For Notts County fans the last few months have been like no other. Julian McDougall tries to keep up with things

In the second half of 2009 ordinary long-standing Notts County fans were subjected to a series of psycho-political experiments. Novelists from Charles Dickens to Margaret Atwood have stretched social reality to develop extreme scenarios which allow readers to explore their anxieties about the world – blending utopia and dystopia to produce complexity which reflects the ambiguous nature of human thought. But if a writer had made up events at Meadow Lane this season, their publisher would likely reject it as “too far-fetched”. Sven-Göran Eriksson arrives, Kasper Schmeichel signs, Sol Campbell comes, rumours link us to David Beckham, Roberto Carlos, Roberto Mancini and Kevin Keegan. Sol goes. The Guardian print allegations of corruption on a daily basis. Bust before bloody Christmas.

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Sarah Gilmore attempts to understand the basis of the problems at Fratton Park and wonders just what the future might hold

On May 18, 2008, along with an estimated 250,000 people, I walked down to the seafront to celebrate Portsmouth’s FA Cup win. I’ve lived in the city since the mid-1980s and witnessed several pretty major events occurring here such as the commemoration of the D-Day landings and the bicentenary of the victory at Trafalgar. But neither of these events came close to involving virtually every person in the city and beyond.

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It's taken a while, but football clubs are slowly getting an official presence on Facebook to match the fan-made pages. Mark Segal logs on to see who's ahead of the game and who's getting left behind

As Simon Cowell found out at the end of the year, you underestimate the power of Facebook at your peril. The campaign to make Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name the Christmas number one was a classic example of how social media, and Facebook in particular, is changing the way people connect with each other.

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Steve Menary examined how FIFA's strict rules on "political interference" were being enforced across world football, and found varying results

If a private club suspended five percent of its members in the same number of years, asking for an explanation would seem perfectly reasonable. FIFA’s reason for suspending a dozen of its 208 members – some more than once – since 2005 is “political interference”.

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Following the departure of George Burley, the Scottish FA appointed Craig Levein as the latest in a long line of Scotland managers, just as Neil Forsyth predicted

Not that they really need one, but Scotland have got a new manager. Eight months from a competitive fixture the SFA acted with surprising swiftness in nicking Craig Levein away from Dundee Utd and appointing him as George Burley’s successor. In WSC 273 I said that the SFA would still be reluctant on a foreign manager after the horror of the Bertie Vogts experiment and that Levein was the standout Scottish candidate. That shows no prescience on my part, rather a depressing lack of qualified candidates who would actually want the job. David Moyes has a more attractive role at Everton, Gordon Strachan had just committed to Middlesbrough, Graeme Souness ruled himself out and Walter Smith made the worthy point that he’d walked out on Scotland for a Rangers return and it would be somewhat cheeky to go back.

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