Shane Richmond

Anyone who has followed English football closely in recent years will have nodded along grimly with last night’s Panorama [available on iPlayer for the next 12 months, it seems], which examined the game’s worrying reliance on debt.
There was little that was new but a few nuggets made the programme worth watching. Reporter John Sweeney focused [...]

It’s time for my annual moan about the Premier League and how it’s killing English football. There are a variety of approaches one can take to make this case. Anyone who prefers the financial approach would be advised to read David Conn’s The Beautiful Game?, which I wrote about last year at 26 Books. I [...]

Well I expected him to get sacked but not quite that quickly. Like Nich Starling I think it was the right decision but made at a strange time. It’s as if the board spent the week unsure whether to be patient or give in to their anger after the first result. They made it as [...]

Last season, Norwich City were relegated to the third tier of English football for the first time in 50 years. Yesterday, in the first match of the season, Bryan Gunn’s team managed to make a bad situation worse. They were beaten 7-1 by Colchester, the worst home defeat in the club’s 107-year history.
Back in May, [...]

From David Conn in the Guardian comes a good article about what makes Barcelona such a great club: they are owned by their supporters.
Alfons Godall, Barcelona’s vice president, puts it perfectly: “We are free. We do not depend on a Mr Abramovich. We want to be successful but also to have meaning, social values. I [...]

Norwich City were relegated yesterday, falling into the third tier of English football for the first time in almost 50 years. It was a sad day for supporters of the club but the match itself was just a formality. The club has been heading for relegation for months and our fate was sealed by the [...]

It occurs to me that there are two likely responses to Sunday’s post about the state of modern football. First, that the Big Four have always dominated football. Second, that each period in football’s history has been dominated by a small number of clubs, even if they aren’t the same ones as today.
I can check [...]

Last year was an awful year for the rulers of English football. Only one of the Big Four – Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool – won a major English trophy. Portsmouth won the FA Cup and Tottenham won the League Cup. Fortunately, Manchester United won the Premier League title, heading off a dangerous outbreak [...]

I watched Eastern Promises last night, David Cronenberg’s film about the Russian mafia in London. It’s generally excellent, with good performances from Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts and a strong script from Steven Knight, who wrote Dirty Pretty Things – another good film about the hidden side of immigrant London.
However, one moment in Eastern Promises [...]

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know I frequently bang on about the pointlessness of the Premier League. David Walsh, in today’s Sunday Times, points out that Chelsea now have so much depth in their squad that their reserves are good enough to thrash almost any top flight side:
“What has become [...]