The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
San Lorenzo fans are mobilising to ask questions of the dictatorship that turned their stadium into a supermarket, reports Joel Richards
Barely three hours after the Mothers of the Disappeared finished their march, San Lorenzo fans filled the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. According to the organisers, there were 100,000 of them. Just like the Mothers, San Lorenzo were demanding justice for crimes committed during the 1976-83 dictatorship in Argentina.
Mark Poole on the controversy which should lead to the SFA updating their disciplinary procedures
Video evidence is all the rage. It seems that every time a manager or pundit is unhappy with a decision they ask why we cannot use video evidence, at least to retrospectively punish the opposition. The Scottish Football Association (SFA) are addressing the issue.
Football is popular in India but without a strong domestic competition fans will continue to watch the English game, writes Simon Creasey
It may play second fiddle to cricket as the national pastime, but football has a big following in India. In July 1997 a record 131,000 people crammed into the Salt Lake stadium in Calcutta to watch the KBL Federation Cup semi-final between bitter rivals East Bengal and Mohun Bagan. In the same decade attendances of up to 100,000 were recorded in Kerala and Bengal. Goa, Bangalore and Delhi also regularly enjoyed matchday attendances of between 25,000 and 35,000.
Alex Lawson on the role of train travel in football
In the 1970s and 80s Football Specials were used to ferry fans to away games by rail in a bid to contain hooliganism. Supporters’ organisations and the British Transport Police have been investigating the idea of restoring the services in the wake of frequent arrests of fans travelling on regular trains. At the height of hooliganism, spare carriages and redundant trains were used to transport huge numbers of fans. But the Specials became a focus for problems and were largely scrapped in the early 1990s as privatisation made organising services across the networks more difficult.