The argument put forward against the punishment meted out was, “We didn’t think that it would be that severe”, which feels like a watered-down version of trying to claim ignorance of the law as a legal defence. It’s the sort of argument that you’d think should have legs, but it’s far from guaranteed that it will.

A curious tidbit from the paperwork shed some light on the League’s thinking. The reason that the punishment was two-fold was because the play-offs and the regular League season were treated by the commission as two separate competitions. Expulsion from the play-offs came because they’d spyed on a team preparing for a play-off semi-final. The points deduction came because it also surfaced that they’d spyed on opponents ahead of two other Championship matches last season, against Oxford United and Ipswich Town.

Knowing the type of horse-trading that goes on behind the scenes in professional football, it was tempting to think that the four-point deduction had been add so that it could potentially be knocked off on appeal, but this has turned out not to be the case. At the time of writing, we still await the written reasons for the decision reached, which will break down in greater detail what their thinking was.

What this means for the future of head coach Tonda Eckert is just about anybody’s guess. Incriminating WhatsApp messages reportedly sent by him formed part of the case against Southampton, and Eckert could even now be facing a ban from football. It’s a little early to say, but the case for saying that his position is tenable is shaky, to say the least.

Other details of the case seemed to spiral into the ridiculous. When Southampton spied on Ipswich, the operation involved dressing in an Eastleigh kit as a disguise, while it was also revealed that they had initially planned for intern involved in the Middlesbrough incident to go back and spy on them for a second day because they were unhappy with his footage from the first .

The knock-on ramifications for the club could be severe. The club’s players are reportedly - and understandably - furious. It’s been reported that they are taking legal advice because a number of them stayed with the club beyond their 2024-25 relegation from the Premier League on a 40% wage cut because they were promised by the club that their wage would be restored in the event that they were promoted back.

They hadn’t secured promotion at the time that everything fell apart, of course, but with a place in the final secured they could be justified in feeling that they had stuck to their end of the bargain, only for decisions made elsewhere within the club to deny them an opportunity to try and win promotion back on the pitch. There has been talk of a class action lawsuit, but whether this has legs or not will come down to the details. Was this a “gentleman’s agreement”, or was it written in as a contractual clause?

It’s a complex business, but it’s unlikely to endear the club to players, and given the way in which news tends to spread around the game on the rumour vine, this sort of nonsense is not going to help any summer recruitment they may want to do.

Southampton have suffered huge reputational damage over all this, and that could have knock-on effects. In the dog-eat-dog world of football transfers, would, say, a player who receives identical offers from Southampton and A.N. Other club choose the Other club or the one that rug-pulled their players’ chances on the pitch in this mildly ridiculous way?

But all of the conversation has largely overlooked an extremely large, money-shaped elephant sitting in the corner of the room. Why is there one football match which is worth a minimum of £200 million to its winners? Frothing excitement over the value to the winners of the Championship play-offs has been evident for years, but there has been little comment recently on the extent to which having one match - and this could be extended to ‘promotion from this one division’ - with this huge financial reward attached to it provides such a huge temptation for clubs to act in an underhand manner.

When football clubs end up acting in this sort of manner, it isn’t excusing their behaviour to ask why they’re engaging in it in the first place. Southampton did what they did in part because the financial rewards for doing so are so huge in the first place.

It is often forgotten that relegation never used to be the huge, existence-altering deal that it is nowadays, and that the game was all the healthier for it. Sure enough, relegation could be embarrassing, would cut revenues, and lead to a reduced status, but it didn’t cause the sort of fluster that we so often see nowadays.

Nothing will change, and that inequality will continue, because it suits those concerned that it exists. It suits the clubs of the Premier League to know that, in the event of relegation, they will have a huge competitive advantage over their opponents in their pursuit of a quick return. It suits the EFL that their end of season Championship play-off final gets all this attention because it has such a huge number attached to it.

The money that moves from the Premier League to the EFL could be distributed more equitably across the three divisions of the League, and the fact that it isn’t is a choice. Of course, talking about this is essentially screaming into the void. Nothing is going to change, in that respect.

Back in the current day, Middlesbrough will now play Hull City in the Championship play-off final at Wembley on Saturday afternoon. With two days to go until the £200 million match, we do at least finally know that it will be kicking off at 3.30pm. Just about every permutation of ‘what should happen next’ has been put forward, and Hull’s owner has made the somewhat specious claim that his club should receive a bye into the Premier League. To be clear, there is no way on earth that this is going to happen.

This is a curious meeting. Hull didn’t know for sure who they’d be playing until Wednesday night, and they have had to prepare for a match against one of two teams. There’s a strong case for saying that this isn’t particularly fair on them. Hull only avoided relegation from this division on the final day of last season, scrambled into the play-offs this season, a success story which has been overlooked over the last couple of weeks or so.

And it’s also a meeting between two teams who have not been in receipt of parachute payments. If Middlesbrough win, it’ll be the first time they’ve graced the Premier League since 2018. If Hull win, it’ll be the first time for them since then too. Two of the three teams relegated from the Premier League at the end of last season failed to get back at the first attempt, and that should serve as a warning to those at risk of getting relegated from the top-flight as that season heads into its final round of matches, this weekend.

But in the meantime, Southampton may wish to give thought on how they might seek to start repairing their severely damaged reputation. Their own supporters and players have been victims of this as much as anybody else, and what the ramifications of what has been going on there this season are, for the time being, unknowable.

And the EFL itself, once the dust has settled on this episode, should give serious thought to how it can reduce the temptation to cheat, whether that’s through making it clear what the range of punishments might be for breaching their rules or through changing them to reduce that temptation in the first place. The thought that all concerned might do the right thing for the game itself rather than the thing that directly benefits them might feel like a moonshot, but it’s one that might be worth taking.

The first four World Cups were not broadcast on the television at all. Television broadcasting in Uruguay, the hosts of the first tournament in 1930, didn’t start until 1956, and it didn’t start in Italy, the hosts in 1934, until five years after the tournament. Even then it wasn’t for very long before other matters got in the way.

When the World Cup resumed in 1950 in Brazil, radio was the only way to tune in if you weren’t inside the stadium. The first networked television broadcasts there started in September 1950, a couple of months after the end of the competition.

1954, 1958 & 1962

But by 1954, things had changed; in Europe, at least. The European Broadcasting Union had been established in 1950 as a coming together of eight public service broadcasters across the continent, and although satellite technology still didn’t exist, they found that they could seamlessly relay broadcasts across their member states.

The first pan-European broadcast was a relay of the BBC’s coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, but the following year eight matches were selected to be shown live across the continent from that summer’s World Cup finals in Switzerland. The tournament kicked off with two simultaneous matches, with the first to be shown live on the television being Yugoslavia’s 1-0 win against France in Lausanne, with commentary from Kenneth Wolstenholme.

England made their World Cup television debut the following day, and fans were at least treated to an entertaining match, as they drew 4-4 with Belgium. In total, eight live matches were shown, including Hungary’s 8-3 win against West Germany, two quarter-finals, one semi-final and the final. By the time of the next tournament in Sweden in 1958, ITV had joined the fray, and this time eleven games would be shown, or partially shown. The final between Brazil and Sweden was shown live on both channels.

The 1962 finals, however, were a different matter. There was no way of broadcasting live to Britain from Chile, which had only started its first television service five years earlier. ITV weren’t interested in this logistical nightmare, but the BBC ploughed on regardless, sending a ten-person team to South America.

Match footage was sent back to England via Lima and New York, and was broadcast as highlights shows two days after the matches were played, all of which allowed viewers to cackle in delight at David Coleman’s fabulously angry introduction to The Battle of Santiago match between Chile and Italy.

1966

There were big changes for the 1966 World Cup finals in England, although the desire to show a lot of matches live wasn’t without some degree of controversy, with people who had no interest in the game beginning their six-decade long tradition of complaining about “wall-to-wall” football.

In the end, the schedule got in the way again, with the tendency to schedule matches to kick off simultaneously - all four of the quarter-final matches, for example, kicked off at the same time - meaning that only 13 matches were only shown live internationally in total. But satellite broadcasting meant that it could be shown outside Europe for the first time, and for international viewers, this forbidding music was their introduction to the tournament.

This has been erroneously tagged as the BBC’s intro, but the likelihood is that this is not what UK viewers would have seen. What we can say with a degree of certainty is that this piece of music, On The Ball by The John Schroeder Orchestra was used by ITV for their coverage of the tournament.

As with 1962, the tournament was just too late for a very significant upgrade. Just as Telstar, the first satellite, had been launched a few days after the 1962 World Cup final, so the 1966 tournament was just too late for colour broadcasting, which started just in time for Wimbledon the following year.

1970

By the summer of 1970, the BBC were rattled. A shake-up within the ITV network two years earlier had led to an overhaul of the commercial channel’s television coverage, and by the end of the decade Match of the Day - although only five years old by 1969 - was starting to look a little staid alongside ITV’s sparkly new weekly highlights show, The Big Match.

ITV’s new-found pugnaciousness extended into that summer’s World Cup finals. European TV companies had for the first time shown their strength and insisted that kick-off times be changed to suit their needs, meaning games kicked off between midday and 7pm local time - in case you’d ever wondered why there were no evening matches played at the 1970 World Cup - and ITV's decision to lock their pundits up in a hotel in London with all the cigars they could smoke and all the whiskey they could drink certainly made for a different way of broadcasting a World Cup. It was also the first to be shown in colour around the world.

For their title music, the BBC went with Mexico Grandstand by The Syd Lawrence Orchestra.

ITV, meanwhile, went for The World At Their Feet, by The John Shakespeare Orchestra. Here’s a clip from one of the 1970 broadcasts. Pay special attention to the lavish cravate being worn by Jimmy Hill at the very end. Small wonder he got to accompany Raquel Welch to a Chelsea match a couple of years later.

1974

The 1974 World Cup finals in West Germany were a nervy affair both at home and abroad. There were concerns at holding a World Cup finals in the country just two years after the hostage crisis at the Olympic games in Munich two years earlier, and back at home England’s failure to qualify for the tournament left broadcasters - who’d had an extremely successful time of things four years earlier - wondering whether they’d be able to attract the same level of interest again.

The BBC’s coverage for this tournament is something of a black hole, though we do know that the intro music that they used was the frankly over-excited Striker by The Anthony King Orchestra.

ITV, meanwhile, decked their opening titles in tartan and hoped for the best. The music they used for another custom-written piece, Lap of Honour by The London Stadium Orchestra - it’s worth pointing out that these orchestra names were often made up on the spot for non-union or otherwise employed musicians and composers who didn’t particularly want their names plastered all over the place - which even now is still used by the Scottish radio station Clyde 1 for their legendary sports show Superscoreboard, albeit nowadays in an extremely truncated form.

1978

Another World Cup, another England failure to qualify. Still, Scotland have made it again and this time they’re definitely going to win it. Just try to not take any notice of the way the host nation's government have been behaving. The strangest visual aspect of the 1978 World Cup finals was that it was that rarest of beasts, a winter World Cup.

But England’s absence from the tournament for the second time in a row didn’t quell interest in the tournament, and the BBC’s castanet-laden title music to it, Argentine Melody, reached number 14 in the charts. It was written by Andrew Lloyd-Webber and, of all people, former Zombies singer - and writer of God Gave Rock & Roll To You - Rod Argent, who performed under the name of “Rodriguez Argentina”. Along with Don Airey, later of Rainbow and Deep Purple, they’d even go on to perform the song as a trio on Top of the Pops. Twice.

ITV, meanwhile, went with Action Argentina, which was essentially a bit of a re-jigging of Lap of Honour, only with some extremely late 1970s wah-wah guitar added to it. As with Argentine Melody, a full-length version was released as a 7” single. There was no TOTP for The London Stadium Orchestra, though, and Scotland, it turned out, did not win the 1978 World Cup.

1982

The Falklands ‘Conflict’ is still going on, and England are back in the World Cup finals for the first time in twelve years, alongside Scotland and Northern Ireland. All this, plus an expanded 24-team tournament, means that the summer of 1982 is an extremely busy one for the broadcasters.

The BBC opted for a slightly odd choice, an arrangement of Jellicle Ball from the musical Cats, performed by The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; a second go around for Andrew Lloyd-Webber. It’s a fine piece of music and it has an enjoyably chaotic end, but it’s not very… Spanish, is it?

They did release a full length version of it, though it wasn’t the success that Argentine Melody had been four years earlier, peaking in the charts at number 61. No repeat appearance on Top of the Pops for Mr Lloyd-Webber, then. It remains my favourite of the lot, though that’s largely because I was about two months off ten years old when this World Cup was played.

ITV had an extremely beige World Cup, as can be seen in this footage of Brian Clough, Jimmy Greaves and George Best, alongside Brian Moore. The music they used was Matador (different times) by Jeff Wayne, who is otherwise best known for the musical version of War of the Worlds. He’d written a shiny new theme tune for The Big Match a couple of years earlier, and this tune does at least make an attempt to be vaguely Spanish, with its panpipes and delicately picked acoustic guitar.

It’s also the first of these to feel mildly aspirational. It would not have sounded remotely out of place as the soundtrack to an edition of Wish You Were Here, featuring a sweeping long shot along a beach packed with pale men with moustaches and, if they were feeling particularly daring, women with sunburnt boobs.

1986

For the 1986 World Cup finals, the BBC reached into the past. Aztec Lightning couldn’t possibly have been much more of its time, but its roots could be found 18 years earlier in the BBC’s coverage of the 1968 Olympic Games, where it forms the basic melody to this revised tune. It might be the most dramatic World Cup music produced by either the BBC or ITV.

This piece of music, allegedly performed by something called “Heads”, leans into the original motif from 18 years earlier, and of course they had to release a full-length version of it, which reached number 45, spending three weeks in the charts that summer.

ITV, meanwhile, have gone for the football as a lifestyle choice option again, with Aztec Gold by Silsoe. There is nothing whatsoever Mexican about this piece of music, and indeed it continued to be used by ITV on and of for years afterwards.

