Despite Sheffield Wednesday's atrocious season, Danny Wilson's job seemsed safe until last month. Grahan Lightfoot examines how it all went wrong for him

The post mortem at the end of the 1999-2000 season will reveal that the cause of Sheffield Wednesday’s Premiership death was obvious. Nothing ever lasts long without a heart. All the more strange that the man who presided over this long and painful downfall was a player who wore the blue and white stripes with such pride. When Danny Wilson was appointed as manager at Hillsborough in July 1998 there weren’t too many Owls fans who were disappointed. After less than two years in charge, however, his dismissal by the club’s new chairman Howard Culley has been met with mixed feelings.

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Bill Costley, the Kilmarnock chairman, is a chef with a long term plan for his club. Graeme Jamieson investigates Aryshire's answer to Delia

Distinguishing features A respectable, bespectacled gentleman with a headline writer’s dream name. And a moustache.

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MLS has abandoned the Americanisms in soccer to please supporters familiar with the game as it is played across the rest of the globe. Mike Woitalla reports

When Major League Soccer kicked off for its fifth season last month, there were a number of new rules for the fans to get used to. For once, however, they were intended to drag the US back towards the mainstream of world football. Arguments over the rules in the MLS date back to a meeting in New York some years ago. Those present plot­ted the return of a professional league in 1996. And they believed in enlarging the goals.

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Poor management, failed takeovers and petty squabbling – the struggles facing Cardiff City, West Bromwich Albion, Oxford United and Barnet

“It is almost as if the club has forgotten how to do anything successfully,” one recent visitor to a Cardiff City internet bulletin board re­marked. That includes selling it to a member of the Sullivan family, which has been a reg­ular agenda item since the early 1990s, when David Sullivan first expressed an inter­­est.

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Football in Greece is turning increasingly ugly, tainted by both hooliganism and corruption. Paul Pomonis reports

When fans of Olympiakos used stones, lumps of wood and petrol bombs to attack a bus carrying AEK Athens supporters to their Greek Cup semi-final second leg last month, there can have been few in Greek football who were either shocked or surprised. Violence and corruption have been escalating for years and the AEK-Olympiakos feud is the  most poisonous of all in the festering domestic game.

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