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Coming to a ground near you – a broadsheet journalist who knows little about football and less about hooliganism, but is still writing about them, to Barnay Ronay's fury

Football is in the grip of a new and terrifying menace: journalists writing articles about hooliganism. Not to mention low-budget British films about hooliganism, journalists writing articles about low-budget films about hooliganism – and now a new and even more sinister threat: football mag­azines publishing articles about newspaper stories about hooliganism.

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Should books about football violence be on the top shelf? Rob Chapman believes that the success of ‘hoolie porn’ is due to some men’s rather odd obsession with crime

About 20 years ago I used to work in one of Britain’s hardest and most dangerous borstals. I mentioned this fact to the husband of my cousin one day at a family get-together. “Oh good, tell me more,” he said, fetching me another drink. “I love villainy tales. They give me an erection.” Yes, that’s what he said. These people do exist. He wasn’t the least bit discouraged when I told him that all I did was teach remedial English to a stan­dard whereby the average semi-literate car thief or burglar might at least be able to grasp the rudiments of a Sun editorial. I haven’t seen him for years but I bet he reads hoolie-books. I imagine most of the commissioning editors who publish the stuff are a bit like him, too. They love a bit of rough and they’ve created a veritable industry out of “literature” that documents the exploits of former, and in some cases not so former, football hooligans.

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Though the extent of Leeds’ problems fluctuates from minute to minute, Duncan Young has tried to get a grip on it all

The conspicuous problem for Leeds is that not only do they not have the money to pay back their debts, they do not even have enough to maintain the obligations that must be met now. As recently revealed by chief executive Trevor Birch, a £60 milli0n loan is already secured against the stadium, a £3.5m debt is secured against the training ground and most of the key players are leased from a company in Jersey. Foot­ball finance expert Professor Tom Cannon of Checksure, an organisation that provides credit ratings on companies, describes this not unreasonably as “test­ing securitisation to its limits”. Even the status of the three valuable players that Leeds might actually own is in doubt, though selling even one would be tantamount to run­­ning up a white flag in the eyes of Leeds fans.

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Friday 2 Martin O’Neill denies being approached by Liverpool – “I’m going to try and remain calm and say that story is totally and utterly untrue” – while Lazio coach Roberto Mancini is the latest to be linked with the Spurs job. The transfer window opens with a creak: Leicester sign Nikos Dabizas from Newcastle and turn down a Blackburn bid for Muzzy Izzet; Wolves sign Romania striker Ioan Ganea on a short-term deal; Eyal Berkovic may take a wage cut to leave Man City for Portsmouth.

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Somehow football and rap have rarely hit it off, in spite of some peciliar parallels in the fashion stakes. Al Needham works hard to find what references there are to the game

First, a word of reassurance: just because footballers seem to be getting into hip-hop a good 15 years after everyone else did does not compromise in any way the well loved cliche about footballers having bland and rubbishy musical taste. Ever since hip-hop overtook country and rock to become the most lucrative genre of music in America, it has been successfully defanged of its subversive elements, until what Chuck D of Public Enemy called “the Black CNN” is now some bloke prattling on about what he bought the other day, who he’d like to shoot and generally how ace he is. Again. For 50 Cent, Eminem and Jay-Z, read “George Benson, Shakatak and Steak and Chips”.

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