There is, because of course there is, also a longer version of this which was released as a single. It reached a high of number 48 in the charts, three places lower in the charts than the BBC’s version, though it did stay in them for two weeks longer. I am prepared to bet good money that somebody will have cared very much about this, forty years ago.

1990

Taken entirely objectively, Nessun Dorma is the best of the lot, isn’t it? It’s the most original - nothing had been seen like it before - it’s the best piece of music, and it’s the one that really grabs you by the heartstrings and makes you sit up and listen.

First written by Puccini in 1924, as part of opera Turandot, which was unfinished upon his death, Nessun Dorma - “Let No One Sleep” - was the idea of a BBC producer, who picked a 1972 recording of Luciano Pavarotti performing it. It became a cultural phenomenon. The single release of it reached number two in the charts in the UK, and it propelled Pavarotti to international superstardom for the rest of his life.

All of this was a little tough on ITV, who had a little operaticky-electropop gem of their own for the finals, though they did spoil it somewhat by featuring sponsorship for the first time. It also sees a return to World Cup action for Rod Argent, who we last saw making a tit of himself on Top of the Pops in 1978, alongside Peter Van Hooke, who is nothing whatsoever to do with Peter Hook. Obviously they put a single version of it out, but it only reached number 81 in the charts. A very comprehensive win indeed, for the BBC.

1990 turned out to be a high. I can’t promise you such riches in the second part of this series, which will be with you next week. But I think I can promise you less Andrew Lloyd-Webber, so that’s something.

Part of the problem with this whole case has been the extent to which this has been a leap into the unknown. The rule being invoked as a result of Spygate 2 hadn’t been used before, so nobody really knew what would constitute guilt, what might be an aggravating factor, and what the ultimate punishment for it might be.

Everybody knew what had happened, and the evidence reported in the press - literally a guy half-standing behind a tree holding an Iphone in landscape position - seemed to indicate that this was pretty much an open and shut case in terms of whether they did it or not. But in terms of what would happen once that formality was out of the way… well, we do now, and it’s cost them a shot at a nine-figure amount of money.

It did feel as though we were going to find out something about the inner machinations of the game in this verdict. It’s all been treated as a joke by both fans and commentators alike, in no small part because there is a little bit of all of us that’s been thinking, “Well, they can’t take it that seriously, can they, considering all the other stuff they routinely turn a blind eye to?”

To that end, we now do have an answer. They take it very seriously indeed. The upshot of this all is that not only have they been removed from this year’s play-off final in the Championship will - at the time of writing - be played between Hull City and Middlesbrough on the 23rd May, but Southampton have also been docked four points for next season in the same division. The club are appealing the decision, but with today already being the 20th, they haven’t got long to get this sorted.

Evidently, the matter of spying on opponents’ training sessions is considered beyond the pale. If it wasn’t, they could easily have fudged it. A large fine - tiny, in comparison with the amount of money they’d have made had they been promoted - or a points deduction could have been awarded, there could have been some pantomime booing, and we all could have just gotten on with our lives. Instead, it’s very clear that, within the game, those marginal gains are being understood to matter very much indeed.

But at the same time, this story has turned out to be a gift that has kept on giving. Part of the reason for the severity of the punishment may be related to the fact that this wasn’t the only match over which they ended up being charged. Two further offences had to be taken into consideration, a match against Oxford United in December and one against Ipswich Town in April. The magnificent coda that particular sub-plot is that they didn’t even win any of the three matches relating to the charges.

Other aspects of the case hint at the reasons for the severity of the punishment. The intern involved was reportedly suggested to have ran off when seen, changed clothes at the nearby golf club and fled, which doesn’t seem in line with the idea that this was just an inexperienced young intern who didn’t know what he was doing, while ESPN reported that as well as Oxford United and Ipswich Town, “at least two other clubs had suspicions of also having their training sessions spied on ahead of playing Southampton.” Combined, these suggest that this might have been systemic behaviour within the club, rather than the accidental oopsie implied by their earlier statement.

And as if that isn’t enough for the club to have to contend with, there have been reports this evening that Southampton’s players could be considering legal action against the club. According to The Athletic, “The players were furious at the EFL verdict, having only found out at the same time as everyone else, with members of the squad who had taken 40 per cent pay cuts after suffering relegation from the top flight year were due to have that reinstated in the event of promotion to the Premier League.”

What this means for the future of head coach Tonda Eckert is up in the air. Whatever the results of the Southampton internal inquiry which the club requested more time to carry out last week, it was on his shoulders to know the rules. Leeds United were found guilty of doing it. There was another reasonably high-profile case involving the Canadian teams at the 2024 Olympic Games, which led to points deductions and sackings. The claim that all concerned didn’t know what they were doing or that it was wrong is fatally undermined by the reports of the intern involved having been hiding behind a tree and then changing his clothes.

The EFL might have acted swiftly and decisively in terms of meting out punishment, but the actual Championship play-off final does remain a mess. The match is to be played in three days, yet it remains the case that no kick-off time has been confirmed. The Hull City manager Sergej Jakirovic is reportedly unhappy that his club could become “collateral damage”, if the date does end up being moved. It certainly feels as though, one way or another, we shouldn’t be having to have this conversation three days before the match is due to be played.

Will the appeal be successful? Well, it seems as though the basis of their appeal is that the punishment is excessive, but that’s a completely subjective questions and it certainly seems to be the case that it’s being treated as a big deal. And comparisons with the Leeds case from 2019 - they received a £200,000 fine - may not be considered relevant when that fine was for a common or garden League match played in January rather than a play-off semi-final with £200 million over three years and under different rules, when the rules that they may have been systematically breaching were introduced precisely because of that original saga.

Perhaps the key question on this Wednesday morning will be, “What punishment would Southampton deem appropriate?”, because if we’re realistic for a moment here, they’d probably take any reasonable points deduction and/or fine because this is all about that precious Premier League money. And that hints at the big, overarching problem with all of this. One match ultimately worth being such a vast amount of money might have had a corrosive effect on the way teams acted throughout the season. It certainly provided them with two hundred million motives to.

In 1990, Swindon Town were demoted to the Third Division after a play-off win and on appeal were restored to the Second. But they weren’t put into the First, and even if they had been, that was a different matter, under very different rules, and more than three and a half decades ago. Normally, appeals are about facts in cases that were materially wrong, but nobody seems to be going down that route.

But the reminder remains that we’re in uncharted territory over all of this, so making any blanket predictions over the appeal could be a fool’s errand. Southampton will have to make a persuasive case, given the extremely evident mood of the EFL’s independent commission on this subject. And the message for the rest of the Championship is extremely loud and extremely clear. For all the tomfoolery that has engulfed the discourse on this subject, the idea of spying on opponents’ training sessions, it turns out, is no laughing matter after all.

Was this a pre-emptive veil to cover the Premier League title slipping from their grasp for a second season in a row? Probably not, but it’s tempting (and, more importantly, fun) to think that it might be. When Andoni Iraola confirmed that he would be leaving Bournemouth at the end of the season, he did so in the middle of April and their world didn’t stop turning.

So, first of all, the roll of honour. Six Premier League titles, three FA Cups, five League Cups, three Community Shields, a Champions League, a UEFA Super Cup and a (pre-absurd expansion) FIFA Club World Cup. Twenty trophies in ten years. It’s a staggering record, half the number that Alex Ferguson managed with Manchester United, but achieved in not much less than one-third the amount of time.

There are questions to be asked about some of this, in particular that Champions League record. Given the resources at his disposal, one trophy in that competition and one appearance in the final isn’t much of a return for a decade in charge.

It should go without saying that winning this competition isn’t easy, but his record is no better than that of Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Liverpool or PSG over that time, and substantially inferior to that of Real Madrid. Of course, when you’ve got the riches of a nation state behind you, whether that explanation still holds could be considered debatable.

Still, though, it’s difficult to argue that he isn’t the defining head coach of his era. An average of two trophies per season, every season for a full decade. And stylistically, the game has reshaped itself around his gravitational pull. The way in which the game is played at the top end has changed to try and counter him and his teams.

And yet, and yet. There are 115 asterisks hanging over these achievements. The Premier League’s failure to resolve the charges brought against Manchester City are a stain on everybody who’s come into contact with them. We’ve seen financial chicanery at Everton, Nottingham Forest and Chelsea resolved in a relatively timeous fashion.

But by the end of the summer it will have been three and a half years since City were charged, without any resolution. We’ve been told that it’s complex - and there is common assent that City’s inclination is to throw every legal trick in the book at it - but it remains a cloud hanging over the League itself that this still hasn’t been concluded, especially considering that it took a four-year investigation to bring the charges in the first place.

Now, there are a number of perspectives that we can apply to this situation and how it applies to Guardiola himself. It has already been argued that his previous comments about leaving the club “the day after”, should they be found guilty of the charges, could have something to do with it all, although this does seem like a bit of a stretch, given the absence of any evidence whatsoever beyond speculation that the Premier League is actually going to find them guilty of anything, or that - as with Chelsea - the punishment will end up being the lightest possible slap on the wrists.

What is slightly surprising is that City seem happy to go with Enzo Maresca as his replacement. Maresca is, of course, a disciple of Guardiola, but his post-City career trajectory hasn’t exactly been sparkling. Taking Leicester back into the Premier League is a thing that happened - their financial mismanagement was also quickly dealt with, though on this occasion it was by the EFL rather than the Premier League - and he too won two trophies in his one full season at Chelsea.

But there are asterisks next to those trophy wins, in that they were the UEFA Conference League and the (post-absurd expansion) FIFA World Club Cup, while his record in the competitions which really matter to clubs with Chelsea-esque ambitions wasn’t quite as sparkling. His team finished fourth in his full season at Stamford Bridge, and they were fifth when he was sacked on New Year’s Day.

They negotiated their way through the group stages of the Champions League on his watch, but it’s doubtful that they’d have done much better against PSG in the quarter-finals with him in charge, although, given that they lost that tie 8-2 on aggregate, it’s similarly difficult to argue that he’d have done much worse, either. Chelsea have been a basket case over the second half of this season, but whether that reflects well or badly upon him is debatable. Their appointment of Xabi Alonso from the 1st July demonstrates that football people will always go where the money is, if nothing else.

If nothing else, the timing of all this does at least add a little spice to this evening’s trip to Bournemouth. I wrote a preview of this match for Fotmob, so if you want know roughly what I think about that match you can do so. The mathematics of their situation haven’t changed. City need a win, or Arsenal are the champions, and Bournemouth have now been unbeaten for almost half - 16 games! - of the Premier League season.

Enzo Maresca is a huge gamble, and the owners of Manchester City surely already know that. As ever in football, there are two versions of that decision that we can write in our heads; evolution rather than evolution, or hiring another bald European guy who studied at his feet because they lack the imagination to think up anything different. The only thing that we can with much certainty is that they’ve become a very different football club as a result of him being there, and that they will be a very different football club again once he’s departed.

Since I didn’t really like what I did before I wasn’t just going to go jumping into a new one doing exactly what I did before straight away. If this move was going to be anything, it needed to be a reset for me and an opportunity to start afresh after having essentially wasted the previous decade on playing football, going clubbing and drinking too much.

We were living solely on her income and I didn’t have infinite time to make a decision. In the meantime, I needed to find a way to occupy that time that didn’t cost much money. One of the key features of looking for work is how dispiriting it becomes, and how quickly. It’s really not the sort of thing that you can spend 60 hours a week or more doing. But I also needed to keep my brain well lubricated. It doesn’t take many days of daytime television before you start questioning what’s real and what isn’t.

I’d been thinking of dipping my toe into writing for some time. The previous summer, I’d quit playing football once and for all, after a couple of pre-season matches made me walk as though my legs were stilts, and I’d messed around with a couple of ideas which didn’t really go anywhere.

I’d had a typewriter since I was a teenager, an enormous metal contraption dating back to the 1950s, but by 2006 I was the owner of a laptop, a way of committing words to posterity which didn’t involve getting the tips of my fingers covered in ink every few minutes or so.

The idea didn’t really strike me as anything strange. There was a World Cup coming up in Germany, and I was going to be at home for pretty much all of it. I decided that I’d watch the tournament in its entirety, blog it, and make a decision over whether I wanted to carry on writing about this stupid and frequently infuriating game afterwards. As you may have gathered, it turned out that I did. After years of searching, I’d found the thing that I wanted to do. By the end of the tournament, I had a readership, a justification to keep going, and a job which I hated but which did at least allow me to keep writing in my spare time. I haven’t run out of things to say since.

To say that I’ve been lucky over the last twenty years would be something of an understatement. I do still occasionally complain about the fact my income is sufficiently low to require me to still wear socks with holes in them, but this sort of complaint has to be weighed up against what it has given me.

I’ve met people that I would never otherwise have met and experienced things that would have been well beyond my reach. I’ve stood on a stage in front of hundreds of people and collected awards. I interviewed Ronaldinho through an interpreter, once. I’ve had press passes and covered an international tournament. These are things that I would never have considered possible, even when I turned 30 in 2002.

And perhaps more importantly than anything else, this became my calling, the thing that I can do. I found myself, and I write these days almost as if it’s a compulsion that I can’t switch off. It’s the nearest that I can manage to art. It’s my job and my therapy. It’s opened up a world into which I did not for years believe I could even be invited, and it’s allowed me to fulfil lifelong ambitions. And here I still I am, still plugging away, still hoping that I can make a go of it, even though I have been making a go of it as my actual job for the last five years.

That anniversary isn’t until the start of September. At the time, it felt as though the stars had aligned for me. I’d been working from home for the previous 18 months, doing a job that I’d lost any material interest in at least a decade earlier, and when an advert for a job came up for which I had no qualifications or experience beyond the portfolio that the blog had become.

I knew how lucky I was from the outset. I was making somewhere around the national average salary, and working from home allowed me to be fully invested in my children’s development. When my ex-wife finally left a year later, I was able to move seamlessly into single parenthood, finding the right balance between work and life.

Such a feeling of inner peace was only likely to be followed by the sound of a needle scratching harshly across a record. In March 2023, I found that I was to be made redundant at the end of the season. I thought I’d done okay. I made the occasional mistake - everybody does - and tightened up as a result of them. I’d been nominated for the FSA’s Writer of the Year award at the end of 2022. I didn’t win, but we did get a fancy evening out at a hotel at St Pancras out of it.

