Millwall's Steve Claridge has seen life as a player and, briefly, a manager in the First Division. He tells WSC how the ITV Digital crisis has affected his outlook and the career prospects for League players at all levels

"I don’t think that the financial crisis in football right now would put off players who were thinking of going into management. Certain problems were there anyway at the lower levels. I said to Tony Cottee when he was going to Barnet, what are they are going to give you? A good year there is tenth place in the Third Division, but if things don’t work out there you’re back to square one. The amount of money around always makes a huge difference.

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Last summer we interviewed a confident David Burns, the Football League's chief executive. Since then his member clubs suffered the collapse of ITV Digital, while rumours persist that Celtic and Rangers will be asked to move south. So we went back to find out how he viewed the situation after a turbulent season

The Football League has called on the government to intervene in the ITV Digital dispute. What exactly do you believe they should do?
I think that the government can and should do more. I have made it clear to Tessa Jowell, the secretary of state for Cul­ture, Media and Sport, that the government should con­­demn the action of Carlton and Granada, yet they refuse to do so. They could have a full enquiry con­ducted by the regulator – the Independent Television Commission – and they could stop giving cash to Carlton and Granada by way of what’s called the digital dividend. These broad­casters, for every viewer they get transferred over on to a digital platform, whether it’s satellite or cable, get a tax-free sum, a rebate against what it costs to be a public service broadcaster, which for the ITV network is £400 million a year. Over the next ten years they can earn up to £320 million of that back through rebates. On Carlton and Granada’s own fig­ures, between 2001 and 2010, which is the period the government set for the switch over from analogue, it’s worth £2 billion to them. Carlton and Granada pulling out of the League deal is nothing to do with the product itself or with them hav­ing overpaid for what they got. Because they paid the going rate at the time – in the same way that Sky did. They just decided they couldn’t run a paying chan­nel against Sky. The reasons why were poor technology, poor customer service and poor marketing. And yet they suddenly saw that they could make more mon­ey out of the digital dividend then they could through subscribers. The government could simply call the ITV companies and say: “You can forget all about the digital dividend until you pay your debt to football.” And that would also serve as a warning to other companies gen­erally, because what we’ve got here are two major FTSE 100 companies who have just walked away from their liabilities – which is almost unprecedented.

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No one else would do it, so Neil McCarthy felt compelled to hand out some awards to the French presidents who have so enriched the past season

Each season, the French Players’ Union stage Les Oscars du Foot, televised live and attended by the squads of all 38 professional clubs. This year, Bor­deaux’s striker Pauleta won player of the season and Djibril Cissé won best young player. For some reason, though, none of the 38 club presidents turned up for the Oscars and only two sent apologies. France Football magazine remarked on this and suggested that per­haps the organisers would have more success in at­tracting them if they awarded an Oscar for president of the season.

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Ian Plenderleith discovers a Swede with an addiction to Slough Town, what Colin Addison's main failing as a manager was, and where the Jail End can be found

How far would you travel to watch Slough Town? It’s one of those questions consistently posed in philosophical and political de­bating salons across the nation. In the case of Mats Tallqvist, leader of the Slough fan group the Swedish Rebels, the answer is “all the way from Halmstad”, and with great regularity, jud­ging by the diary accounts on his Unofficial Slough Town Web Page.

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The Football League play-offs present altering patterns in hooliganism, writes Tom Davies

If there’s a World Cup in the offing, one thing you can always rely on in the preceding weeks is the “spotlight” falling on “fears of hooliganism”. With it comes the obligatory bout of documentaries on “the problem that never went away”, as a seemingly endless stream of ageing young men queue up to tell us about where and why it’s kicking off. Proclaiming yourself to be a former football hooligan must surely be the easiest way to achieve TV fame these days – such people make the contestants on Pop Idol look like dues-paying footsloggers by comparison.

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