While English clubs shrug off the annual doom-laden analysis from financial commentators, Scotland's elite have been assessed as even flakier. Ken Gall reports on some alarming figures

Recent evidence would suggest that the required reading for Scottish Premier League chairmen during the close season would be a well-thumbed Guide to Who’s Cheap and Available Around the Second Div­isions of Europe. However, following the publication in April of the remarkable sets of accounts by all SPL clubs, they would be well advised to pick up instead a copy of JK Galbraith’s The Great Crash, in which the eminent Harvard economist describes how speculation, profligacy and unsustainable financial practices led to the Wall Street crash of 1929.

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Gunther Simmermacher reports on a culture of buck-passing in the aftermath of South Africa's latest disaster

Never again, the football establishment of South Africa vowed after more than 40 fans died at a match between the country’s most popular clubs, Soweto teams Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs. Fast forward a decade, and the well-meaning platitudes – voiced after 42 fans were crushed to death in the remote town of Orkney on January 13, 1991 – proved less than prophetic. On April 11, 43 more fans died outside Ellis Park stadium in Johannesburg during the Chiefs v Pirates derby.

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While the Premiership clubs can afford costly measures to keep hooliganism out of their stadiums, the price is being paid lower down the leagues and out of sight of the camera. Mark Rowe reports

Graham Hodgetts has the lives of an admittedly less than full Villa Park in his hands. In the control room under a stand roof he stands with his shirt sleeves rolled up, spectacles dangling from his right hand. As Villa’s safety officer – all league clubs have one – he looks calm, but then he was a police officer for 30 years, retiring as superintendent. Leeds are visiting on a January midweek night. There are about a dozen people in the control room, half of them uniformed officers, looking at a dozen CCTV monitors and taking most interest in the images of fans on their feet at the back of a stand, well guarded by police and stewards.

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The Football League's verdict on charges of financial irregularities against Chesterfield has thrown the Third Division into confusion. Hartlepool fan Ed Parkinson is among those left unimpressed

In a confusingly dishonest world full of spin, deceit and greed it is usually possible to gain some respite by indulging an obsession with lower division football, a reasonably plain-speaking sporting backwater still dominated by traditionalists and mercifully free of prawn sandwiches. The recent events involving Ches­ter­field would suggest that this rare pool of comparative sanity is in danger.

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Karl D Pridmore explains how the board at Nottingham Forest tried to change a football club into a public company in 1997

In April the financial future of Nottingham Forest was decided in the High Court, to almost complete indifference in the national press. It’s a complicated tale, but one with important implications for other clubs and, for Forest, a more or less happy ending.

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