But it wasn’t enough. My editor told me that this was just the harsh reality of media work, and that it was in no way a reflection of the quality of my output. I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t have much choice but to continue anyway. I’d reshaped my entire life around working from home. This was the thing that I do now, and going back to my old way of doing things wasn’t viable. I had little choice but to go freelance.

So I started the Substack that you’re reading now, and I kept my fingers crossed that somebody would see enough value in my writing for me to be able to keep my head above water. And three years on, I’m still here. I don’t have as much work as I’d like, and I don’t really have as much work as I need, but I’ve managed to just about hold it together for three years, and that’ll have to do. The acknowledgement that I’m working in what is essentially a dying industry has been something that I’ve had a long time to come to terms with.

There are elements to it all that I hate. By the end of my first month as a self-employed person, I earned £442. I hadn’t earnt that little in a calendar month in about thirty years, and by this point I had two little people who were completely dependent upon me. I hate having to relentlessly self-publicise, and to have to ask people to give me money, although I am now relatively at ease with the fact that I’m probably good enough to be able to justify it, even though I’m still earning less than I did twenty years ago.

And of course, this Substack hasn’t been a complete disaster. I still struggle between what to put aside for paying subscribers only and what to make available for everybody. Three years on, it’s still standing and this post right here is the 1,000th that’s gone up on it over that period of time.

All of this says something for how little time off I’ve been able to afford myself over those intervening three years. I’m still paying the financial price for having had the temerity to take a week out to recharge in February because I felt as though I was at the point of burning out, though I am still doing better than I was a year ago. It remains just about financially justifiable.

I have plenty of people to be grateful to. I will never have enough thanks to give Edward Carter and Sam Whyte, who have podcasted with me without complaint for years. I am grateful to Fotmob and FLW, who’ve given me enough work to be able to continue. I’m particularly grateful to When Saturday Comes, who not only have given me occasional bits of work, but who allowed me to fulfil a lifelong ambition by getting my words into their pages in the first place.

And of course, my biggest thanks of the lot goes to those who pay to subscribe to this place, and who allow me the freedom to flex my creative muscles here without having to worry too much about the metrics. I feel trusted, and that really does mean a lot, when imposter syndrome is always threatening to sit on my shoulder and start whispering in my ear.

I know how tough times are. I know that none of you are under any obligation. But this is not just good for my material quality of life. It’s been so good for my mental health that there have been times - particularly over the last 12 months or so - when it’s more or less kept me alive. I am absolutely not trying to butter anyone up by saying how fortunate I am to have the readership that I have.

More or less everything has changed over those twenty years. I live in a different town, now. I’ve been through a marriage and a divorce. I have two incredible children, and I literally have no idea of what my life would be like now without those guys. I still have days when I hate myself, and when all those old insecurities come flooding back. I’ve made some horrendous mistakes, and I haven’t always treated others kindly, though forgiving myself those mistakes and trying to do better has been crucial to maintaining my own sanity.

I keep going because I have no choice. Another three years? Another five years? Another twenty years? Another 1,000 posts on here? Well, one thing that the last few years have taught me has been that making plans for the medium-to-long-term future is for other people.

I have no plans to retire, and will keep working until my body and mind are too enfeebled to go on, in no small part because a functioning pension of value has not been something that I’ve been able to stretch to, these last few years. Planning for the future is a luxury and a privilege, when the present feels perpetually as though all hands are required on deck.

But I’m still standing. In the back of my head right now are plans for the World Cup, for the summer, and for the start of the 2026-27 season. Things will change because they always change, and at the moment I have no idea whatsoever what my future looks like. But giving up the economic security of a normal office job to go and freelance in an industry that’s being cannibalised by AI still feels like the best decision I ever made, because it allowed me to find myself. And if it’s okay with you lot, I’d really like to continue doing it for another twenty years, at least.

Manager John Bond had overseen all of this. He’d replaced Malcolm Allison in October 1980 following a terrible start to the season which had seen them take just four points - four draws - from their first twelve matches. He steadied the ship, and got them back on course. A draw against Aston Villa in their next match, but then the sky fell in.

A 4-0 defeat at Brighton & Hove Albion in the FA Cup changed everything, though. Things had been coming apart behind the scenes at Maine Road for a while. They’d overspent on Trevor Francis, who had been injured after his arrival, consequently leaving Bond’s squad a little thin. He’d very nearly fallen out with chairman Peter Swales over it, and relations had been permanently soured. There was also talk of personal matters which made what happened next inevitable. On the 3rd February, John Bond resigned as the manager of Manchester City.

But it shouldn’t have been a problem, should it? By this time City were 10th in the table, but under three points for a win, they were only one win from a European place. They were eleven points above the relegation places. They put Bond’s former assistant John Benson in charge of the team, and he took charge of his first game two days later against Spurs, a match which ended in a 2-2 draw.

The wheels didn’t take long to fall off that wagon, though. Benson is a reasonably well-regarded coach, but he had little actual managerial experience himself beyond three years as the player-manager at Bournemouth in the late 1970s - he was Bond’s long-time assistant - and Manchester City are in a more fragile state than was necessarily visible from the outside. Some of those clubs who’ve forked out seven-figure sums on players two or three years earlier are starting to feel some degree of buyer’s remorse.

City have only picked up ten points since then, a goalless home draw against Everton, alongside a home win against West Ham and away wins at West Bromwich Albion and Brighton. After the Spurs game, they took just a single point from their next nine matches. At the start of April they were humiliated 5-0 at home by Liverpool on Match of the Day, a display which brutally exposed the difference between the champions-elect and the shambles that Manchester City have by this time become.

On the final day of the season, it’s all come down to maths. Manchester City are fourth from bottom, and they’re at home to Luton Town, who are a point behind them. Should they draw, Birmingham could be relegated if they lose at Southampton, but only if they lose by four goals or more. A draw is all that Manchester City need. Get that, and either Luton or Birmingham go down. Lose, and they’re down unless Birmingham also lose, in which case they have six goals in goal difference to make up. In real terms, it’s more or less a shootout between Manchester City and Luton Town.

Newly-promoted Luton Town have earned a reputation as the entertainers of the division over the course of the season. They’ve scored more goals than second-placed Manchester United and fourth-placed Tottenham Hotspur, but they’ve also conceded 15 goals more than anybody else in the division. They’ve conceded five goals three times, but they’ve scored five twice. They’ve conceded four goals on four occasions, but scored four twice. Back in September, they drew 4-4 at Stoke City.

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There’s nothing people like quite as much as a good bit of intrigue, and Spygate 2 is the Real Deal. It concerns The Most Valuable Match in Football, so there are literally hundreds of millions of pounds at stake. It involves accusations of espionage, a near-fight on the pitch, a ballboy with a shit-eating grin on his face, a head coach losing his rag in a press conference, and a photograph so brilliantly funny that it seems certain to have become a meme by the time you read these words.

It’s possible that there may be some people who haven’t yet caught up with this story, so this is where we were up to by the start of this week. With the first leg of the Championship semi-final between Middlesbrough and Southampton having ended in a goalless draw at The Riverside Stadium, we were just getting ready for the second leg on Tuesday night.

The atmosphere around St Mary’s before the game was somewhat febrile, with missiles thrown at the Middlesbrough team coach when it arrived at the ground, which may have been partially deserved on account of them having the words “WE SHALL BE” plastered across the side of it.

(Yes, I know it’s the English translation of “Erimus”, which is the motto of the town of Middlesbrough, but I’ve stated my objection to these three word slogans before and I’m not stopping for this one.)

Supporters had entered into the spirit of the occasion for the second leg, with several turning up dressed as spies. One had a set of binoculars. One had a newspaper with eye-holes cut in it. One, gloriously, had turned up dressed as a hedge. As ever, football fans remain undefeated in their commitment to The Bit.

Five minutes in Riley McGree gave Boro the lead, only for Ross Stewart to level for Southampton with a scrambled header shortly before half-time. But tempers were already clearly fraying. Even before half-time, Southampton’s Taylor Harwood-Bellis and Middlesbrough’s Luke Ayling both received yellow cards over what was either a heated exchange of words or Harwood-Bellis mocking Ayling’s stammer. Nice, if true.

There was also a moment of low comedy in the 89th minute when a ballboy refused to give the ball back to a Boro player, resulting in some pushing and shoving into which several people who were nothing to do with it originally became involved. Had he been instructed to help slow the play down? Given the extent to which Southampton seemed to be leaning into the moustache-twirling element in it all, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if he had.

And at the end of the evening, some football broke out. In the 117th minute, Shea Charles attempted a cross from the right - it was a cross; don’t even try to persuade me that he meant this - and the ball zipped across the Middlesbrough penalty area and into the corner of the goal to snatch the win for Southampton.

Did they deserve it? Well, perhaps the problem here is that “deserve” isn’t really the appropriate word for situations such as this. Middlesbrough probably shaded the first half, but Southampton were strong in the second and both teams looked about out on their feet during extra-time.

The post-match press conferences were like pouring oil onto a fire. The Middlesbrough head coach Kim Hellberg was a little emotional, describing what had happened as “absolutely terrible” and pulling up a reporter who used the word “alleged” when questioning him about the incident.

And there was more excitement when the Southampton head coach Tonda Eckert sat down to answer questions himself. It’s clear there were several questions that he really didn’t want to answer, and he got up and walked out alongside press officer Jordan Sibley when asked, “Tonda, are you a cheat?”

The following day came the icing on the cake, when the Mail published a photograph of what was reported to be the Southampton intern recording the Middlesbrough training session in a manner which could at best be described as ‘unsubtle.’ By the afternoon, another tabloid had named him. Sadly, he was not wearing a fake nose and glasses.

(James Bond, photographed outside the Middlesbrough training ground: Photo credit - someone on the Boro training staff with an Iphone to hand)

In the meantime, other clubs had also reportedly claimed that they’d been surprised at how quickly Southampton had been able to react to tactical changes and substitutions during matches this season. It also was claimed that Middlesbrough had two other clubs who were ready to testify that they had also been spied on throughout the season.

The EFL have charged Southampton with breaching two regulations: 3.4, requiring clubs to act with good faith towards each other; and, more specifically, 127, prohibiting clubs from observing or attempting to observe another’s training sessions within 72 hours of a game.

The second of these rules was introduced following the original Spygate drama, which occurred between Leeds United and Derby County throughout the second half of the 2018-19 season. The first is what landed Leeds a £200,000 fine. It should be remembered that this fine was issued for a run of the mill - albeit close to the top of the table - League match, and there are no guarantees whatsoever about what decision is reached over this fresh case.

We are into the definitely into the territory of a Swindon Town 1990 repeat, this year. 36 years ago, Swindon Town beat Sunderland in what was then the Division Two play-off final, only to be demoted to the Third Division as a result of financial improprieties that been taking place at The County Ground. Swindon were eventually restored into the Second Division, but promotion was instead handed to Sunderland.

But has been really striking about this entire story has been how much we’ve all needed it. We live in deeply divided and mildly chaotic times. At such moments, it’s difficult to imagine anything more unifying than a good bit of intrigue, with an extremely hurt party and a moustache-twirling villain.

And there seems little doubt that the court of public opinion has already decided its verdict over this particular story. It fits almost too neatly that this should have happened at Southampton, whose Saintly halos are looking somewhat less than polished at the moment.

What verdict will eventually be reached? Who knows? But with just nine days left until the play-off final date, tickets are still not on sale and no kick-off time has even been giving, making planning how to get to Wembley in the first place somewhat difficult for fans. And it’s difficult not to have a little sympathy for Hull City, here. They only avoided relegation on the last day of last season, and for them to be one match from a return to the Premier League is one heck of an achievement.

But they’re being overlooked here, and it’s not difficult to see why. A place in the Premier League is worth at least £200 million, so there really is a lot at stake (although no-one, as ever, few seem to be asking the perfectly valid question of whether it’s right that one match per season should be this financially impactful), and even the decision over the punishment will likely only cause more drama.

If Southampton are docked points for next season and go up, the Premier League will have to administer it. Should there be any sanction against them which denies them a place in the Premier League, there will surely be some form of legal challenge. Should they only receive a fine, Middlesbrough - and other clubs - might be left wondering what the point of rule 127 is in the first place.

The clock will be ticking, no matter what happens, because football has stripped any breaks from its schedule. The EFL’s AGM, at which the season formally flicks over from 2025-26 to 2026-27, comes in June, and the fixtures are released on the 25th of that month. A fair few Championship players will be heading to the World Cup, which starts on the 11th June and ends on the 19th July, while the transfer window reopens at the end of May for the summer.

And this story has attracted everybody’s interest. The tabloids are running stories on every last detail of it - how did the Mail get access to that photo? It’s not difficult to add two plus two, there - while The Athletic’s homepage is currently dominated by four pieces about it. For the supporters of clubs currently facing the possibility of relegation at the end of the season, seasoned Championship-watchers will be able to confirm that yes indeed, this is exactly the sort of thing that happens in this madhouse of a division, albeit on steroids.

The EFL would likely have preferred it, had Middlesbrough’s goal at Southampton been the only one scored at St Mary’s on Tuesday night. That would have made their job substantially easier. But that didn’t happen, and now the drama is dragging out still further, and if we can say one thing for certain, it’s that somebody is going to be left furious, no matter what verdict is ultimately reached.

And the rest of us will be here on the sidelines, 3D glasses on and giant buckets of popcorn in hand, waiting for the next instalment in a saga that has lit up the end of a Championship season which had already been a slightly strange one, with one team finishing it on zero points, one of the freshly-relegated Premier League clubs getting relegated again, and teams who were close to the relegation places last autumn pushing towards the promotion places by its final weeks.

For those of us who subscribe to the viewpoint that modern football has essentially become a soap opera with sport attached to it, where this might end up is a tantalising thought. Will Tonda Eckert be spotted on Blackpool seafront, running in front of a tram? Might we all wake up tomorrow morning to find that it was all dream? We shall see. In the meantime, it’s difficult to say much more than offering a big thank you to all concerned for offering us such melodramatic entertainment at the end of a long, hard season.

