Few people have spent more time studying the Bosman Judgment than Glyn Ford, Labour MEP for Greater Manchester East, and he thinks that a lot of what has been said has missed the point. This could turn out to only be the beginning

Pages and pages have been written on the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling in the Bosman Case. And they’ve all been wrong. Jean-Marc Bosman took two issues to the Court. Firstly, that of the transfer system, and secondly, limitations on ‘foreign’ players. He won both arguments, but not in the way it has been commonly described. The European Court did not outlaw the foreign player rule – three foreigners plus two assimilated players. They ruled instead that under Article 48 of EC law it was illegal to discriminate against nationals of other Member States, thereby making all EC citizens domestic players.

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Monday 1 Spurs win the battle of the reserve XIs, beating Man Utd 4-1. Peter Schmeichel, injured in the warm up, misses the second half and will be out for a month, reportedly. "We're up against it," says Alex Ferguson. Liverpool come back from two down to beat Forest 4-2 and are now three points clear in third place. An exchange of views between Joe Royle and Sam Hammam after Everton's 3-2 win at Wimbledon, during which the home side have two penalty appeals turned down, ends with Joe being pursued onto the team coach by Sam and his brother. Their Dads should sort it out.

Tuesday 2 "We have just buried the ghost of Old Trafford," says Kevin Keegan after Newcastle's 2-0 home win over Arsenal takes them seven points clear again. David Ginola scores the first inside a minute. Roy McFarland is sacked by Bolton. Co-manager Colin Todd, left in sole charge, says, "It is nothing to do with me." Uh-oh – FIFA's international board are considering a suggestion to widen goal posts by the diameter of two balls and increase the height by the diameter of one ball. The changes would be introduced after the 1998 World Cup. Plenty of time for petitions.

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Dear WSC,
Mickey Parker’s point in WSC No 107 that most football songs require the player’s name to contain four syllables may well be connected to the fact that most popular music is in 4/4 time. (Tom Jones’ Delilah, of course, is a notable waltz-like exception, but what self-respecting footy fans would have any truck with that kind of a limping rhythm?) What concerns me is the rather worrying notion that a player’s whole popularity – and hence his career – can depend on the singability of his name.
This first struck me at Wembley last season when Paul Tait’s winning goal (OK, it was the Auto Windscreen Shield) was greeted with a rousing chorus of ‘Super, Super Kev, Super Kevin Francis . . .’.Last season at Birmingham we had a player called José Dominguez who used to run around a lot, then fall over and lose the ball. The crowd loved him, and I’m sure it had a lot to do with the pleasure to be had from a rousing chorus of ‘José, José, José, José’. On the other hand, Jonathan Hunt became the first Blues player to score a hat-trick in ten years and there was never a hint of a hum in his general direction. Some players can get away with just having an extra superfluous syllable thrown in (‘Stevie Claridge, there’s only one Stevie Claridge’), but others simply can’t: the unsingable Alberto Tarantini managed a mere 24 games for us in the seventies. I suggest that any rhythmically challenged player at the start of their career should seriously consider sitting down with their agent and coming up with suitable alternative names that will guarantee their popularity with the crowd. Pop stars have been doing it for years, and if Savo Milosevic doesn’t do something soon, it’ll end in tears. In the meantime, perhaps WSC readers could write in with suggestions for a suitable song that incorporates the words ‘Jonathan’ and ‘Hunt’. Then again, perhaps not.
John Tandy, Birmingham

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With the Bosman judgment likely to prove a disincentive for clubs to carry on with youth development programmes, Chris Hall looks at the controversy surrounding the treatment of young footballers by professional clubs

Terry Murphy, the man in charge of the youth development programme at Arsenal, showed me a chart which illustrates how many players the club have in each position, in each age group, from the youngest players at under-10, to the first team. He uses this chart to plan how many boys will be retained at Arsenal’s centre of excellence from year to year.

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Matt Nation had a close shave with a legendarily "uncompromising" Premier League defender, and lived to tell the tale

The most irrelevant piece of advice that I thought I’d ever received was from a careers officer at school. After having given us leaflets on the police force, agricultural training in Monmouthshire and driving a tank with the best bunch of mates we’d ever have, she announced: “Whatever you end up doing, you don’t need to be nervous at the interview. Just picture in your mind’s eye the person interviewing you getting into a really hot bath. It’s such a silly idea that you’ll be instantly relaxed and it’ll be a doddle.”

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