Tom Bower's new book looks into the financial irregularities and running of football. Here he tells WSC why these issues will sooner or later shatter the game

The publishers make play of the fact that you are the first non-sports journalist to write on this subject. Do you consider that football journalists are too reliant on clubs as sources for stories to be adequately dispassionate on business matters?
I don’t criticise them for that. I think football journalists write brilliantly. I came to this as an outsider who didn’t read the football pages before. Their problem is they need access to the players and so it’s very difficult for them to do what I’ve done; it just comes with the turf. Where the failure has been is with the business sections of the newspapers. It’s regarded as just sport whereas in fact it’s a huge industry.

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Steve Ragg talks Latics

What have been your best and worst moments as an Oldham fan?
Seeing the team walk out at Wembley for the Littlewoods Cup final in 1990, then clinching the old Second Division title with a last-minute penalty in the final game the following year, represent a two-year spell that it is hard to see being beaten for a Latics fan. The worst: two last-minute goals, one against Leeds in the 1987 play-offs, the other, just too painful to mention.

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Dear WSC
How’s this for a delicious sense of irony? Brentford v Colchester United, Tuesday February 18, 2003. 1) On a freezing cold night when almost everyone wishes they’d stayed indoors, the Bees put in a dreadful first-half display and are roundly booed off the pitch. 2) In an effort to pla­cate the home fans, Brentford decide to play the D:Ream hit Things Can Only Get Better over the tannoy. 3) Immediately the song finishes, the club announ­ces the match has been abandoned at half time. If only the Bees’ strike force was as good as their comic timing.
Eddie Hutchinson, Ashford

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Tirol Innsbruck, a familiar name from the Champions League, has vanished from sight. They could be a long time coming back, as Roderick Stewart writes

The dramatic collapse of Tirol Innsbruck last year, from Champions League qualifiers to the third division, was probably the most extreme case yet of a club being punished for financial misdemeanours. Now, in a new guise, the club have started the long haul back.

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Before it's too late, Tom Davies records the relaxed conviviality of chatting in the quietest part of a quietish ground, pausing only for the odd barbed reference to the game in the background

Those who have campaigned for the retention or return of terracing at football have aimed their fire too narrowly. In highlighting the mystique of a terrace as a throbbing, heaving mass of partisan passion, they’ve missed what makes an awful lot of terraces – particularly a lot of those that still exist – special: their quiet, easy-going affability.

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