Image by Luisella Planeta from Pixabay

Except it’s not quite that simple, for me. For one thing, writing about football is my job. I don’t yet know what the policies of the places for whom I do paid work will be with regard to the tournament, but three and a half years ago I was working for F365 and, “Sorry, I won’t be doing any work for you for the next month because of the way that migrant workers have been treated in Qatar” wasn’t really something I could say that was going to butter any parsnips.

So I feel as though I need a justification for watching any of this, and, “Well, I didn’t have enough of an ethical compass to boycott in 2022 (or 2018, now I come to think of it)” doesn’t sound like a very convincing argument, to me. But we only live one life, and there’s a big part of me which feels a need to push back over something like the World Cup, which is deeply personal to me, being taken away by politicians who don’t really give two shits about it and football administrators who prefer money and political leverage to its integrity. To an extent, I feel bloody-minded about it all.

And on top of that, this isn’t only about me. My children are now eight and a half and ten and a half. Older has never really expressed any interest whatsoever in football. So far as he’s concerned, on the occasional moments when I do mention something about it to him, I might as well be trying to explain quarterly sales figures or productivity spreadsheets. So far as he’s concerned, it’s Dad’s Job and little else.

Younger, however, has expressed an interest. He’s the sportier of the two, and did sit down with me a couple of weeks ago to watch an entire episode of Match of the Day. He’s asked pointed question about the laws of the game, and he’s starting to get an iota of understanding about it all. A seed of interest is definitely starting to germinate in him.

To be absolutely clear, I have never pushed the game upon them in any way whatsoever. The same as Older’s - now-abandoned - vegetarianism, I have always been very clear that they should follow their passions rather than mindlessly absorbing mine. But I’m also aware of the fact that the best World Cup is the one that takes place the closest to your 10th birthday, and this is the one that is closest to both of theirs. It’s a one-shot deal, and I feel obliged to give them that opportunity.

I remember the summer of 1982 extremely vividly. It was a big one. We were moving from North London to Hertfordshire that summer, while I would be hitting the big one-oh a couple of months later. My own interest in the game had started to blossom a couple of years earlier, and by the end of the 1981-82 season I was fully invested.

And although there was nowhere near as much of it then as there is now, I fell in love with the stuff. I had a poster on my bedroom wall onto which I scrawled the results of every game. I had the Panini sticker album (uncompleted) and a Ladybird book about it which detailed the exotic-sounding venues at which matches would be played, cities that I’d never heard of, such as Valladolid or Gijon.

I absorbed as much of it as possible, from Argentina’s hilarious opening game loss to Belgium (which wasn’t shown live by ITV in this country, lest it encourage some form of Falklands-inspired rage among the general populace), to the final itself, which I definitely wanted Italy to win.

But I do remember a lot of it. I remember England vs France kicking off a couple of days after surrender negotiations had started in the Falklands and Bryan Robson’s obscenely early goal, watching Northern Ireland shockingly beating the host nation without really understanding why there was a “Northern” Ireland playing when the actual Ireland were nowhere to be seen (I was not an especially political nine-year-old), and Hungary whacking ten goals past El Salvador. I remember a degree of weird outrage at Brazil, Argentina and Italy being drawn in the second group stage, and of the Brazil vs Argentina match being trailed on the television under the moniker of Star Wars.

The third-fourth place play-off was in the afternoon of the day that we moved. I watched both that and the final on a portable television that was balanced precariously on an upturned tea chest in our new living room. After the final, I remember running out into the garden with a football to kick it around, despite the failing light.

Having lived in council flats to this point, this was a luxury that I’d never enjoyed before. Life would never be quite as exciting again, and regardless of that weird-haired turd currently occupying the White House, I’m not going to deny my kids those sort of memories.

It should be added that I’m starting from a very low base, here. My ex-wife is American, and during the 2014 World Cup she asked me, “If all the best teams are in this tournament, how come Barcelona aren’t in it?”, which is, if you know absolutely nothing about football whatsoever, an entirely fair question to ask, or if - as was the case for her - the only contact you’d have with the game was your half-brother supporting the Blaugrana.

My kids have a similarly low level of knowledge of the game to her. They’re aware of the existence of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, but I know absolutely for certain that if I asked them to name some football teams, they’d essentially just start listing towns they’d heard of. I can pretty much guarantee that one of them would say, “London?”, within three guesses.

So this morning on the walk to school, the indoctrination started. I confirmed that we would be watching the World Cup together and explained the difference between club and international football to them. They were delighted to find out that they qualify to play for three international teams - they are Anglo-Cuban-American, and they have at least one grandparent from each of these three countries - but less so to learn that you can only really play for one of them.

Over the next four weeks, then, the kids and I are going on an adventure. I’m going to teach them the history of the competition, and we’re going to learn about the countries taking part. This month’s When Saturday Comes should land through my letterbox in the next few days, with its legendary World Cup wallchart. We’ll look at flags, talk about players, learn some national anthems, find about the host cities, and laugh at both Donald Trump’s stupid haircut and Gianni Infantino’s complete absence of one.

Because ultimately, there will only be one World Cup that is the closest to their tenth birthdays, and no matter how soiled FIFA has become and no matter what an absolute pillock the current President of the USA might be, I can’t deny them even the possibility of the magic that I felt on that summer, 44 years ago. Maybe I can’t make this World Cup finals any less grubby than it will be for most people - and what I do write about it on here will reflect that - but for two little boys who mean the absolute world to me, perhaps I can inject something special into it all. We’ll see, I guess.

Their match against West Ham United was, unsurprisingly, not much of a spectacle. Arsenal started strongly, but Mikel Arteta made one of his trademark baffling substitutions when Ben White was forced off with an injury, which led to him switching Declan Rice to full back. This gave West Ham a little more space, and they created some chances themselves. If anything, for at least 80 minutes both teams looked strikingly nervous, beyond anything else.

With seven minutes to play Leandro Trossard scored from close range and that, we might have presumed, would be that. West Ham, who needed at least a point if they were to arrest their ongoing descent towards the Championship, had had their chance, when Mateus Fernandes was put through but had his shot blocked by David Raya’s legs. 1-0 to The Arsenal and that’s just the way they like it, and all that.

But in stoppage-time came the moment that will replayed for years and years. A West Ham corner from the right, a traditional Arsenal meatwall as the ball swung into the six-yard area, and Callum Wilson bundling the ball over the goal line for what looked like it might be a West Ham equaliser.

Except, of course, it wasn’t. The video assistant had picked up a foul and, cowards that they are, called referee Chris Kavanagh over to look at it and make the final decision. Another few minutes later, and with absolutely undeserved confidence, he chalked the goal off. Arsenal had their win, West Ham continue to slide towards one of their periodic sojourns in the second tier. So it goes.

After the game, of course, social media filled with fans of clubs who were just as certain as England that they knew what they saw. They came armed with screenshots, which are probably the worst way of being able to tell which fouls had been committed by whom, and believe it or not, almost every single analysis confirmed what the person posting it had wanted to happen.

One of the ugliest goals you’d ever have seen being disallowed following a four-minute delay would, of course, be an entirely appropriate way for this season to be determined. It’s been an ugly season of stultifying football, dominated by muscle and set-pieces. Were there to be a defining image for the 2025-26, it would probably be a group of players surrounding a referee, yelling at him in more languages than it’s possible to learn in this country’s secondary educational system.

There has been a certain low comedy to be found in the absolute certainty of every single one of these screenshotters. A couple of journalists tried to count the number of simultaneous fouls that were going on as the ball dropped into the penalty area. One put it at seven, another at eight. It has been claimed that Declan Rice committed two before the ball even landed.

So, how do you determine which of this large number of fouls was the first, or the most serious? The point has been made that goalkeepers receive “extra protection” at such times, which is a fair enough comment to make, but… why do they?

Goalkeepers tend to look as though they were all brought through the FC Brobdingnag youth academy, these days, and they have the option to use their hands and arms. Why do they qualify for extra protection over outfield players? And if we’re talking about ‘protection’, what do we actually mean by that? It had been said that this wasn’t the case this season, so why are the rules being applied so unevenly?

In short, corners have become a crapshoot in which fouls by both attackers and defenders frequently go unpunished. The number of goals scored in matches has dropped from an average of 3.28 two seasons ago to 2.75 this season, and the number from open play is falling at an even faster rate than this.

But in truth, nobody really cares, so long as they get the decision that benefits their team. This seems to pretty much apply across the board, these days. So long as we get the decisions that benefit our teams, that’s all that seems to matter. Consistency only becomes important when the decisions don’t go our way. The same goes when The Letter of the Law has just been applied. You can see this in real time in the comments sections under every single article that has already been written on the subject.

Getting an answer to this might involve, say, banning all players apart from the goalkeepers from the six-yard box at set-pieces, but it wouldn’t be an answer that would hold for very long, because that’s not, and has never been, the point. The point is that my team - or your team, if we’re taking your perspective - should get every decision that benefits it, regardless of consistency or what the laws of the game actually say in the first place.

Clubs have long been masters at the art of gaming the system. This runs through the entire game, whether we’re talking about creative accounting, spying on opponents’ training sessions, tactical fouls, or ‘meat-walling’; - a phrase which needs to be eliminated from the game - corner kicks. Professionalism is when your team does it, cheating is when it’s anybody else.

Change that culture, and you might have half a chance of fixing everything else. Leave it as it is, and whatever changes to the rules come, clubs’ first priorities will be to circumvent them, with thousands of people ready to back them on social media, whatever they end up doing. Because at the end of the day, people seem to prefer winning to football. Make of that what you wish. Perhaps the bottom line in this debate is that any refereeing decision can be a “clear and obvious” one, so long as it’s the one that benefits your club or your worldview.

Considering these twin factors, you can probably imagine how I’m feeling about having given up four hours to watch both of the Championship play-off semi-finals only for Hull City, Millwall, Middlesbrough and Southampton to club together to produce two successive goalless draws, both of which were more heat than light, and neither of which gave much indication as to which of these four will be playing Premier League football next season.

Of course, all the drama over these two matches has concerned the revelation that a member of the Southampton club staff was found outside the Middlesbrough training ground. Southampton have stated that the sacrificial lamb to be was there in his own capacity and wasn’t told to do this by the club, and their head coach Tonda Eckert wasn’t very happy at being asked questions about it in the post-match presser.

But the EFL have brought charges against them which are to be heard before the second leg, and there have even been calls for them to be chucked out of the play-offs altogether. This seems unlikely for reasons - *makes the internationally recognised hand signal for money with thumb and forefinger* - but given what we saw in the first leg, they might even be considered to be doing the viewing audience a favour if they did.

We did finally get a goal in Friday and Saturday’s play-offs, in the last minute of the third match of the afternoon, when Stockport scored at Stevenage. It was a goal which raised the philosophical question of whether a dive is a dive if there’s no intention to win a penalty. This manoeuvre was enough to throw to Stevenage defenders, allowing the ball to roll through and be stabbed inelegantly into the goal. It took 270 long minutes to get to this point.

To be clear, I don’t blame teams for being extremely cautious in the first leg of an EFL play-off semi-final. You’ve played 46 games to get to this point. You don’t want to throw anything away by doing anything strategically reckless in the first leg, and that kind of applies whether you’re the home or away team.

The issue is the schedule, rather than the teams or the managers. In the most literal sense possible, Friday and Saturday’s matches have demonstrated that first legs in cup football are an outdated relic from an era when there was a genuine advantage to making football matches two-legged.

Below the National League, you don’t get any of this nonsense. Play-off matches are one-offs, with the higher-placed team in the division getting home advantage. It’s a beautifully elegant way of doing things, which gives teams a clear incentive to stay competitive in their league fixtures, even in the eventuality that a division ends up with a runaway leader or that a gap opens up between those who’ve reached the play-offs and those below them.

All of this leads back to Southampton and those spying allegations. The rules covering this sort of behaviour were introduced in 2019 after the famously funny “Spygate” involving a match between Leeds United and Derby County in January of that year, when it was found that Leeds had been sending staff to spy on the Derby County players prior to a regular season match between the two clubs. Leeds were fined £200,000 under the EFL’s broad misconduct charges of the time. Neither team, as things turned out, were promoted, after Aston Villa beat Derby in that year’s play-off final.

Given that this is the first time that this rule has had to be enforced since its introduction, no-one knows what sort of punishment Southampton may receive. The Derby vs Leeds fine of 2019 is occasionally mis-remembered as being a very similar case to this one because the two teams did meet in the play-off semi-finals at the end of that season, but this charge concerned a regular league meeting between the two teams that January.

It’s possible that a lot of people could become fixated on that £200,000 figure that Leeds ended up being fined, but that was for a regular league game, and it was awarded seven years ago. It’s impossible to say what the punishment will be this time around, but there isn’t much of a justification for it being lower than this amount.

This is considerably more important than a run-of-the-mill League fixture, for one thing, and Southampton’s alleged breach comes despite a specific rule having been put in place to prohibit such behaviour after the blizzard of negative publicity that the previous case of this caused.

It’s highly unlikely that Southampton will be removed from the play-offs, but the punishment that they do receive - presuming the charges to be upheld - will offer a degree of insight into how seriously this matter is considered in the EFL’s corridors of power.

Some of the reaction from within the game has hinted that this could be taken more seriously than some might presume it would be. There was, for example, a call yesterday from the former Watford striker Troy Deeney on CBS Sports Golazo (X link) that Southampton should be thrown out of the play-offs altogether.

This leaves us wondering whether he’s just making such a statement for the shock jock value, or whether it’s a genuinely held conviction of his. Given the importance of marginal gains in modern professional football - and especially taking into account the increased importance that rehearsed set-piece plays have come to take in recent years - it could be that Southampton are in hotter water than might currently be appreciated. They certainly will be if Deeney’s view - which was not exclusive to him - is more widely held by those working within the game.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to Southampton ending up at the more severe end of the punishment spectrum over this is commercial rather than anything else. Sky Sports would certainly be less than happy at losing the highest-profile of the six play-off semi-final matches from their schedule, and while it’s unlikely that they would have any direct influence on the EFL’s disciplinary processes, it’s difficult to believe that commercial concerns wouldn’t be in the forefront of the League’s mind, as well as upholding the integrity of their end of season play-offs.

