Squads are now so vast that players can sink to the bottom and never come up again. Matthew Hall goes in search of Mark Bosnich

Three years ago, Mark Bosnich had it all. He had turned down Juventus to rejoin his beloved Man­chester United, the club he spent three seasons with as a teenager a decade earlier, as successor to Peter Sch­meichel. During the same summer, after a night that ended in a police cell, he had remarried. Happy at work and happy at home, the future was bright. Three years later, the sunglasses are well and truly off, most likely replaced by pyjamas, slippers and a blanket. Mark Bos­nich doesn’t get out much these days, and in that relatively short space of time, Bosnich has felt the wrath of Sir Alex Ferguson, then his new wife and now Claudio Ranieri.

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The European Union is expanding as rapidly as the waistlines of retired footballers. Al Needham puzzled over an event that brought the two together

The Europe United Masters tournament was held at the London Arena on a miserable October Sunday, wedged between the Disney Channel Kids Awards and Beauty and the Beast On Ice. It had a weird premise: the Foreign Office decided that the best way to mark the admission of ten new coun­tries to the European Union was to organise a kick­about for retired foot­ballers, some of them not exactly re­nowned for their Europhilia (one of the British Masters squad once said living in Italy was like being in a foreign country and another famously told Norway to “Fuck off”). Mind you, if you needed reminding that there have been worse ideas, we’re only a stone’s throw away from the Millennium Dome.

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Jim McLean has finally quit. Ken Gall says the man who made Dundee United great was right about most things, even if he didn't always put it politely

With all four Scottish entrants for European club competition experiencing varying degrees of dis­ap­point­ment and humiliation, and Arsène Wenger openly scoffing at the notion of ever signing a Scottish player, one might imagine that the game north of the border could do with all the help it can get.

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In the past decade, the quest to find Scotland's 'Third Force' has become an increasingly vain one. Gary Panton runs the rule over the brief contenders

Just months after completing their meteoric rise from the lower rungs of Scottish football to a third place finish in the top flight, the critics are claiming that Livingston’s bubble has already burst. Ten games into the season, an im­pres­sive 4-3 UEFA Cup victory over Sturm Graz could not dis­guise the fact that the Livi Lions had slump­ed to the bottom of the SPL.

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The big issues affecting clubs in the Football League

The principle that clubs should not leave their ground unless they are certain of being able to return to a site in the local area is one that was meant to have been established after Brighton left the Gold­stone Ground. How­ever, it shows no sign of being universally ac­cepted. Ron Noades, for one, is keen to move Brentford out of Griffin Park, despite the fact that no new long-term home has been secured.

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