Youngsters in search of a football career are turning to the sport’s equivalent of a public school. Gavin Willacy wonders whether this experiment will work or if good money is going after bad
Borehamwood’s Hertswood School v Birmingham City was a league fixture. On the same day, Dagenham & Redbridge lost at home to Brightlingsea Regent, Conference club Histon played Queens’ School in Bushey and Oxford United lost at home to someone called FCV Reds.
The PFA has celebrated its centenary at a time when players aren’t held in especially high regard. But that doesn’t mean the union’s battles weren’t worth winning, says John Harding
In December 1907, a group of Manchester United players entered a hotel in the city centre and created admiring headlines by forming a union. One hundred years on almost to the day, another group of United players, at another city-centre hotel, created altogether different headlines, ones that must have had PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor weeping tears of frustration.
Richard Barker recalls when a top-flight side last hit nine
When Manchester United entertained Ipswich Town at Old Trafford on March 4, 1995, there was little reason to expect much of a contest. Defending champions United were locked in a struggle with Blackburn Rovers at the top, while Ipswich were going hell-for-leather to clinch the bottom spot.
Just occasionally, a thumping win becomes a massacre. Ian Farrell looks back at the most recent time a League team posted double figures
Though the points were totting up nicely, Manchester City’s record of ten goals in their first eight games of this season was nevertheless an underwhelming and depressingly familiar return. When, at the start of November, Sunderland were then subjected to their regulation 1‑0 defeat – the sixth such home win at Eastlands – nostalgic fans couldn’t help thinking back almost exactly 20 years, to a time when a very different MCFC matched Sven-Göran Eriksson’s eight-match stats in 77 insane minutes.
Zaire’s 1974 World Cup experience can be seen as comic but, as Jonathan Barker explains, reaching those finals was actually a high point in a country’s tragic history
If he were alive today, perhaps a chunk of former Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s dubiously acquired fortune would be invested in a Premier League club. Instead his claim to football infamy is the role his government played in the dramatic rise and fall of his country’s football team. The Leopards were African champions in 1968 and 1974, but have gone down in history as the fall guys of the 1974 World Cup.