Should an award be created for the world's most badly-organised football tournament, 1996 Concacaf Gold Cup would be a front-runner, as Soccer America's Mike Woitalla reports

It’s immigrant-bashing season in the USA. 1994 saw the launch of ‘Operation Gatekeeper’ – a massive border patrol build-up designed to keep out those Mexicans we otherwise welcome to baby-sit our children, clean our houses, pick our fruit and go to our soccer games. 1996 is election year in the USA and the demagogues are raising the level of immigrant scape-goating to another level. The building of the ‘Tortilla Wall’ – a triple fence with razor-blade barbed wire – is part of political discourse.

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No style magazine worthy of the name would go to press without at least one feature about supermodels, Britpop, Hollywood hunks and… Liverpool players. John Williams got past the security on the door to ask a few questions

More years ago than you would care, or want, to remember, the great Merseyside net-buster, Bill ‘Dixie’ Dean, visited Pathé News in Soho to be interviewed for some football cinema coverage. Dixie once jumped into the crowd at White Hart Lane to smack a local racist and, after a serious road accident, was also popularly thought in the city to have had a steel plate inserted into his head, thus accounting for his thunderbolt headers that started out somewhere near Garston.

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Responding to the article in last month's WSC about Wimbledon's proposed relocation to Dublin, Colm McCarthy insists that such a move would be welcomed by many football fans in the Republic of Ireland

Robert Rea, in WSC No 108, voices opposition to the proposed move of Wimbledon FC to Dublin. The FA, he writes, should say “. . . loudly, clearly and immediately, that they will be opposed” Robert would love the FA of Ireland, who have said precisely that. But the proposed move has no shortage of supporters in Dublin, and I am one of them. There is a crisis in the senior professional game in this country, and it has its origins in the structure of league football presided over by various national associations and UEFA.

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Tom Davies argues that the one-year ban imposed on Leyton Orient's Roger Stanislaus for pre-match drug taking is both unfair and inconsistent

Two of the symptoms widely attributed to cocaine use are paranoia and confusion. Similar feelings can be experienced at a fraction of the cost by trying to make sense of the contradictory reasons given for Roger Stanislaus’s year-long banishment from the game. Stanislaus has been banned by the FA because a test after Orient’s 0-3 defeat at Barnet on November 25th found “performance-enhancing” levels of cocaine in his blood. He was subsequently sacked by Leyton Orient in order, basically, to set an example to the kids. Football must be seen to be whiter than white, said chairman Barry Hearn, making no reference to the FA’s implication that Stanislaus was a cheat.

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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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