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The comprehensive corporate makeover of Austria Salzburg has brought in big money and big promises but has alienated supporters, as Paul Joyce reports

The Austrian Bundesliga has always been highly commercialised. Club names can be altered at the behest of new investors – hence FC Superfund in Pasching, or SCU Seidl Software of Untersiebenbrunn. With players plastered from head to arse in sponsors’ logos like motor-racing drivers, it’s fitting that Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz followed his acquisition of a Formula 1 team with that of SV Austria Salzburg in April.

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Sven-Göran Eriksson’s team are top of their qualifying table and heading home to a shiny new stadium next year – but, as Philip Cornwall writes, the fans don’t seem to have much to sing about

It’s 9.52am and my train is at journey’s end – in a year or so’s time. As a kid on my way home from London I always felt a thrill just here, long before I first walked up close to the Twin Towers (FA Trophy final, 1982) and went inside what was clearly to me then the home of football, English or otherwise. On winter nights I would press my face up against the windows to negate the reflections, peer out, longingly, then pull back as we rattled through Wembley Central and see the impression my forehead had made on the glass.

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The sun shines on the football in Leith these days, as Tony Mowbray’s young side have become Scotland’s latest third force. But can they build on current success? Dianne Millen reports

Every team in Scotland outside the Old Firm is allowed to have what the papers normally refer to as a “bumper season” – a concept depressing in its acknowledgement that no club can hope to actually claim the real honours. Seven years ago, improbably, it was St Johnstone, now of the First Division, who claim­ed the “third force” honours. Four years ago it was newly promoted Livingston who, rather than dutifully struggling against relegation, instead storm­ed to third place and Europe. Since then, the club with the most credible claim have been the consistent if somewhat stolid Heart of Midlothian, the only club to finish in the lucrative half of the laughable “top six-bottom six” league split every year since it was introduced. This season, however, the third force-elect are their Edin­burgh neighbours, Hibernian. Their youth-fuel­led renaissance under ex-Ipswich man Tony Mow­bray hints that, for the first time in years, genteel Edinburgh may be rising again as a footballing city to challenge its western cousin.

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Four years ago this month, Sunderland were second in the Premiership – and as Harry Pearson writes, some fans are still struggling to come to terms with the spectacular collapse since

It’s probably the fact that it is 70 or so years since one of the region’s teams could justifiably lay claim to being the best in the country that leads football fans in the north-east of England to spend their lives permanently teetering on the brink of exasperation. It doesn’t take much to tip them over the edge. Santa hats may predominate at the Sunderland Stadium of Light, but the mood is as much restive as festive. When yet another pass is pinged out of midfield and across the touchline a bloke sitting in the row behind me in the East Stand groans loudly: “I’ve paid £23 for a bucket of shite,” he says. The big scoreboard above the North Stand shows that six minutes and 28 seconds have been played.

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Anti-racism initiatives in football should be applauded, but it's only scratching the surface

The press lounge at a Premiership ground one evening a few years ago. Journalists gathered for a midweek game are looking at a TV screen that is replaying goals from the previous weekend. Dwight Yorke scores against a team supported by one of those watching, who walks up to the screen and says loudly, in mock indignation: “Yorke, you black twat!” In the wake of last month’s friendly in Mad­rid, the journalist in question was one of many who set about suggesting various forms of action that might be taken against Spain for the Bernabéu crowd’s racial abuse of black England players. It is fair to assume, then, that he has long since seen the error of his ways.

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