Search: ' Supporters Direct'

Forty years ago the Atlanta Chiefs of the North American Soccer League played across the baseball infield, over gridiron markings and beside a smoking teepee – called into action for goal celebrations – to bring the city its first sports championship

Stadium demolition is something of an American art form. They typically attract crowds who chronicle the devastation for later enjoyment. The destruction of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium early one day in August 1997 was no different. Some 30,000 people turned out so they could experience first-hand the seismic jolt triggered by a chain-reaction explosion that in half a minute buried a brief three decades of sporting history.

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Wolves are the quintessential Championship side, in the second tier for two decades, bar one season. Coventry used to be the epitome of top-flight survivors. Both are casting their eyes upwards this autumn, though neither is exactly confident, writes Josh Widdicombe

At 2.15pm in the car park Molineux shares with a 24-hour Asda, a sprinkling of people amble away from their cars, the odd old-gold replica shirt peeking out from under a coat the only clues that they aren’t here for the weekly shop. The loudest shouts come from the raffle-ticket sellers and the strongest evidence of pride in the home colours can be found on the metalwork in and around the ground, an area painted on the Midas principle: anything that can be gold, should be gold.

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Supporters Direct is gaining momentum and credibility, with friends in high places. Adam Brown reports on their annual conference

A cabinet minister making a keynote address, a speech by the chair of the FA and even the shadow sports minister in on the act – it’s hardly what you would expect at a conference for several hundred fan activists. But this signalled just how far Supporters Direct, the ­government-funded agency promoting fan ownership of clubs, has travelled as it held its 2008 conference.

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Clubs struggling in the current financial crisis by Tom Davies

The financial crisis has inevitably brought with it a swirl of speculation about how football clubs will cope with the first recession since the Premier League breakaway, but given the messes so many got into during the boom years it’s tempting to wonder whether we’ll notice much difference. But there’s no doubt many will find life more precarious.

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Newcastle, managerless and looking for new ownership, travel to a seemingly far happier club, with West Ham fans welcoming Gianfranco Zola. But fresh turmoil is about to emerge: the papers reporting on the game predict the imminent verdict in Sheffield United’s appeal over Carlos Tevez, writes David Stubbs

I caught this fixture in April, on an unseasonably warm day. The Jubilee Line was subject to one of its rare closures and I had to make the trip in a replacement bus, which, like a mobile greenhouse and packed to the rafters, wended its way at gridlocked-traffic’s pace to Canning Town, then past some of east London’s most eye-catching industrial estates before reaching West Ham. Uncannily, though the journey lasted 40 minutes, the Millennium Dome hovered throughout, seemingly never more than 250 yards away; a curse of the white elephant. West Ham, under the lugubrious watch of Alan Curbishley, darted into a 2-0 lead but then, having blown their ­bubbles, conceded two quick goals to a Newcastle team with the air of having accidentally rediscovered their self-esteem under Kevin Keegan.

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