Having slid to the fifth tier Fortuna Cologne are looking to a web-based model to revive the club, explains Paul Joyce
Under their dictatorial president Jean Löring, Fortuna Cologne were possibly Germany’s least democratically run club. Löring once fired manager Toni Schumacher at half time during a match in 1999 with the words: “I, being the club, had to react.”
Tim Springett looks at the latest edict from the World Anti-Doping Agency and its implications for football
If ever there was a topic that cried out for rational debate, it is the issue of drug use by sports people. Sadly, rationality has long since been buried under a tidal wave of self-righteousness. Even though football has far from the worst record of participants seeking to gain an illicit advantage through drugs, it seems constantly to be first in line for the bile of commentators and opinion-formers whenever the subject is raised. The usual mantra – that football’s procedures for drug testing lag way behind other sports – has been repeated so often it seems almost pointless to question it. To this can be added the well-known fact that every professional footballer is an overpaid prima donna.
Leicester’s tussles with Atlético Madrid left fans simmering at injustice but, as Saul Pope recalls, these were heady days
Eleven years ago their fans would have never accepted it, but Leicester City’s UEFA Cup first round tie against Atlético Madrid in September 1997 will probably be as good as it gets. Leicester didn’t win the game, but for a time they were leading thanks to a player once described by the club fanzine The Fox as looking “knackered whenever he ran on to a football field”.
A Yorkshire MEP is campaigning for an investigation into the 1973 Cup-Winners Cup final. Matthew Barker wonders why
The 1973 European Cup-Winners Cup final wasn’t, by all accounts, a great game. Leeds United and Milan kicked chunks out of each other in a typically brutal early-Seventies footballing culture-clash, played in a torrential downpour in Salonika. Luciano Chiarugi scored the only goal from a third-minute free-kick (indirect, claim Leeds), with the Italians happy to defend deep in a catenaccio master class under the tutelage of Nereo Rocco. Don Revie’s team had three penalty claims waved away by Greek referee Christos Michas, while Norman Hunter was sent off. It was, as Italian newspaper Il Manifesto recently put it, “a disaster from beginning to end … a night of rain and rage”, with a disgruntled local crowd pelting Milan’s players with missiles as they attempted to celebrate their win.
Neil Forsyth assesses the fallout from the Ferguson/McGregor incident and the somewhat muddled response of their superiors
The Scottish national team has a long, celebrated history of alcohol-fuelled moments of madness and it was about time another one came stumbling into view. After all, it’s been more than 30 years since the glory days of the 1970s – when a drunk Jimmy Johnstone stole a rowing boat during a Scotland camp and was rescued by the coastguard, then the Scotland career of Billy Bremner and two others ended after an altercation in a Copenhagen nightclub following a European Championship game.