Ron Noades continued influence over Crystal Palace and stadium trouble at Oldham Athletic and Swansea City
There are league rules that prevent one person owning two clubs (although as the Peter Johnson case shows, they do not mean much) but there is nothing to stop someone in control of one club from owning another club’s ground. This is the case at Crystal Palace, where the extraordinary terms of their lease with former owner Ron Noades have left him with a significant presence.
UEFA seem intent on changing the transfer system. Guy Osborn & Steve Greenfield explain how this could affect England and beyond
It seems barely a week goes past these days without a new proposal to regulate the international movement of players. The most recent have involved reintroducing restrictions on foreigners, standardising transfer windows across Europe and effectively abolishing the transfer system. Yet again, it appears that poor old Jean-Marc Bosman is the root cause of most of these ideas.
Shaul Adar covers the fallout over Eyal Berkovic's controversial autobiography
The furore over the excerpts from Eyal Berkovic’s book printed in the Mirror has not come as a surprise to anyone in Israel. Let’s be clear about one thing, however. Berkovic does not say in his autobiography,The Magician, that West Ham are racist. He does claims it is an unprofessional, unpleasant, ill-managed club in which nepotism plays an important role. One chapter is called “Frank Lampard Snr – West Ham’s biggest trouble”. He accuses the club of being xenophobic and says “they can’t stand foreigners” but he takes care not to call anybody a racist.
The Euro 2000 play-off draw has pitted the two oldest foes in Football against each other, but does anyone outside of Britain care?
“I would not be Kevin Keegan if I did not get excited about this,” said the England manager in a blinding flash of self-awareness on hearing the Euro 2000 play-off draw. Unfortunately, he is Kevin Keegan, and his face was splashed all over the papers after England and Scotland came out of the hat together (or what passes for a hat at UEFA headquarters these days).
Friday 1 Dennis Wise, Frank Lampard, Steve Guppy and Trevor Sinclair are the new names in Little Kev's squad to play Belgium. Paul Ince is recalled in place of David Batty, making sure the squad contains no less than the mandatory three players who have been sent off for England in the past 18 months. Newcastle sign Kevin Gallacher from Blackburn for £700,000. A consortium of Icelandic businessmen has made a bid of £6 million to buy Stoke City, hoping to install the national team coach Gudjon Thordarsson as manager in place of the luckless Gary Megson.
Saturday 2 Strugglers' Saturday sees Steve Staunton scandalously sent off in Villa's dismal 0-0 with Liverpool, a game mystifyingly described as "just balloons on sticks" by John Gregory. Bottom club Sheff Wed go goal-crazy against Wimbledon, winning 5-1 in front of a suitably Wimbledon-sized crowd, 18,077. Sunderland are second after pasting Bradford 4-0 at Valley Parade. Everton are reportedly the target of a £50 million bid from Chris Evans and Terry Venables – possibly both in the top two on any fans' list of undesirable owners. India's Baichung Bhutia makes his debut as a sub for Bury, and gets booked after two minutes. "We will probably get more fans than if we'd signed Ronaldo," Bury manager Neil Warnock had predicted. They get 3,603.