Dear WSC
I know the battle for the soul of football has been lost when someone writes to WSC to justify both the ticket arrangements and pricing of Euro ’96 (Letters, WSC No 115). For the record, the minimum admission at Birmingham City this season is £10, but to attempt to justify Euro ’96 prices by comparing them with admission prices for (what is effectively) a Division Two game is surely to miss the point not once but twice.
David Warren, Keighley
Premiership superstars swap cubs for millions but down in the lower divisions the picture is rather different. Tom Findlay reports from the twilight world of pre-season trialists
In the summer months, when football is supposed to take a break, thousands of ‘free agents’ trawl around the smaller playing fields of England desperate to find a club. Loanees, refugees and YTSs trying to fulfil their dream. It’s not a pretty business. Cambridge United, who have spent the last two seasons bobbing round the nether regions of Division 3, played some twenty games through August featuring a small army of trialists. The first game of the shopping season featured 22 players the club had never seen before – none survived.
Celtic's Fergus McCann has got big ideas. Problem is they're almost all bad ones, as Gary Oliver explains
In the week scientists went loopy over what they believed to be an organism from Mars, Celtic’s owner and managing director, Fergus McCann, reminded fans that he is Scottish football’s own little green monster – one that remains extremely hostile to its alien environment.
Cliff Grantham explains why Portsmouth's penniless owners were only too happy to seek help from a man with financial problems of his own
There can be few better ways to diffuse an explosive situation than to announce that a former England manager is to take over the running of your club. Indeed, short of beating Sir John Hall to Alan Shearer’s signature, Martin Gregory could not have hoped to pull off a more impressive or audacious coup.
Harry Pearson looks at Sir John Hall's role in both the football club and city of Newcastle
A few years ago I met the former chairman of a First Division club. I tried vainly to engage him in conversation about the game. After a while he confessed that he wasn’t particularly interested in it. “Why did you go through all the bother of becoming a chairman then?” I asked. “Because it is the most exclusive club in England,” the chairman replied. I eyed him quizzically. “Look,” the chairman explained, “There are hundreds of lords, aren’t there? Hundreds of MPs and Bishops, but there are only 92 Football League chairmen.”