And that is the ultimate $64,000 question, here. How seriously do those involved take these allegations? The EFL fined Leeds £200,000 over it before it was even a specific rule and then introduced a specific rule covering it, so we might presume that they take it fairly seriously. But it’s not the only question at play, here. Presuming the rule to have been breached, this was done so knowingly, but will Southampton’s claim that the member of staff concerned was acting in his own capacity be taken seriously?

Because there are also potential ramifications for the EFL here, as well. With so much money potentially at stake, a severe punishment for Southampton would likely end up with an appeal, while the Championship play-off final certainly can’t be put back this year for a variety of reasons, not least the presence of a World Cup which is due to start within a couple of weeks of the match being played. There isn’t time for any lengthy investigation to take place, a consequence of the football calendar which has been squeezed for years, to a point at which there is really no more space to play with.

We will, at least, get insight into what the EFL really thinks of these spying allegations in their verdict over the charges that they’ve brought although, given the nature of modern football discourse, we all already know that they won’t please everybody, whatever conclusion they reach. And if there is a silver lining for the rest of us, at least it adds a soupçon of drama to this round of Championship play-off matches when the actual teams concerned were singularly unable to deliver it themselves.

The remainder of the non-league play-offs should really have been finishing this weekend, but this won’t be happening in the Southern Combination Football League Premier Division, at Step Four of the game below the league because of a peculiar set of circumstances which perhaps should have been foreseen by somebody, somewhere.

The league was won on the final day of the season by Steyning Town, leaving Haywards Heath Town, Peacehaven & Telscombe, Guernsey and Horsham YM to play off for a place in the Isthmian League next season. There was something of a surprise in one of the semi-finals, when Haywards Heath - who’d won 18 of their 19 home league fixtures - were beaten 1-0 at home by Peacehaven. The other match saw Guernsey beat Horsham YM 3-0.

Below the National League, all play-offs follow a similar structure. They’re all one-off matches, with home advantage going to the higher-placed team. It’s an excellent season, which offers a clear benefit to finishing as runners-up over finishing 5th because it means that not only will you play the lowest ranked team in your semi-final, but also that you’ll get to play all your play-off matches at home.

The semi-finals in the SCFL Premier Division, then, resulted in a final between Guernsey and Peacehaven & Telscombe, which was due to be played at Guernsey’s Victoria Park, a purpose-built football stadium into which they moved at the start of this season. On Thursday, though, it was confirmed that the venue for this match would be switched to “the mainland” because they were unable to book flights out and back for this particular day.

There are two teams from the Channel Islands playing in the English non-league set-up. Guernsey were formed in 2011, while Jersey Bulls, who play in the Isthmian League Division One South-East. Ironically, both teams finished 3rd in their respective divisions this season, with Jersey losing on penalty kicks in their play-off semi-final against AFC Whyteleafe following a goalless draw.

It took a lot of work to get these two clubs into the National League System, and they operate under slightly different rules to everybody else. The two clubs themselves are liable for the travel costs of opposing teams for their home matches, while during the regular season their matches kick-off an hour earlier at 2pm so that their opponents can get home the same day.

But this particular weekend follows Liberation Day on the islands, which marks their freedom from occupation by Germany during the Second World War. It’s a public holiday there, and it would appear that this has meant a lot of people returning to or visiting the islands, meaning that no flights were available at relatively short notice.

What has been surprising, though, has been the decision taken over the matter by the SCFL, who’ve stripped Guernsey of home advantage for the match. At the time of writing, it’s expected that it will be played midweek next week, but it’s not known where. There has been talk that it could be switched to Peacehaven, or even that it could be played at a neutral venue instead.

It is somewhat surprising that Guernsey are being blamed for this through the means of having home advantage taken away from them for the rescheduled fixture. The League AGMs which determine who plays where next season aren’t until June, so there’s no particular reason why this match couldn’t simply have been moved back in order to be played at Victoria Park. Why there’s a rush to play it in midweek hasn’t been satisfactorily explained by anyone.

Next weekend wouldn’t have been an option. That weekend sees the final of the Muratti Vase - the annual intra-islands tournament which has been played since 1905 - and it’s a big event on the Channel Islands. This year’s final is the first to be played at Victoria Park, and last year Guernsey won the competition for the first time in eight years.

But there’s plenty of time before the end of this month to fit this fixture in on Guernsey, so exactly why there’s such a rush to get it played as soon as possible is something of a mystery. Guernsey are understandably furious over this decision, and their statement on the matter more than hints at their frustration over this:

“The club had already begun engaging with Peacehaven and Telescombe to facilitate their travel, including accommodating a request to travel the day before the fixture and offering to cover the cost of a coach transfer to the airport, thereby removing logistical challenges and additional expense.”

“This morning, we were informed that our proposed travel arrangements had been considered by Peacehaven and Telescombe, who were unable to agree to the proposal on a number of grounds.

“This raises further concern that Peacehaven have effectively been given discretion over whether the fixture is played in Guernsey, rather than the league enforcing the fixture at the venue earned on sporting merit and under the competition regulations.”

(It probably doesn’t help their case that they spelt “Telscombe” incorrectly throughout the statement, but that’s by the by, really.)

It feels as though something goes wrong with a non-league play-off every year, and for the second year in a row it’s come from the Channel Islands. Last year it involved Jersey Bulls in the Combined Counties League, though this was in relation to a points deduction at the very end of the season which cost them the league title rather than travel arrangements. These play-offs were eventually played at the very end of the month, and Jersey were promoted anyway.

There will be some who feel that this is grounds to question whether these two teams should be playing in the English league system in the first place, but the involvement of these two teams has been a net benefit. New sporting facilities have been built on the islands and attendances for matches have been excellent. Despite playing at Step 4, Guernsey averaged a home attendance of 651 this season, not that far off double the second-highest in the division.

The geographic position of the Channel Islands, far closer to the coast of France than England, has always led to logistical issues for them. Colour television, for example, didn’t arrive there until 1976 because of issues with getting a signal there. But this has been a known issue since the very outset of the involvement of these two clubs in the English league system, and broadly speaking it’s worked well. Guernsey & Jersey Bulls have absorbed the costs of travel - which are extremely high - and there’s been little complaining about it.

But you do have to ask questions about the original scheduling of this fixture. Guernsey’s relegation from the Isthmian League last season meant that they were always likely to be among the title contenders this year, and the obvious knock-on effect of this is there was always a strong possibility that they would end up in the play-offs at the end of this season. In view of this, we might have expected somebody at some point to have pointed out that the weekend of the play-off final was one where plane tickets were likely to be in short supply.

The principle of home advantage going to higher-placed teams is an important one. It’s ethically the right way to organise a league season, and playing these matches as one-off matches makes for a considerably smaller amount of work at the end of each season. And the balance of the interests of these two particular clubs with the interests of their opponents on the mainland has been well-managed, over the years.

But stripping the club of home advantage for the fixture feels like essentially punishing the Guernsey FC for something which was completely beyond their control. The dates for play-off matches are decided by leagues themselves, and while perhaps Guernsey could have pointed out that this particular weekend could be problematic should they have got there, it’s still the league’s responsibility to ensure that these dates are playable, and well in advance of the matches being played. The SCFL itself may well end up hoping that Guernsey win their play-off final, so that they don’t face a similar issue again next season.

Edit: It’s been confirmed this morning that the match now will be played at Victoria Park on Guernsey on Saturday 23rd May, which is the best decision that they could have reached. Excellent common sense from the SCFL, there.

The reason for this was, of course, a winning team. Flush with investment following the sale of the club to Barrie Drewitt-Barlow and Scott Drewitt-Barlow in February 2025, there was good reason to be excited. ITV planned a documentary series following the club’s fortunes over the course of the 2025-26 season, and the club was drawing more attention than it ever had before.

The property developers first hit the headlines when became one of the first gay dads in the UK to children via surrogacy in 1999, later featuring on, among other shows, reality TV shows like Rich House, Poor House and Below Deck Sailing Yacht. Their purchase of Maldon & Tiptree was initially described as being a “multi-million pound”, although how this was the case wasn’t made entirely clear. That certainly wouldn’t have been the sale price of a club playing anywhere near that level of the game.

On the pitch, the team delivered. They won the Isthmian League Division One North on goal difference from Felixstowe & Walton United on the final weekend of the season, despite losing their match 3-2 at Walthamstow. The club had only ever played one season at their new level before, spending the 2005-06 season there under their former name of Maldon Town before getting relegated straight back again.

The circumstances surround that name change were a little grubby. Maldon Town changed their name after the owner of Tiptree United bought the club, announcing in April 2010 that Maldon Town would be ‘rebranded’ as Maldon & Tiptree Football Club, with Tiptree United withdrawing from their place in the Essex Senior League. Tiptree United’s ground was later demolished, and the land was sold for housing.

But now it might be that the club’s recent success is about to collapse around their ears. Police vehicles were spotted at the club’s ground earlier in the week, and it’s now been confirmed by Essex Police that the Drewitt-Barlows have been charged with multiple offences including rape, sexual assault, and modern slavery trafficking for sexual exploitation. They appear at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court on the 8th May.

Of course, we have to be extremely careful about what we say, at such a point. It’s important to remind anyone reading this that neither arresting somebody for something nor charging them with criminal offences means that they have done anything wrong. That’s the way in which justice works in this country, and excessive speculation can damage their right to a fair trial.

But the very fact this has happened in the first place will cause alarm around the club, coming so soon after promotion was secured. The costs have already been high. A six-part ITV series following their season was expected to be shown from the middle of May, but this has already been shelved, with a statement from the company saying: “ITV has decided to remove Up The Jammers from the upcoming schedule. It will no longer be shown on ITV4 or ITVX as previously advertised.”

And then, of course, there is reputational damage to the club. At such times, for many people the legal specifics of such a case are, whether rightly or wrongly, often considered to be neither here nor there, and whether this is fair in any way will not be taken into consideration very much at all.

Having put so much into building the club up over the course of the season, everybody else at Maldon & Tiptree will have been looking on at the way on which events have unfolded this week with utter dismay. The club’s stadium was renamed the Drewitt-Barlow Stadium following the take over. We shall have to see, whether this is still the case by the start of the 2026-27 season.

While no accounts have been made available for any period of their ownership yet, there is common assent that a lot of money has been put into Maldon & Tiptree over the last fifteen months or so, since they acquired the club. If there is such a thing as a silver lining to this story for those who have to deal with the after-effects of all this, it’s that at this level of the non-league game player contracts tend to be rolling ones which only last a year, and it’s a little early to be agreeing new ones for next season. It is to be hoped that the club hasn’t already over-extended itself financially for next season.

The effect of money coming into the club was clear, last season. Over the three seasons prior to 2025-26, Maldon & Tiptree had finished 15th, 11th and 13th in the Isthmian League Division One North. Among the players brought in last summer was the former West Ham United and Ipswich Town forward Freddie Sears. Although now 36-years-old, Sears ended the season as the division’s top goalscorer, with 29 in the league and 33 in all competitions.

All of this feels like a sideshow in comparison with the severity of the charges brought against the Drewitt-Barlows. This is an extremely serious matter, and now is certainly not the time for the banterbus to be departing the station. The allegations made and the charges brought are horrendous, and at such times it’s important to keep this in mind. It’s important that the Drewitt-Barlows receive a fair trial and that the truth outs, whatever that turns out to be. The football club itself has fallen silent on social media this week, and that’s probably the best way for them to progress, for now.

But the Premier League’s decision to throw its lot in with satellite broadcasters had ramifications elsewhere, too. ITV, who’d had the exclusive rights to the First Division for the last four years prior to this rupture, hastily signed a deal with the Football League which resulted in a strange patchwork of Sunday afternoon broadcasts from what is now known as the Championship for the next few years. But stranger that that was the interjection of a broadcast which had previously shown little interest in the game.

Channel 4 first went on air on the 2nd November 1982, but with a remit to provide an alternative to other broadcasters, the national game was seldom shown on the channel. In 1985, they showed the World Cup play-off between Australia and Scotland, and they covered the Women’s FA Cup from 1989 to 1993, but over the first decade of its existence Four’s best-known sports coverage was American football, which had never really been shown in this country before.

In the summer of 1992, all that changed. The roots of Channel 4’s relationship with Italian club football can be traced back to 1988, and the S4C show Sgorio. When Channel 4 had been established, the decision had been taken to make the Welsh version of this channel primarily a Welsh language show. Sgorio - “Score” - was launched in 1988 and S4C found that buying the rights to big European leagues was an inexpensive way to pad out their weekly broadcast.

The rights to Serie A were bought by British Satellite Broadcasting in 1990, and that company was merged into the Sky the following year. But by the summer of 1992, it was clear that football was rapidly becoming fashionable again. Channel 4 never produces its own shows. They’re all made by independent production companies. And one of those companies, Chrysalis TV, had worked with Paul Gascoigne on a documentary about his return from the serious injury that he essentially caused himself during the 1991 FA Cup final.

A gap in the market was spotted. The first Premier League television deal had been signed for what was then considered to be a staggering £306 million over five years. Chrysalis approached the FIGC, Italian football’s governing body, with a view to buying the rights to Lazio matches, given that this was who Gascoigne had signed for, but the FIGC refused to sell them separately to the rest of the league.

Channel 4 managed to acquire the rights to Serie A for £1.5 million a year, an incredible deal for a league which was widely considered to be the best in the world at the time. In addition to this, a trickle of English players to Italy had grown the league’s visibility, with 1990 World Cup stars David Platt and Des Walker having decamped there as well as Gascoigne.

The first live broadcast of Football Italia was shown on Sunday 6th September 1992. Even though Gascoigne was injured, the match that they featured was between Sampdoria and Lazio, who’d finished the previous season in 6th and 10th places in the table respectively. Commentary was provided by the ITV stalwart Peter Brackley and the former Pisa player Paul Elliott, with Kenneth Wolstenholme dragged out of retirement for off-screen links. The show was watched by a very healthy audience of 3 million.

