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French football is in need of a financial facelift and, writes James Eastham, they've come up with a familiar looking scheme

Raymond Domenech’s questionable managerial abilities made 2008 an awful year for France’s national team, but in November the state of the club game became the source of most navel-gazing tension, with the publication of the Besson Report. Written by politician Eric Besson and commissioned by national rugby coach-turned-sports minister Bernard Laporte, it was a seven-month study into how to make French football more competitive.

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With the credit crunch starting to hit fan's pockets, attendances are suffering. Ashley Shaw looks into how Man Utd are trying to deal with the problem

The Manchester United Supporters Trust campaign to urge the Office of Fair Trading to investigate the ticket-pricing policy at Old Trafford represents the first skirmish in what could become a war between cash-strapped supporters and football clubs at all levels.

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AC Milan looked to Sweden for inspiration and three players came to help them lift the title, by Luca Ferrato

The long-term significance
Most of the foreign footballers in Italy in the 1930s had come from South America, often from migrant backgrounds that enabled them to be selected for the national team. After the war clubs widened their search for playing talent, notably into eastern Europe and Scandinavia. In 1950-51 Serie A featured nine players from Denmark and 13 from Sweden. Seven of the latter had been gold medallists at the 1948 Olympics, including a trio who went on to play for AC Milan: midfielders Gunnar Gren and Nils Liedholm plus striker Gunnar Nordahl. Often referred to collectively as “Gre-No-Li”, these three were to play key roles in Milan’s title, the club’s first since before the foundation of city rivals Internazionale in 1908. Liedholm and Nordahl had previously played under Milan’s Hungarian coach Lajos Czeizler when he was in charge of their Swedish side, IFK Norrköping.

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Dear WSC
I write to you concerning Simon Creasey’s fascinating article Parting Shots (WSC 259), in which Ignacio Palacios-Huerta of the London School of Economics describes that, in penalty shootouts, the team that taking a penalty first wins 60.5 per cent of the time. He then goes on to say that the team kicking first “has a 21 per cent greater probability of winning the shootout”. I don’t cast doubt on Mr Palacios-Huerta’s abilities as a statistician, but it is possible that he meant 21 per cent more probability of winning. If Team X has a 60.5 per cent probability of winning, then Team Y therefore has a 39.5 per cent probability. Team X’s probability is [(((60.5 / 39.5) -1) x 100) =] 53 per cent greater than Team Y’s of winning the shootout. Or, in other words, that Team X wins 21 per cent more matches means that their chances are 53 per cent better than Team Y’s for any given shootout. We can be sure that this is precisely what was going through Rio Ferdinand’s head after extra time in Moscow.
Patrick Finch, Eskilstuna, Sweden

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Developing local young talent used to be the way forward for Millwall, but they can no longer see the point. Paul Casella takes up the sorry tale

After a close-season tribunal judged that teenage starlet John Bostock’s sale to Tottenham Hotspur was worth just £700,000 to Crystal Palace, their owner Simon Jordan decided it was time to look for a buyer for his club. And he wasn’t the only south London chairman to question the point of developing homegrown talent this summer. Last season Millwall lost youth hopes David Amoo to Liverpool, Sam Walker to Chelsea and Tom Kilby to Portsmouth for combined fees of £400,000. They were all products of a youth set-up that an ailing third-tier club could barely afford to run. The club’s American chairman, John Berylson, was so enraged by the size of the fees that he closed the Millwall academy.

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