, the ill-conceived substitute for European football that began its short life 25 years ago this autumn.

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Dear WSC
Congratulations on the article about match-fixing (Crimes and misdemeanours, WSC 283). Paul Joyce did a superb job reviewing the many different cases of corruption in European football. As the German police investigation began, partly because of the controversy around my book, The Fix, I did want to take him up on one issue. He mentioned that “Germany lies second in the match-fixing table” – this is true but it is not because corruption is more prevalent in German football. Rather it is because the German authorities are now, after years of denial, actually taking the issue seriously and are vigorously investigating match-fixing – and the more they investigate, the more they find. This proactive attitude is in stark contrast with British football authorities who seem to have adopted the attitude of “don’t know, don’t want to find out”. The circumstances in British football are similar to other European countries: thousands of relatively badly paid players; lots of poor clubs and lots of interest in the gambling markets. However, the British authorities have not yet fully woken to the dangers. I can only hope that they do before they discover a similar problem to the one in Europe.
Declan Hill, Oxford

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Mike Ticher acknowledges that there are several ways in which to appreciate football. But if we concentrate too much on the view of professionals, we risk missing the point altogether

I was a bit shocked to find out I didn’t know how to watch football, despite years of practice. At least that was the impression I got from Jonathan Wilson’s excellent book on tactics, Inverting the Pyramid. Perhaps a better way to put it is that the book exposes the gulf between two ways of watching: the fan’s way, in which you care about the result and the entertainment; and the coach’s or analyst’s, in which you study patterns and work out what each team is trying to do. The book’s genius is that it successfully explains the second way of thinking to the first group of people.

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Allowing the biggest clubs to loan out their developing players could be distorting competition, says Simon Cotterill

The existing laws on player loans between Premier League clubs need urgent revision. In their present form they allow points to be bought and they are increasing the speed at which the league moves towards being a competition almost entirely devoid of, just that, competition. However, neither the bigger clubs, who use the loan system to farm out future stars, nor the smaller clubs, who use it to bolster their squads, see rule changes as being in their short-term interests. And sadly, the short-term seems to be as far as English football looks these days.

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