But a live match a week wouldn’t be the only show that Four would be dedicating to Serie A. In addition to their Sunday afternoon show, they would be showing a weekly highlights package from the previous week to be called Gazzetta Football Italia. The original intention had been to get Paul Gascoigne to host it, but a combination of Gascoigne’s unreliability and uncomfortable nature in front of a camera rendered that impossible, with journalist James Richardson drafted in to replace him. The first show was scheduled in for the Saturday morning after that first match, the 12th September 1992.

Italy on the 12th September 1992

1992 was a difficult year for Italy, hitting a nadir between May and July, when the two leading magistrates in the fight against the mafia and their entire security detail were killed by two separate bombs in Sicily. Amid growing criticism, the state reacted by deploying an initial contingent of 9,000 soldiers to Sicily. This was the start of a massive operation of homeland security that would last for six years and eventually involve more than 150,000 officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers.

But this wasn’t the only crisis facing the country at the time. In the same year, Mani Pulite (“clean hands”), an investigation into the District Attorney of Milan, brought to light a deeply corrupt nationwide system that had, for decades, made bribery and kickbacks a tacit code binding together politics and businesses. It demonstrated that politicians’ thirst for money and power had no moral compass and that the welfare of the people played no part in their decision-making.

The scandal came to be known as Tangentopoli. When a general election was held at the start of April, it was different to before. The Italian Communist Party had dissolved a year earlier, while the far-right Lega Nord jumped up to 8% in the polling. In the same month, the investigation started to ramp up, and many industrial figures and politicians from both the government and the opposition were arrested on charges of corruption.

While the investigations started in Milan, they quickly spread to other areas as more politicians confessed. Fundamental to this increased exposure was the general attitude of the main politicians to drop support for subordinates who got caught; this made many of them feel betrayed, and they often implicated many other figures, who in turn would implicate even more. On the 2nd September 1992, just ten days before our broadcast the socialist politician Sergio Moroni, who had been charged with corruption, committed suicide, leaving behind a letter declaring that his crimes were not for his personal gain but for his party's benefit.

Italian football on the 12th September 1992

Exactly how healthy Italian football was by the start of the 1992-93 season was very much a matter of perspective. If you supported Milan, all was right with the world. Unburdened by European football - they’d been banned by UEFA for the 1991-92 season - they won Serie A unbeaten, with 22 wins and 12 draws from their 34 matches and winning 8-2 away to Foggia on the last day of the season.

And the league seemed strong. Big transfer fees were being paid for foreign star players, and there was growing interest from abroad. The World Cup held two years earlier had led to huge amounts of money being poured into stadia, although the national team itself had suffered a hangover from their semi-final defeat to Argentina in 1990, having failed to qualify for the finals of the - then eight-nation - European Championships in Sweden.

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Look at just about any post on the upcoming tournament - or the sport in general, really - which comes from an American and you can be just about guaranteed to read a series of posts underneath it berating them for calling it “soccer” rather than “football.”

Never mind that they have another sport which they call “football” which remains far more popular in their country than our version of it. Never mind that the actual word “soccer” isn’t some sort of modern affectation only used by parvenus. It’s another opportunity to tell an American off, and that seems to be all that matters to some people.

At this stage in proceedings, most people understand the etymology of the word “soccer.” But for the uninitiated, it bears repeating for a full understanding of just how British the word actually is. “Soccer” can trace its roots back to the public schools of the 1870s. By this time, our version of the game of football was already cleaving itself into two fundamentally different versions.

In the first place, the game had come from the public schools of the 1850s. But each different school had a different version of the game, with different rules. This wasn’t an issue in the game’s earliest years, but with the dramatic growth of railways in the 1840s these schools were now able to play matches against each other. Sometimes, a hotchpotch of the rules played by the two schools would be thrown together. On other occasions, they would play the first half by one set of rules and the second by the other.

What was clear by the start of the 1860s was that the game needed a single, consolidated set of rules as it continued to grow, and so it was that in October 1863 a series of meetings was held at a pub called the Freemasons Arms in Holborn at which the rules of the game were thrashed out.

These meetings were fractious, but the main bone of contention which split different representatives was ‘hacking’, or kicking opponents below the shin, and this led to a breakaway which led to the codification of rugby a decade later. (A later revision of the laws of the game to incorporate the Sheffield rules would change it still further, but I’m straying from the point already, really.)

By the middle of the 1870s, then, there were two versions of this new game being played in public schools, and to disambiguate between the two they came to be known as “association” football and “rugby” football. At the same time, there was a fashion within these organisations for lopping the end of a word, slightly mangling the spelling, and adding “-er” to it so, for example, “breakfast” became “brekker.” This extended into sports, and this resulted in rugby becoming known as “rugger” and association football becoming known as “assocer” or, as we know it today, “soccer.”

This desire to one-up Americans on this particular subject doesn’t have much of a grounding in reality. The media has been calling football “soccer” more or less continuously since then. Even now, Sky Sports’ Saturday afternoon live scores-a-thon is called Soccer Saturday, and nobody bats an eyelid. So, why do we on this side of the Atlantic persist with this chiding? Obviously, I only have theories on this, but the conclusions that I’ve reached point in different directions, some arguably justified and others somewhat less so.

On the one hand, America sucks up a disproportionate amount of the English-language internet, and their cultural imperialism can stick in the craw. We all know that slight curl of the lip which comes with seeing an English language option on a website which is accompanied with a Star-Spangled Banner rather than a more familiar flag. The American tendency to colonise global culture remains undiminished, and to be told that the language that we have spent hundreds of years speaking isn’t “ours” leads to automatic hostility.

And with this being Britain, the class system also has to be taken into account. Football is most commonly called “soccer” in parts of the world where there’s a need for disambiguation, and over here that primarily means where rugby is popular. This in turn means that the word “soccer” is heard with something of a sneer in its voice. It’s the word that the PE teacher who’d rather be teaching chase the egg might use, or an MP trying to signal that they’re a normal functioning human being. A lot of people just don’t like the word.

But there’s also a possibility that there’s something else at play here as well. We all know how wealthy and powerful America is, and that if they really applied all of their collective resources to the task, they could dominate the game if they wanted to. I pick up a vibe of fear from people who get on their high horse on this particular subject, that we have to push back against the “Americanisation” of our game.

The problem is that this has already started, and FIFA have been its biggest single proponents. They’ve been given the USA two World Cups in 32 years, even though the game is nowhere near as proportionally popular there as it is in most countries on earth, and we all know that this is about the governing body’s rapacious desire to accumulate as much money as it can.

And then there are the changes to actual game itself. Those of us with long memories will remember the Budweiser television adverts of the mid-2000s, in which the piss manufacturers ribbed us with star-spangled changes to make football more appealing to an American audience.

Well, buckle in, because that ship is already sailing. It’s recently been confirmed that there will be three-minute “water breaks” midway through every match at this summer’s World Cup, and the fact that this has been announced by FIFA feels like a dog-whistle to broadcasters and advertisers that three minutes is exactly long enough to fit in a commercial break.

How long, we might well ask, before this “drinks break” becomes the match being divided into “quarters” because that’s what the American audiences are more used to? I’m going to stick my finger in the air and say three years. We might say the same for the alarmingly high ticket, hotel and even public transport prices that have been thrown around over the previous few months. It’s very clear that FIFA want to make the World Cup a ‘boutique’ event for which only the top 5% of earners can afford tickets. Forcing people to pay through the nose for things is the ‘Americanisation’ they really want.

But it’s FIFA doing this, not the fans of the game in the USA. FIFA are fucking our game beyond recognition, and as we already know, there are enough snouts in their trough to ensure that their current direction of travel isn’t going to change. An organisation riddled by corruption more than a decade ago responded to global revulsion at its behaviour has responded by… becoming even more craven and corrupt than anyone could reasonably have guessed.

There are many things about the game in the USA that I would change. Promotion and relegation would be introduced under my benevolent dictatorship, for example, while those pitches you occasionally see with the markings for a bewildering array of different sports and more than one set of goalposts would be outlawed, with their installation being punished by immediate expulsion to El Salvador.

It does feel, however, as though a disproportionate amount of invective is aimed at this one particular word, and this is galling when there are many more useful things to get angry about. Be angry with FIFA for prioritising pricing people out of our game, giving an absurd “peace prize” to a senile, psychopathic warmonger with the world’s most stupid haircut, kowtowing to dictators the world over and forcing a video review system which has broken the game as a spectacle.

But stop it with this apparently reflexive desire to keep putting people down who love our game as much as we do. The real harm being caused to association football is happening considerably closer to home; at FIFA’s supervillain lair in Zurich, to be precise. There are good reasons to loathe American cultural imperialism but, as they may or may not say on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, this ain’t it.

The EFL regular season is over, with only the play-offs now to come, and they’ll be over quicker than you expect, because they are every year. Below the National League, they’re more or less done already in the non-league game. And the Premier League is finally starting to sharpen, and in ways that will look like they make considerably more sense with hindsight.

Arsenal had a “statement win” against Fulham on Saturday, by a comfortable 3-0 margin, which extended their lead at the top of the table to six points, but with Manchester City having two games in hand. City, meanwhile, had a difficult-looking trip to the new Goodison Park on Monday night and fluffed their lines to an extent that would have been hilarious, had Arsenal not been the beneficiaries. The match ended in a 3-3 draw, meaning that two wins from their fairly straightforward final three matches against West Ham, Burnley and Crystal Palace will hand Arsenal the Premier League title.

At the other end of the table, meanwhile, it hasn’t taken long for Spurs to start to look as though they might actually be turning themselves around. Their 2-1 win at Aston Villa was both the result and performance they needed, a season-best showing, albeit against a team that has been out of form for longer than has been widely acknowledged.

While Aston Villa did rest a number of players for their Europa League second leg against Forest, it’s equally true to say that Spurs have eleven - many of whom would walk first into their first eleven - out injured, and have had something like that number missing all season. And Villa have now won just four of their last 15 Premier League matches.

None of this reflected well upon West Ham United, whose 3-0 reversal at Brentford was literally a self-inflicted disaster, with the first two goals coming as a result of an own goal and a penalty. Konstantinos Mavropanos absolutely whacked the ball of the underside of his own crossbar for the first, before El Hadji Malick Diouf approached Dango Ouattara in much the same way that a lumberjack would a spruce, allowing penalty genius Igor Thiago to put the game beyond much reasonable doubt, with Morten Damsgaard adding a third for the lulz.

Nottingham Forest also rested players for their Bank Holiday Monday trip to Chelsea, and it is a sad reflection on the state of discourse in the modern game that they’re not going to be getting more attention as a result of their thumping win at Stamford Bridge. Considering the chaos that inevitably comes with a panicking Evangelos Marinakis, as has happened at The City Ground this season, Vitor Pereira has done an incredible job since landing at The City Ground as their fourth manager of the season.

But there they are, going into their Europa League semi-final second leg against Aston Villa with a 1-0 lead, off the back of one of their very best results of the season at Stamford Bridge. They’re six points clear of the bottom three, so they’re almost home and dry. Pereira, who evidently wasn’t good enough for Wolves, turns out to have been good enough for Nottingham Forest, just in case you still questioning the extent to which picking the right manager or head coach still matters.

As for Chelsea, well, it feels as though there are going to be a lot of articles about them on The Athletic this week. Apparently, just dropping in the under-21s coach because you’ve sacked your second head coach of the season without much of an apparent idea of what to do next might not be the wisest of ideas.

Chelsea’s abject performance against Nottingham Forest was the exact combination of bad luck and incompetence which leads to the conclusion that they may in fact be cursed. This wasn’t just a 3-1 home defeat to a team near the bottom of the table, although it very much was a 3-1 home defeat to a team near the bottom of the table. A good example of this came at the end of the first half when Jesse Derry was lost on his debut on a stretcher following a clash of heads with Zach Abbott which resulted in a Chelsea penalty kick.

Already 2-0 down, Chelsea needed this goal. But instead, and following an extremely long interval, Cole Palmer stepped up and placed a poor penalty to the right of the Forest goalkeeper Matz Sels. Seeing a replay from over Palmer’s right shoulder really demonstrated what a poor kick; completely telegraphed, with Sels’ eyes clearly watching exactly where the ball ended up going all the way.

At 3-0 down, an offside decision denied them their one final chance of a route back into the game. Perhaps at 3-1 with 18 minutes plus stoppages, they could have used some of that residual Big Club Arrogance to crowbar a point from it all. But the Roboref said no, and the offside concerned was by a margin that didn’t really need lines being drawn across a screen to confirm it. It stayed 3-0 until the 93rd minute, when Joao Pedro scored history’s most futile bicycle kick.

Of course, they finally remembered how to play after this, and the 300 or home supporters still inside Stamford Bridge were treated to as close to a barnstorming finish as their current rabble are capable of at the moment, but Forest’s defence was stout enough to withstand them with some comfort. Chelsea have now lost six in a row in the Premier League, have dropped to 9th in the table, and Pedro’s goal was their first in the League since the 4th March. Who on earth is going to want to take that on, come the end of this season?

It feels like it’s been a long time since Manchester United vs Liverpool mattered as little as last weekend’s episode did, with United having already more or less guaranteed themselves Champions League qualification for next season and Liverpool fourth but unlikely to fall below sixth. Perhaps because the pressure was off a little, it was an entertaining enough match for once, and we all know how much simply beating That Lot means when it comes to a derby match, regardless of league position.

And finally, in a weekend in which every match meant something to somebody, Brentford brushed Crystal Palace aside without a great deal of fuss. Palace drop to 15th with this lethargic defeat, though they also have a European semi-final second leg on Thursday night and changes were made for this one.

With the likelihood of 6th place being enough for the Champions League still alive - this requires Aston Villa to both finish exactly 5th and win the Europa League - it did at least matter to Brentford. Newcastle’s win against Brighton may have momentarily quietened calls for Eddie Howe to have to pay a visit to the Saudi embassy, as it were.

