In WSC 115 we asked you how you felt your club was fairing on and off the pitch and you feel the biggest problems facing the game are. Roger Titford reports the results
So how has football’s boom left the typically cynical and crisis-hardened WSC readership feeling? In the six years we have been conducting these surveys we have never had such upbeat results, but many of you can sense the problems of success (aka too much money) just around the corner. All percentages are based on 720 replies.
Phil Ball examines why the city of Pamplona in Northern Spain has long been a haven for expatriate British footballers
Since the construction of the new motorway, San Sebastian to Pamplona only takes 50 minutes by car now, over the rainy mountains and down into the meseta that opens out into southern Navarre. To the east of the city, on the old road up to the French Pyrenees, Club Atlético Osasuna are training in a downpour. You can tell they’re in the Second Division now – First Division sides regularly attract hundreds, sometimes thousands to training sessions. Here there are at most a dozen assorted kids and pensioners moping on the cold stone steps of the training ground.
Harry Pearson looks at Sir John Hall's role in both the football club and city of Newcastle
A few years ago I met the former chairman of a First Division club. I tried vainly to engage him in conversation about the game. After a while he confessed that he wasn’t particularly interested in it. “Why did you go through all the bother of becoming a chairman then?” I asked. “Because it is the most exclusive club in England,” the chairman replied. I eyed him quizzically. “Look,” the chairman explained, “There are hundreds of lords, aren’t there? Hundreds of MPs and Bishops, but there are only 92 Football League chairmen.”
The atmosphere at football matches isn't what it used to be
Another season, another FA committee may be in the offing. They’ve looked into bungs and tax fiddles (investigations so thorough and complex that we’re still waiting for definitive conclusions a couple of years later), now it’s the turn of the teams of marketing managers to look into the atmosphere or, rather, the lack of it, at grounds on matchdays.
Cris Freddi looks back at the days when British coaches had to go abroad to be coaches at all and wonders if it is time for a little reciprocation
Among the British subjects living in Germany who were arrested at the outbreak of World War I was a certain S Bloomer, who must’ve been first pick in any internment camp five-a-side: he’d scored a world record 28 goals in 23 matches for England. The mighty Steve had been passing on the tricks of the trade, and not just in Germany: Vittorio Pozzo became the only manager to win the World Cup twice (1934 & 1938) on the back of conversations with Bloomer and the great centre half Charlie Roberts.