Points deductions have set the agenda in League One, writes Huw Richards

This was the Year of the Asterisk, with three teams – Leeds, Luton and Bournemouth – suffering points deductions. It also saw our Premier League-fixated national media, not for the first time, missing the point lower down. Hypnotised by the spectacle of Leeds and Nottingham Forest, regarded as Premier League members-in-exile, so far down the tree, they ignored the fact that much of the season was dominated, and the best-quality football played, by teams with a radically different provenance. Doncaster and Carlisle have both spent time in the Conference, while Swansea nearly went there only five years ago. If nobody quite reached the sublime heights attained by Blackpool in the later stages of 2006-07, there was some genuine quality.

Read more…

This season's Championship has been a strange affair, says Tim Springett

The Championship, we are told, is the fifth richest football league in the world. That doesn’t alter the fact that it will always be the poor relation of the Premier League. The financial gulf between the two continues to grow and one could be forgiven for thinking that Derby’s abject experience this season served as a deterrent to many teams in the Championship to strive for promotion. It was a division that, in 2007-08, nobody seemed to want to win.

Read more…

Halifax bounced back into the League once, but a failure to do so again has led to aseemingly terminal decline. Many want to keep football in the town but, writes Peter Brooksbank, they cannot agree how

Friday May 9, 2008. As the rest of the football world was being ordered by Sky to whip themselves into a frenzy for the final Premier League Sunday of the season, supporters of Conference strugglers Halifax Town spent their day glued to the internet, tapping the refresh button every other minute and glancing nervously at the clock. They weren’t, however, waiting on updates of a play-off game or a Trophy final. In a macabre parody of online minute-by-minute match reports, they were watching the Halifax Courier’s live updates from a meeting organised by administrators Begbies Traynor with the club and their owners, a last-ditch effort to keep Halifax Town alive. And, to the fans’ horror, it was not going at all well.

Read more…

They reached European semi-finals in five consecutive seasons in the 1990s, but Paris Saint-Germain are in a sustained slump. Their fans aren't making them very popular either, writes James Eastham

Sympathy for Paris Saint-Germain is often in short supply in France, yet you had to feel a little sorry for them after the 2008 French Cup final. They dominated but ended up losing 1-0 to Lyon in extra time. It was, admitted winning goalkeeper Gregory Coupet, “un joli hold-up”.

Read more…

The long-running referee-bribery scandal is still a matter for the courts, but the football authorities are not allowing the legal niceties to get in the way and the casualties are mounting. Phil Town reports

While the so-called Apito Dourado (“Golden whistle”) bribery case continues to trundle through the criminal courts four years after the events, the Portuguese League have taken some decisive action. In what has come to be known as the Apito Final (“Final whistle”), various clubs, club presidents and match officials have been found guilty of dirty deeds and dealt a range of penalties, including fines, suspensions, point-docking and, in one high-profile instance, relegation.

Read more…