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But this improvement had been building for a couple of games. The two points dropped against Brighton were a huge disappointment because the second equalising goal came about so deep into stoppage-time and because their performance that day, although nervy and skittish, warranted a win. The Wolves match was a win without a performance, which is the most important thing to manage of all at this point of the season, but which also offered little room for optimism in the remaining fixtures to come.

The trip to Villa Park didn’t offer much hope on paper, against opposition who were in 5th place in the Premier League and the semi-finals of the Europa League. But while much has been made of Unai Emery’s decision to heavily rotate his team for this match, with the second leg of their semi-final to come on Thursday night and his team a goal behind, this rather overlooks the fact that Spurs have been operating under that sort of restriction for most of this season without having had much choice in the matter. They had more players missing than Villa did yesterday; they just didn’t get any choice in the matter.

And perhaps the most impressive from the match itself of all was Conor Gallagher. He’s been at risk of becoming a fall guy over the second half of this season, and he was dropped into the first eleven for this match because of the injury to Xavi Simons, who is a very different player to him.

But his performance, in a number ten’s sort of position even if he isn’t necessarily that type of player, was excellent, topped off with a superb goal from distance. He kept going for the full 97 minutes, and he demonstrated that he has the capacity to be the leader on the pitch that they’ve been missing all season.

So there are signs of improvement, and those signs have been dripping through over their last three league games. They’re back out of the bottom three, as a result of a pretty poor performance by West Ham at Brentford Saturday afternoon. And with three games to go, the position at the bottom of the table does look radically different as a result of this win.

Next up for Spurs are Leeds United at The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium next Monday night. A win from this match remains critical. From the perspective of the psychological wellbeing of the club, a home win is another hurdle which has to be leapt.

They haven’t won there in the Premier League since the 6th December, and that win remains their only home League win since they beat Burnley there 3-1 on the opening day of the season. Given how aggressively febrile the atmosphere has been at so many home games this season, that remains a seal that needs to be broken.

But the win at Aston Villa gives both the team and the supporters a reason for the atmosphere for this game to not be as toxic as it has been at other points this season. An eight-day gap gives the players an excellent rest break opportunity. And perhaps most importantly of all, by the time they take to the pitch against Leeds they’ll know exactly what they need to do, even though they already know exactly what they need to do.

Just over 24 hours earlier, West Ham United play Arsenal. This promises to be a match with an atmosphere unlike any other. Arsenal need a win in order to maintain the fragile lead over Manchester City that they’ve rebuilt at the top of the Premier League table. West Ham - whose goal difference is ten goals worse than Spurs’ - will need a win to lift themselves back out of the bottom three with two games to play.

But the road to safety is, then, now clearer than it was prior to the start of the weekend, and most striking of all is the fact that, should Arsenal beat West Ham on Sunday - which we should expect; Arsenal have discovered a little of their mojo after losing at Manchester City, while West Ham were pretty terrible at Brentford last weekend - and Spurs beat Leeds on the Monday evening, all that relegation talk will have been for nothing, and Spurs will be safe with two games left to play.

There remain a lot of people - including many in the media itself; all you have to do is look at the reactions to the team selections for the Villa match to se that - who are highly invested in Spurs getting relegated from the Premier League this season. That much has been evident for months.

That constant need for ‘narrative’ means that this will continue to be couched as a ‘crisis’ until it’s mathematically impossible for it to not be. But a win from the Leeds match will render it exactly that, and perhaps even offer the possibility of a slightly happier end to this season, as well as ensuring that they finish 2025-26 with more points than they did 2024-25.

And once it’s over and done with, wherever it ends up, things need to change. An actual rebuild of the first-team squad needs to be carried out over the summer; all that matters in that respect is whether it’s being rebuilt for a season in the Championship or a season in the Premier League.

If Spurs really do consider themselves to be a “Big Six” club - and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that this media confection never really had much of a grounding in truth or reality, for reasons which require greater explanation than there’s room for here - then perhaps it’s time for the club’s hierarchy to start acting like it, and go out there to actually get the players such a ‘status’ should be able to ensure.

But for now, there’s a bit of a gap. Enjoy the break. All of our hearts deserve it. There’s a glimmer of light at the end of this very long tunnel, and it has been getting incrementally bigger over the last three games. Nothing is guaranteed yet. West Ham could get a surprise result at Arsenal and set those butterflies a-fluttering again, while there remain serious questions to be answered about the medium-to-long-term future of the club. But for now, things don’t seem quite as bad as they did just a few days ago, and that’s a little bit of respite that we should probably hang onto.

There were points at which it felt as though the football gods were lining up to give them a kicking. 46 matches, of which 32 ended in defeat. Plunged into administration and docked 18 points. Forced to sell their legendary club captain at the end of the January transfer window just to keep the lights on. Formally relegated at the home of their most bitter rivals just three and a half weeks later. Relegation as a mere formality from around the end of October on. A record low points tally, having only just crawled up to zero on the final day of the season.

To say that this has been a season from hell for Sheffield Wednesday is something of an understatement. There were points at which there were serious questions over whether they would be able to raise a team for matches. There were moments of hope that were snatched away, and the strong possibility that the agony could even stretch on into next season through another points deduction.

Yet the club’s season ended on a high that could have been scripted. Before the match, the scoreboard ticked down, or up, from -15 to zero, confirmation that the club had been successful in persuading the EFL that, while there are very good reasons for the rule that threatened next season as well being in place, in this case it simply didn’t make sense to prolong the club’s agony any longer. The calculated gamble taken by the club’s new owners had paid off.

And to cap it off, a 2-1 win against West Bromwich Albion to lift them up to a plump zero points, a figure that will sit there in perpetuity as a memory of the darkest season that any League club has had. But at least it wasn’t below zero, and that mattered.

The fans started congregating around Hillsborough early, on Saturday morning. It was Honolulu day, so there were plenty in fancy dress; a party atmosphere at a club that has been in mourning all season. The match had been sold out for days. It was widely expected that the new owners would be confirmed in time for this fixture. That had long been the aim. And in the end, a sell-out crowd of almost 34,000 was there to sing them home.

But those fans hadn’t walked away from the club. Over the season, the club’s average home League attendance ended up at 23,199, the thirteenth highest in the division. At such times, the fans are often the only people you can really, truly trust.

Talking of which, the Sheffield Wednesday Supporters Trust were there from the start, helping to starve the club’s former owners out and galvanising the supporters to keep them going through what turned out to be a tortuous administration process. Fans loaned the club money. They packed Hillsborough out when they needed to.

The fans weren’t the only heroes at Sheffield Wednesday this season. A group of young, inexperienced players had to be thrown together to keep the club ticking over, alongside those who hadn’t seen their contracts expire and whoever else they could get their hands on.

Manager Henrik Pedersen had to get his players to the other side of it without causing them any long-term psychological damage. These were utterly unique challenges, and the manager has earned the right to go again with the club in an altogether healthier position, next season.

And while there are caveats to expressing gratitude towards billionaires for any reason, what can be said about the club’s new public face, David Storch, is that he has understood the assignment. He has given every impression of having let Sheffield Wednesday get under his skin. Every indication has shown that he’s been speaking to the right people and forging the right connections. As the electronic scoreboard counted their points deduction away he stood in the centre circle, apparently close to tears himself.

This was hardly surprising. What saw at Hillsborough on the final day of the season was a community getting its football club back. There’s a lot of work to be done. Of all the money that was poured into Wednesday over the Chansiri years, precious little of it was ever spent on infrastructural improvement. The first team squad needs complete rebuilding. It’s not going to be cheap, and there are no guarantees of success in League One next season.

And it has felt at times throughout this season that it hasn’t felt as though what’s been happening to this club hasn’t been receiving the attention that they’ve deserved. I’ve been writing about this sort of thing for twenty years or so now, and I’ve not seen many clubs in a worse state than this one found themselves in this season. When writing on clubs in financial trouble, there can be a tendency to believe that everything will just sort itself out in the end, and that all we have to do is be patient.

But every now and again over the last few months, I’ve had cause to wonder whether this was actually going to reach anything like a happy conclusion. Might Chansiri’s truculence have driven the club completely to the wall? Might they have ended up in the hands of Mike Ashley, to slowly have their lifeblood drained from them as he fattened them up to spin them on to someone else? Where was this to end up?

We don’t quite have our answer yet, but at least Sheffield Wednesday get the opportunity to reset and rebuild. It is ridiculous, that what should essentially be a sport should come to something like this, but the long march of the history of the game is littered with examples of it. Vainglory and ego, two of the oldest human emotions in the book, will usually ensure that some of our football clubs will always be badly run unless corralled into order by an external body.

But Sheffield Wednesday have been saved, and it is to be hoped that the incoming Independent Football Regulator, who should be entering service any day now, will carry out its duties with the care and diligence for the game that it has promised over its lengthy manoeuvring into existence.

Now they can return to normal. A division lower than they were, but with that fresh break for which they’ve been hoping for so long. Sheffield Wednesday are quite clearly a long-term project. There’s a lot of damage to be undone. There’s a football club that needs to be dragged into the 21st century.

But the potential is massive. That’s been demonstrated in attendances, and particularly away from home. It’s only been a week since they filled out the away end at The Kassam Stadium for a 4-1 defeat to the also already relegated Oxford United.

And they’ve been through enough. The win against West Bromwich Albion was their first since September, and their first at home of the season in the league. Chansiri was a danger for years, and there were Sheffield Wednesday supporters sounding alarms over him for years, too.

A couple of seasons of recklessly bad spending, followed by years of trying to correct an increasingly listing ship until it became fundamentally uncontrollable. Administration came after months of the wages not being paid on time. It took administration for that to start happening at the club, this season.

The EFL will be a better place for having a healthy Sheffield Wednesday in it. Though there remain challenges to come - League One is going to be tough, next season - they’ve got that one really important feeling back that underpins what it means to support a football club. Hope. This has been absent from Sheffield Wednesday for a long time, and it’s important that it’s returned. The nightmare season is over. It’s time to wake up.

While calendars draw a strict line between decades, the truth of the matter is that what we come to see as different periods of time fade in and out rather than starting suddenly on the 1st January and ending on the 31st December. But this isn’t to say that, especially with the benefit of hindsight, we can’t see what’s coming.

Consider, for example, the stories that grab newspaper headlines throughout the early months of 1969. In March of that year alone, both Paul McCartney and John Lennon got married, The Kray twins were finally imprisoned, and the Victoria Line opens on the London Underground.

The first six months of that year feel like a portent of what’s to come. Rupert Murdoch buys the News of the World. The Beatles play the rooftop show which marks their final live appearance as a band. Both the QE2 and Concorde makes their maiden journeys. The UK voting age is reduced from 21 to 18, the Harrier Jump Jet is launched, and British troops arrive in Northern Ireland to ‘support’ the RUC, while Bernadette Devlin is elected to parliament.

Some of these changes are as cultural as anything else. Among the consumer products to go on sale for the first time throughout this period are the space hopper, the Raleigh Chopper, the Ford Capri and the Austin Maxi. That summer, humankind will land on the moon for the first time. And on the night before this broadcast the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest, which was held in Madrid, ended in a four-way tie between the UK (Lulu, with the almost-but-not-quite magnificently dreadful Boom-Bang-a-Bang), Spain, the Netherlands and France. The 1970s are just around the corner, and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it.

The Football World on the 30th March 1969

The times are also changing in the world of football. Matt Busby retired as the manager of Manchester United in the middle of January, and by the end of March it looks very much as though there’ll be a new name lifting the championship trophy at the end of the season. Going into the last weekend of the month, Leeds United are top of the First Division, six points clear of Liverpool, albeit having played a game more.

In the Second Division, meanwhile, there’s another bunch of upstarts leading the table, with Derby County three points clear of Middlesbrough at the top of the table and Crystal Palace in third place. In the Third Division, it’s Watford who lead the way, with Swindon Town in second place and Luton Town in third, but with all still to play for and three-quarters of the season played.

One of the cup competitions has already finished, while the other has reached its latter stages. The League Cup final, played at Wembley on the 15th March, ended in a huge surprise, with Swindon Town beating Arsenal 3-1. And the FA Cup finalists have been decided, with the first of the semi-finals having been played a week after the League Cup final and Manchester City booking their place at Wembley with a 1-0 against Everton at Villa Park.

The second semi-final between Leicester City and West Bromwich Albion would be played that weekend. Leicester won the match 1-0, and the BBC showed highlights of it after their weekly edition of Match of the Day the night before, which had featured Manchester City’s 3-1 win against Stoke City. Over on ITV, meanwhile, the weekly football shows weren’t on until the Sunday afternoon.

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This is, after all, a man who stood trial for racial abuse almost a decade and a half ago. And as if that wasn’t something that he deemed worthwhile of treating as a learning exercise, he’s even had a go at following the far-right grift pipeline through getting himself involved in NFTs, when they were the latest craze for fools who were easily parted from their money, and flogging CBD online.

Yet at the same time, you have to wonder over his rank stupidity, don’t you? This is a man who clearly believes that he’s entitled to manage a football club in the Premier League. Quite asides from the fact that the modern football club dressing room is clearly an extremely multi-cultural place - the current Chelsea first-team squad consists of twelve different nationalities, thirteen if you include the disgraced Myhailo Mudryk - what does his decision to publicly go down the “London has fallen” path in public do for his managerial chances?

I don’t really feel that there’s much of a need to express how abhorrent the view that he apparently enthusiastically shares is. That should be plainly obvious, even though there seems to be approximately 30% of the population of this country who’ll believe any old bullshit, so long as it’s racist.

But there’s an extra layer of rank imbecility, not to mention arrogance, about showing these sort of colours like this publicly. If you want a highly sought-after job that pays millions of pounds a year, it might be advisable to not show up on Instagram in public support of that wretched old dick Rupert Lowe, mightn’t it?

Even if we strip away all the rights and wrongs of being a massive racist - and we obviously, obviously shouldn’t - it doesn’t feel like the smartest career move that somebody in his position could make. Perhaps this, along with his recent interest in buying a League Two club, is an admission that it’s never going to happen.

