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.
Ian Plenderleith takes a look at the diverse range of football websites
Welcome in to my exciting life, declares Crystal Palace’s Finn Aki Riihilahti at the start of his official homepage. As player websites go it’s a treat, and you can follow the ups and downs of Aki’s existential mood swings that correspond to his fluctuations in form.
The sanitised Premiership fan experience is increasingly an exception around Europe. Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger expalins why German clubs have insisted on keeping terraces open
He looked like somebody out of an American movie about college nerds: the thick spectacles, the greasy hair, the slight speech defect and the frail body. Still, he was a pretty good long-distance runner, and that’s how my brother had come to know him. He was always standing right behind us at games, next to that bunch of bikers who called themselves The Ghostriders.
Ian Plenderleith shows us websites from the top of the football hierachy, to the bottom.
There is no end of general football sites saturated from the top down with Premier this and that, but one website with the courage to eschew the tedium of big boy coverage is League Matters, which describes itself as the independent and dedicated guide to league football. And by that it means the Football League.
The hounding of Neil Lennon brought the issue of sectarianism back into the spotlight. As Davy Millar writes, recent initiatives to revive the Irish League will fail unless this underlying problem is addressed.
Its not been a bad season for the Irish League so far. Our clubs still suffer from a shortage of fans, a lack of money, administrative cock-ups and an all-pervading sense of despair but we’re used to all that sort of thing by now. The good news is that everybody agrees we’re in a mess and they’ve all promised to think really hard about how to get out of it. Out of the mess, that is; Glentoran’s Rory Hamill misunderstood that bit and promptly failed his UEFA Cup drug test.