Live football helped Sky transform the UK television market – and now Rupert Murdoch hopes it can yield similar profits on the internet. Bruce Wilkinson reports

The current spat between the football authorities, Sky and the European Commission may be little more than a sideshow to the most significant media  business event of 2005 – BSkyB’s acquisition of the broadband internet provider Easynet for £211 million, part of a major drive to acquire new media interests around the world. As the EC worries about Murdoch’s monopolistic grip on English football, his henchmen are gaining a stranglehold over what many experts predict to be the future of sports broadcasting – the live coverage of matches over the internet.

Read more…

There was little to be positive about in 1985, the game’s year zero, till the founders of the FSA reinvented fan politics.  Adam Brown charts the body's highs and lows

It is now 20 years since the Football Supporters Association was formed by a handful of souls in a Merseyside pub and began to transform the landscape of fan politics in England. Before 1985 there was only the National Federation of Football Supporters’ Clubs, a federative body of officially sanctioned club organisations, their activities based on raising money for the club and organising travel. The “Nat Fed” was certainly not politically radical.

Read more…

Fans who want a return to terracing are not content to sit in silence while they wait, explains Amanda Matthews

Memories of standing on the terraces are now fast fading in the Premiership. Young fans are more likely than not to sit in the stands and watch their team in near silence. But members of “Stand Up Sit Down” feel all-seat stadiums and being made to sit contribute hugely to the lack of atmosphere, and that that is increasingly influencing fans’ decisions to stay away.

Read more…

James Copnall chronicles the year of the underdog in Africa

With all five qualifiers being decided on the last matchday of the ten-round series, this was undoubtedly the greatest African World Cup qualifying campaign ever. That Angola should have finished ahead of Nigeria was perhaps the biggest shock of all. The southern Africans have next to no pedigree, having qualified only twice for the Nations Cup and had little success once they got there. In contrast to Nigeria’s team of star names, Angola players come from the semi-professional local league, alongside a handful of veterans from the former colonial power Portugal and the middle-eastern leagues. Yet Angola upset Nigeria at home, thanks to a goal from SC Qatar’s Fabrice Akwa, drew the return, and then, when only a win would do, beat Rwanda away, Akwa scoring a late header.

Read more…

Yet another Ireland qualifying campaign has ended in a near miss and Brian Kerr has paid the penalty for some strikingly strange decisions, as Paul Doyle relates

What do you do when there are 25 minutes to go in your last qualifying match and your team desperately needs a goal to avoid World Cup elimination? If you’re Brian Kerr, you take off your country’s record goalscorer. Then, with just four minutes left, you replace your other striker.

Read more…