Small wonder - pun only half-intended - that Dennis Wise, who was also big-upping Lowe’s opinion that “foreigners” should be banned from claiming benefits and that “migrants who are incapable of financially supporting themselves” should be deported, hasn’t been able to find work in England since being sacked by Newcastle United for being a terrible director of football, almost 17 years ago. Probably all those foreigners coming over here and taking your jobs, eh, Dennis? The irony of ‘deport all immigrants’ rhetoric coming from someone whose last job in football was in Italy is striking.

At least, we might console ourselves, Terry and Wise, the worst comedy double act on the circuit, are dim enough to have been unable to keep it quiet and reveal themselves to the watching world rather than successfully hoodwink us into believing that they’d genuinely changed in any way.

Terry hasn’t done anything as crass this time around as he did at the time of the Anton Ferdinand case, but that’s not really saying much. In short, his behaviour has been little short of the prospective football manager’s equivalent of winning a Darwin Award, by potentially removing himself from contention for future positions well in advance of them potentially becoming available.

But it’s also worth circling back to give a little more thought to that 2012 court case. Terry was acquitted of having called Ferdinand “fucking black cunt” during a match between Queens Park Rangers and Chelsea the previous year. He claimed that he was sarcastically repeating back words that he believed the QPR player had accused him of saying in an argument following a gesture made by Ferdinand.

The FA, who had a lower burden of proof that the court, issued a four-match ban and a £220,000 fine regardless, and Terry issued an apology for “the language [he] used in the game” and stated that it was “not acceptable on the football field or indeed in any walk of life.”

The matter seems to have ended there for John Terry, but it certainly didn’t for Anton Ferdinand, who was subjected to horrific racial abuse and received death threats for years after the case had ended. He hadn’t even realised what had happened until shown a video of it afterwards and would have preferred for the matter to be dealt with by the FA rather than in court, but it’s clear that it left a stain. Speaking to the Guardian about the case in 2020, he said:

“I was hurt and angry. People that haven’t had racial language shouted at them online or by another person won’t understand that and that’s why I made the documentary – to show the ripple effects. People at board level ain’t ever going to feel that. What they can do is open their minds and become understanding by listening to people who have felt it, and working closely with us.”

I strongly advise watching the 2019 documentary Anton Ferdinand: Football, Racism & Me, which is available on YouTube - see below - and tells the story of what happened at Loftus Road that day, and of the effects that it had on Anton Ferdinand for a long time afterwards.

It is very clear from watching the documentary that Ferdinand was quickly cast as the villain of the piece when he’d done nothing wrong, and that there were sections of the media that were very keen for the impression to take hold that he had lied, while the FA’s investigation seemed to treat him as the guilty party in all of this.

There was plenty of sympathy for Terry after the courtroom verdict. At least Michael Volpe OBE may have a better idea of the answer to the first question he asked in this piece, from September 2012. He hasn’t said anything about the recent revelations on his Twitter account, even though he has some strong opinions on far-right politics, these days.

(Note that the last two links there are to X.com, for those who wish to avoid those.)

This started almost 15 years ago, so it might have been reasonable to think that perhaps John Terry might have learned a thing or two from it. Since his retirement from playing, he’s had plenty of time during which he could have educated himself, had he wanted to. Instead, in 2026, at 45 years of age, he’s cheerleading for full fascism.

There is, it should be added, something mildly humorous about Terry’s desire to manage Chelsea. “I don’t feel I need to sell John Terry as a manager,” he said in February. “If someone needs to win football matches, I’m not sure you’re going to get anyone better.” Given the number of times that Chelsea have swapped managers in recent years, we might reasonably assume that they’ve given him consideration at some point or other and concluded that no, he’s probably not the right man for the job.

Terry’s response to this has been a bid to buy Colchester United, down in League Two, all of which raises the question of whether the incoming Independent Football Regulator should be accepting club owners who’ve previously been charged by the FA themselves with “abusive and/or insulting words and/or behaviour" which "included a reference to the ethnic origin and/or colour and/or race of [Anton] Ferdinand.”

Of course, knowing the way that football works, there’s no way that these sort of indiscretions would be taken into consideration in assessing his suitability for any position, whether as a manager or as a club owner. After all, it’s been less than three years since idiot provocateur, libeller and wife-beater Joey Barton was managing an EFL club, while noted tin-foil hat enjoyer Matthew Le Tissier has been quietly shuffled into an advisory position at Southampton, despite the fact that he spends his days arguing with Elon Musk’s AI over chemtrails.

But we are where we are. In 2026, far-right politics have been normalised to such an extent that centre-right politics effectively don’t even exist any more. If he wanted one badly enough, John Terry probably was always likely to be able to find a managerial position within the professional game in England, so long as he could temper his entitlement over the size of the club that he’d be managing. As things stand, League Two will have to do him, for now.

There are certainly enough club owners who would turn a blind eye to his political views, and not-implausibly a fair few who’d agree them. There may be already. It’s just that they have enough of a sense of professional self-preservation to keep them to themselves.

John Terry wasn’t even smart enough to do that, and that’s why the likelihood of him ever managing a big club such as Chelsea is probably something that we can still consider slim to non-existent, hence his move for Colchester. He doesn’t seem to have learned a thing, and his views should make him persona non grata within the professional game. That he still probably isn’t says something about both football and the political climate of the 2020s.

As things stand right now, the Scottish Premiership title race has turned into a three-horse race. The presence of Celtic and Rangers in it is absolutely no surprise whatsoever, but they’re currently occupying second and third places, with Heart of Midlothian three points clear at the top.

Last Sunday brought not inconsiderable drama, with Hearts away to Hibernian in an Edinburgh derby and Rangers at home to fourth-placed Motherwell, who themselves needed a win to maintain their push for a spot in next season’s Europa League.

It turned out to be a dramatic afternoon. By half-time, Rangers were 2-0 down, but Hearts were also losing 1-0 in their match too, despite Hibs having been reduced to ten players after just 14 minutes. But three minutes into the second half, Hibs had a second player dismissed.

It turned out to be an undulating second 45 minutes. At Ibrox, Rangers pulled the score back to 2-2, but there turned out to be high drama at both games. At Easter Road, an own goal pulled Hearts level, and they then snatched the lead with four minutes to play, but then Rangers conceded in the last minute to give Motherwell an unlikely-looking 3-2 win.

All of this leaves Hearts three points clear of Celtic at the top of the SPFL table with four games left to play, with Rangers now four points off the top of the table, although with Rangers have the best goal difference of the three.

The final four games of the season almost seem to have been designed to ratchet up the tension for Hearts. On Monday 4th May they’re at home to Rangers at Tynecastle. They then have to travel to Motherwell themselves the following Saturday. They follow this up with a home match against Falkirk before playing at home to Celtic on the 16th May in what could be a winner-takes-all shootout for the League title.

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At this point in the conversation, Hearts fans could be forgiven for jumping under the nearest table with their hands over their ears, because this extraordinary end-of-season comes on the 40th anniversary of one of the most heartbreaking ends to a football season that could be imagined.

Celtic and Rangers have held a duopoly over Scottish club football for decades, but the first half of the 1980s was a bad time for both of them. Over the six seasons from 1979-80 to 1984-85, Rangers didn’t win the League at all, and Celtic could ‘only’ manage it twice, with Aberdeen winning it three times and Dundee United winning it once.

The Scottish public was, therefore, quite used to the idea of the Old Firm being challenged and beaten by others by the start of the 1985-86 season. But if there was to be a serious challenger to the Glasgow giants, it was expected to come from Aberdeen or Dundee United rather than Edinburgh.

Hearts hadn’t had a particularly easy first half of decade either. They’d spent the years between 1977 and 1982 bouncing between the top two divisions, a a run which only ended when they failed to get promotion straight back in 1982.

They managed to get back up a year later, and this time they managed to keep their heads above water, finishing 5th and 7th in a ten-team division in 1984 and 1985 respectively. The upswing had coincided with their 1981 takeover, which put the club under the ownership of property developer Wallace Mercer, who paid £265,000 to buy the club. (Mercer would end up as something of a villain in the Hearts story himself, following his attempts to merge Hearts and Hibs in 1990.)

While Hearts’ fortunes had definitely improved under Mercer’s ownership, there was little indication that they could launch a bid to usurp the Big Two Plus Two at the top of the table. And this seemed borne out by their early season results. They kicked off their season with a creditable 1-1 home draw against Celtic, but then lost their next match 6-2 at Falkirk. By the time they’d played eight matches, they’d lost five of them.

But perhaps the clues were there. On top of that draw with Celtic, they only won two of those opening eight fixtures, but those wins came in an Edinburgh derby with Hibs and against Dundee United, who’d won the league in 1983 and had finished in the top three in each of the last three seasons.

The switch truly flicked on the 12th October, when they went to Celtic Park and won 1-0. It was the start of an unbeaten run that would last until almost the end of the season. The full extent of that run was 27 league matches, and it included further stunning results.

Their other two matches against Celtic both ended in 1-1 draws, meaning that they went unbeaten against them in four league matches throughout the season, and although they’d lost 3-1 to Rangers at the end of August during that early-season poor run, they beat them in all three of their remaining fixtures afterwards.

The run took them all the way to the last day of the season, and the odds were very much in their favour. Rangers had fallen away to 5th place in the table. The champions, Aberdeen, had dropped to fourth, in no small part on account of the semi-loss of manager Alex Ferguson for the Scotland job following the sudden death of Jock Stein in October 1985. Dundee United were third, but out of contention for the league title.

That left Celtic. Going into the final weekend, Hearts led the table by two points, and it is somewhat surprising to be reminded of the fact that Scotland didn’t adopt three points for a win until 1994. Celtic were at home to 7th-placed St Mirren, while Hearts had a trip to 5th placed Dundee.

This was not an easy fixture. Dundee were 6th in the table, but knew that a win could put them 5th and qualify them for the following season’s UEFA Cup, if Rangers dropped points in their home game against Motherwell. But Hearts had a built-in buffer in the event that things went wrong for them at Dens Park. A point there would be enough for the league title, but even if they lost their match they were four goals better off in terms of goal difference.

So on Saturday 3rd May at 3pm, everybody went about their business. St Mirren vs Celtic at Love Street, and Dundee vs Hearts at Dens Park. 12,000 Hearts fans made the trip north-east for their match. The league title was so close they could practically smell it.

It was, unsurprisingly, a tense first half at Dens Park. Hearts, shooting towards their own supporters, might have had a penalty kick when Sandy Clark was upended while trying to cut inside the penalty area from from the goal-line, but nothing was given. They had the better of the play, but chances were few on the ground and by half-time the score was still goalless.

During the half-time break, though, came an announcement over the public address system which changed the atmosphere around Dens Park. Celtic were leading St Mirren 4-0. Hearts’ goal difference advantage had evaporated over the course of 45 minutes. The very strong likelihood was that they now needed to take a point from this match to lift the title.

The second half continued very much as the first had ended, with few opportunities at either end and the crowd growing increasingly restless. And just after an hour had been played, the Dundee manager Archie Knox made what would turn out to be one of the most famous substitutions in the entire history of Scottish football, when he withdrew full-back Tosh McKinlay in favour of Albert Kidd.

There was little in Kidd’s history to suggest that he might change the face of the season and become a legendary name. Born in Dundee, he’d started his career with Brechin City before moving on to play for Arbroath and Motherwell before signing for his hometown team in 1983. He had made only 11 appearances that season, seven of which were as a substitute, and he’d only scored 10 goals in 114 league appearances for them.

With the extra attacker, Dundee were knocking harder and harder, and the Hearts goalkeeper Henry Smith had to pull off one outstanding save to keep the score at 0-0. But the hammer fell with seven minutes to play. A corner from the right headed down for Kidd to lash the ball into the roof of the goal to give Dundee the lead. Celtic were 5-0 up at St Mirren by this point, so goal difference wouldn’t be the deciding factor, as Celtic had a better goals scored record.

Hearts needed a goal, and their tactical policy of containment changed immediately as they poured players forward in search of an equaliser. But they couldn’t work the ball out of midfield, and with a minute to play Kidd broke for Dundee, played a tidy one-two, and drove the ball low past Smith to complete Hearts’ misery. These two goals were the only league goals he scored all season.

The Scottish Premier League title was on its way to Celtic Park, again. Having been unbeaten in the League since the 28th September, it had taken just six minutes for all that hard work to completely implode. There was still an opportunity for some form of redemption a week later in the Scottish Cup final against Aberdeen but, shattered by the Dens Park disaster of a week earlier, they were comfortably beaten, 3-0. But none of this ended up making any difference to Dundee, either, since Rangers beat Motherwell 2-0 on the final day to secure 5th place on and a berth in the UEFA Cup for the following season.

This match turned out to be Albert Kidd’s last for Dundee, though he did play a role in the following season’s championship race as well. On the penultimate Saturday of the 1986-87 season, Falkirk went to Celtic needing a win to secure their Premier Division status and with Celtic needing a win to have any chance of catching a rejuvenated Rangers at the top of the table. Kidd didn’t score that day, but he did come on as a second half substitute and Falkirk won the match 2-1, ensuring that the league title went to Ibrox for the first time since 1978.

27 matches unbeaten, it turned out, wasn’t enough, and although Hearts have been the runners-up three times since, they haven’t come that close again. Ironically, the last time that they did finish second was in 2006, the 20th anniversary of what Celtic (and Hibs) fans came to call “Albert Kidd Day.”

And as those final four games of the season come into view, a different version of this tale is playing out again. No club other than Celtic or Rangers have been the champions of Scotland since Aberdeen in 1985, and this current 41-year streak has blown away the previous longest run of 28 years, which lasted from Third Lanark winning it in 1904 to Motherwell winning it in 1932.

Hearts may not be sitting top of the table on Albert Kidd Day this year, since Celtic play a day earlier, but as they found out forty years ago, it doesn’t matter who leads the table with three or four matches to play. The only result that counts is where everybody stands by the time all 38 league matches have been played, and there are still three teams who could win it. Hearts have an incredible opportunity to lay that ghost to rest next month, but even with so few matches of their season left to play, there may well be more plot twists before the outcome of the 2025-26 SPFL title is decided.