Belgian football is riddled with match fixing, retracted confessions and the accused suing those making the allegations, as John Chapman explains

Belgian football is in despair. Not only are the national team at their lowest ebb for 30 years, but the clubs regularly get thumped in Europe. Crowds have declined and a lack of investment in infrastructure means that watching a match such as La Louvière v Lierse on a wet winter night will be an experience you won’t forget and probably won’t repeat. Most top-flight clubs are run on annual budgets of £1.5 million. If they’re lucky, players receive contracts offering them around £1,400 per month. If they’re really lucky, they get paid. Chairmen try to keep the smaller clubs afloat by bringing in high-rolling sponsors, a risky business at best. Despite this background, money is being made in Belgian football. Unfortunately it’s going to a bunch of characters seemingly straight out of a Damon Runyon novel.

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There are fewer printed fanzines now, but some of the best are still going strong two decades on. Graham Ennis & Mark O'Brien report

When Skies Are Grey started in 1988, during that first heady rush of the fanzine boom. The aim, very simply, was to give supporters a platform. To this day, although the appearance of the mag has changed radically – we threw away the Pritt Stick years ago – that ethos has never changed. The fanzine and, for that matter, our website exist to let Evertonians have their say on about pretty much anything they like.

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There are fewer printed fanzines now, but some of the best are still going strong two decades on. Mike Harrison reports

City Gent launched in October 1984 but had been discussed for at least 18 months. What gave it the final push was the fact that the founding editor, Brian Fox, was unemployed, so able to commit time, and sought a career in journalism. 

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For 16 years, Scottish fans could read a football publication that didn’t begin and end in Glasgow. Archie MacGregor explains the rise and demise of his fanzine and the changes in the game in its lifetime 

From December 1986 to September 2002, The Absolute Game (TAG) jinked its way through 60 issues about Scottish football in general and everything but the Old Firm in particular.

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WSC was first published in March 1986 and soon found itself part of a publishing boom. Al Needham casts his mind back to the heyday of football fanzines and what his own favourite, Nottingham Forest’s ‘The Almighty Brian’, meant to him 

Like many writers, I got my start in fanzines. In the mid-Eighties, I had an idea that was so obviously brilliant, I used to lie in bed wondering why no one had thought of it yet. So I bought a typewriter from an old woman on the next estate, emptied the local WH Smith of every bit of Letraset they had, monopolised the Banda machine at college and produced the first ever, erm, American football fanzine. (Five hundred back issues of Third and Long are still available in my Dad’s loft, if anyone’s interested. No? Fair enough.)

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