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Apparent misfits in the Premiership, more than a few imports have gone on to have perplexingly good careers elsewhere. We tracked down three of them, Ernst Bouwes looking at Jon Dahl Tomasson

In the spring of 1997 his fellow players voted him Talent of the Year in the Dutch league, with Giovanni van Bronckhorst and Arnold Bruggink second and third. A couple of days after accepting the trophy, he scored a hat-trick against Vitesse Arnhem to go top of the goalscorers list, leaving quality players like Luc Nilis, Roy Makaay and Patrick Kluivert (and Gerald Sibon) behind him. While his goals took modest Heer­enveen to their first Dutch Cup final, about 20 clubs  were rumoured to be interested in signing him, with Ajax, Atlético Madrid and Bar­celona the most persistent. A transfer fee of about £2 million seemed a laughably small amount for a 21-year-old who had just made his international debut for Denmark. Yes, we’re talk­ing about Jon Dahl Tomasson.

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Tom Davies takes a look at four clubs in the news for the wrong reasons

The controversial Tony Petty is still in charge at Swansea after winning a legal battle with the former City cap­tain Mel Nurse on Nov­em­ber 23. Trouble began after Petty bought the club from the prev­ious ow­n­ers, Ninth Floor (effec­tive­ly former chairman Mike Lew­is), for £1 in September and promptly tried to sack or re­duce the wages of 15 mem­bers of staff . “If the players’ con­tracts had been continued, there would not be a club here,” he claimed.

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Suddenly, all official club websites look alike. It's another triumph for commerce over diversity and independance, says Jan Lotze

In a move which proves that the desire for money will always overrule quality, all 72 Nat­ionwide League clubs, and a handful in the Premiership, have effectively handed over control of their official web­sites to Prem­ium TV, a subsidiary of the broadcaster NTL. Lured by an initial six-figure fee, and with the pro­mise of further revenue dependent on traffic and the number of “referrals” to an on­line bet­ting shop, clubs have opted to buy and oper­ate the PTV soft­ware for the next five years.

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Paul Giess  believes that success on the field would help transform the club's profile and in the process atttract a larger fansbase across the Midlands as they struggle to compete with the other leading clubs in the region

Walsall isn’t a small town but the club has nearly always been in the lower divisions. Do some locals support other clubs?
Almost all. Saturday afternoon at the Bes­cot can be depressing but on a non-match Saturday the town centre is even worse. A seemingly non-stop procession of Villa, West Brom and Wolves shirts mingle with the Man Utd brigade. Maybe if the club had had more success in its early days it might have built up the fan base now lost to our neighbours. It may take ten years’ success to get us noticed again.

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He has been at Chelsea since before the fall of the Berlin wall, yet has played barely 100 games. Mike Ticher looks at the enigma of the underemployed keeper

“Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish that man would go away.”

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