Search: 'UEFA'

Saturday 1 Berlin’s stadium announcer is replaced after urging the crowd to cheer Germany during their quarter-final. Glenn Hoddle resigns at Wolves. “My expectations and the club’s have drifted too far apart,” he says. Paul Ince is tipped to step in.

Sunday 2 David Beckham quits as England captain, although he wants to keep playing. He tearfully mentions Steve McClaren and Peter Taylor twice, with a solitary nod towards “Sven”. “Maybe we’re a victim of our own honesty and Wayne more than most,” reasons John Terry as the campaign against “Sly Senor” Ronaldo gathers momentum. Honest Wayne is quoted as telling team-mates over breakfast that he wants to “smack him on the head and split him in two”, though he may have been referring to his boiled egg.X

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Thursday 1 “I think I have arrived here at the perfect time,” says Andriy Shevchenko on joining Chelsea for £30 million. Arsenal are to be questioned over a loan payment made to their Belgian nursery club Beveren, which may have breached FIFA regulations. Ronnie Moore steps down as Oldham manager, to be replaced by John Sheridan.

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Marseille were first crowned League champions, then European Champions. They were stripped of the former though, reports Aaron Donaghy

The long-term significance
The best-supported and richest club in French football, Olympique de Marseille, beat AC Milan to win the first-ever Champions League on May 26, 1993. Twenty-four hours later, news broke that Marseille’s vital league match against Valenciennes just six days earlier had been fixed. It emerged that three Valenciennes players had been paid to “go easy” on Marseille, who were chasing a record fifth consecutive league title. Valenciennes defender Jacques Glassmann claimed that he and two of his colleagues were offered £30,000 to throw the match. Marseille were thus barred from the 1993‑94 Champions League by UEFA and stripped of their league title by the French FA, while three players and a Marseille director were banned from football. A year later they were further punished with enforced relegation, bankruptcy and the imprisonment of club president and millionaire entrepreneur Bernard Tapie. The whistle-blower Glassmann claimed to have been shunned by French clubs subsequently and wound down his career playing on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion.

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Thirty years ago a west London club very nearly won the title – and it would have been a popular success, too. Graham Dunbar recalls QPR's finest 42 games

It is April 17, 2006, Easter Monday, and Queens Park Rangers lose 3-2 at Norwich in the definitive meaningless and mediocre end-of-season game. Two teams playing second-rate, second-tier football in what could be the worst five-goal affair anyone has seen; a match with no significance beyond reminding both clubs that the Premiership is a distant dream.

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Steve Menary reports that the main recommendations from a review of European football will not sit well with England's top clubs

Chelsea at the bottom of the Premiership is an unlikely scenario that would surely only ever happen if Roman Abramovich quit west London, but could a salary cap reduce the champions to also-rans? Wigan, for example, were rugby league’s dominant club until a few years ago but this season face relegation from Super League and a salary cap has contributed to their demise.

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