Search: 'European Union'

The number of Australian players in Britain has turned from trickle to flood, fuelled by an army of agents. Neil Forsyth  traces this all back to a very English wheeler-dealer

Ten years ago it was Scandinavians. Every United Kingdom team, it seemed, had one. Cheap, professional and highly adaptable to the British playing style (apart from Tomas Brolin, on all three counts) they stream­ed across the North Sea. It wasn’t a coincidental occurrence, a sudden outbreak of itchy feet. Rather, it was down to the emergence in those countries of an ambitious and inventive breed of a relatively new football phenomenon, the modern agent. Well educated, fluent in English and with a largely untapped resource to market, the fledgling Scandinavian agents found the UK a fertile mar­ket. One, Rune Hauge, brought a novel bus­iness approach to his dealings with then Arsenal manager George Graham, leading to the Scotsman’s sacking.

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While the Czech Pavel Nedved celebrates being named European Footballer of the Year, Ian Farrell  remembers the rapid decline of a previous winner, from slightly further east

Such is the general view of football in eastern Europe today, it takes some effort to imagine teams from there electrifying the sport and win­ning admirers across the world. But in the mid 1980s, Dynamo Kiev, together with the virtually interchangeable USSR side also coached by Valery Lobanovski, took football to another level with a conception of the game as a living machine. Total Football meets applied mathematics. This lent itself easily to Cold War stereotyping – collectivised football played by faceless automata – but the play was a world away from the drabness of the Eastern Bloc, thanks mainly to Oleg Blokhin, Alexander Zavarov and, foremost among them, Igor Belanov.

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It could be far worse than Murdoch, writes Ken Gall

European Union policy on anti-competitive practices may not be the topic du jour for most WSC readers, but the keen interest shown recently by commissioner Mario Monti in the Premiership’s cosy TV deal with Sky may yet have implications for the game at all levels. And anyone who deplores English football’s alliance with Rupert Murdoch might have to face an alarming possibility: that the alternative might be far, far worse. Any departure from the current collective agreement could result in the bigger clubs selling the rights to their games individually, leaving clubs at all levels – along with grass-roots projects such as the Football Foundation – facing a shattering cut in revenue.

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While many feel footballers earn too much these days, there are those who argue that salary capping players would be a bad idea

One of the biggest clubs in the country is in dire trouble; another high-flyer has slumped from the top of the league to the bottom, both as a result of spending too much on players’ wages. That may sound familiar, but in fact these two examples from Australian sport could hardly be more different from the nightmare scenarios painted for the future of football clubs in Britain and the rest of Europe.

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Almost alone among their former communist neighbours, Czech clubs have made some headway in the Champions League era. Sam Beckwith reports

These are strange days in the Czech Republic: European Union entry, which has been dangled on a string since 1989, finally seems imminent; the citizens of Prague and Brno are spoilt for choice when it comes to multiplex cinemas and out-of-town shopping centres; and even Viktoria Zizkov’s Jur­assic-era stadium is all-seater now.

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