On Saturday, the season for Europe’s major leagues will come to a close with the Champions League final taking place in Kyiv, Ukraine. It will be between Real Madrid, seeking their 13th Champions League title, and Liverpool, seeking their 6th. The build-up to the final has been somewhat overshadowed by fans facing ticketing and logistical problems which have meant that what should be a happy, enjoyable occasion has turned into a stressful and expensive trip for many. Sadly, relatively low ticket allocations for fans at UEFA finals has become par for the course, with both sets of fans only receiving about 16000 each in a stadium that holds over 70,000, but the real problems for this final have been transport and accommodation. Local hotels have well and truly cashed in on the event, by not only raising their prices to exorbitant rates. Rooms that were $25 per night are now going for closer to $2500 per night. People who had booked rooms at the lower rates before the semi-finals had been played have found their bookings has been cancelled and their rooms have been re-sold for more money. Despite this, most of the rooms have been sold; some to ticketless fans, many, many more to UEFA’s battalion of sponsors and officials, which means that there are people in possession of tickets who can’t find accommodation. It should be noted that many Kyiv residents have been horrified by the price gouging and are appalled that it could lead people to think of Ukrainians as exploitative, have been kind enough to invite fans to stay in their own homes, but for people attending the game to be reliant on the generosity of complete strangers is a situation that should never have been allowed to happen. That of course assumes fans can get there in the first place. Flights have been chartered, but there are only limited slots available for chartered flights at Kyiv’s airports; as I’m writing this, Mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson and Mayor of Kyiv, and former World Heavyweight Champion, Vitaly Klitschko are trying to find a solution to help the 1000 Liverpool fans who’ve had their chartered flights cancelled due to a lack of landing spots in Kyiv. Real Madrid have returned around 1000 tickets because their fans can’t get there, Liverpool may end up doing the same. Other fans have found creative ways to get there; some have flown to neighbouring countries and are taking colossal train journeys, renting motor homes are chartering buses to get them there and back. Now to the game itself. I’m probably jinxing it by writing this, but this has the potential to be a truly great final. Real Madrid will be the clear favourites; they come into this game looking for their third successive Champions League title, have better players than Liverpool and a ton more experience. But, Liverpool will be happy to be the underdogs. Had you asked them earlier in the season. Most Liverpool fans were just happy to see them back in the Champions League and would have settled for getting out of the group stages. What Liverpool lack in experience- they have an average age of 24, they make up for in enthusiasm. What they lack in individual playmaking flair, they make up for in having a system that creates a lot of chances. Having been able to see both teams in person this season, I think that they are far more equal than people may think. Both teams have the same weaknesses and inconsistencies as each other, which will mean that neither side will be afraid of the other and each will have worked out several ways they can win. Finals can often be quite tight and cagey games, I think this one will be much more flowing and open (may have jinxed it again). Most Liverpool games descend into barely-organised chaos at some stage, and this game will probably be the same. Real Madrid will be looking to attack and Liverpool don’t have the players to be able to sit back and defend. Even though Liverpool’s defence is far better than it’s given credit for, Real Madrid will be confident that they will get chances. They will probably aim to go after Liverpool’s 19-year-old right-back Trent Alexander-Arnold, who had his first really shaky game since breaking into the Liverpool team in the semi-final second leg in Rome, betting that his inexperience may give them a way in. Also, Real Madrid will know that Dejan Lovren can be extremely error-prone at times and will look to capitalise. On the other hand, Liverpool will be equally confident that their pressing game, superior pace and rapid counter-attacks will see them have a lot of the ball in the final third of the pitch and that the guile of Roberto Firmino and the blistering pace of Sadio Mane and Mo Salah will see them have chances to score. In the game I saw Real Madrid in a few months back, they lost to a goal on exactly the sort of counter-attack that Liverpool specialise in. For Liverpool to win, they probably need to be leading at half-time. Liverpool’s Champions League run has largely been due to the blistering starts they have made in games that has blown teams away. Liverpool play with their defence stepping up and compressing the pitch, and then the midfield and attack pressing to win the ball and then going forward in waves. If Real Madrid can figure out how to stop that, or pass around it, then they can stop Liverpool. If the game comes down to substitutions, then Real Madrid will probably win as they have far better players to bring on than Liverpool do. Liverpool’s decision to have a small squad, coupled with a few injuries means that they have extremely limited options in terms of making substitutions to change the game. If anything happens to one of the front three, they don’t have anyone who can provide anywhere near the same attacking threat. In the semi-finals and for the last few games of the season Liverpool played the midfield trio of James Milner, Jordan Henderson and Georginio Wijnaldum in every game, with no midfielders on the bench because they had no more midfielders available to use. Liverpool’s midfield options have improved due to Adam Lallana and possibly Emre Can being back from injury, but even so their bench contains nowhere near the quality of the Madrid one. Similarly, Madrid’s superior experience will come into play if they are in front coming into the later stages of the game. They know how to see games like this out. Liverpool’s worst moments in the Champions League this season is when they have been caught in two minds between carrying on attacking and sitting back to defend, so if Liverpool have a narrow lead in the late stages of the game, Real Madrid will still fancy their chances. I don’t think anyone will pretend that this year’s Champions League finals contains the best two teams in Europe. I also don’t think anyone can deny that Real Madrid have the better players. But, Liverpool will be quietly confident their team matches up against Real Madrid’s weaknesses well and Liverpool have found ways to overcome more talented teams than them before. Either way, this game has the potential to be a classic.

Today, Glasgow Rangers ended their near season-long search for a manager by appointing former Liverpool and LA Galaxy player Steven Gerrard on a four-year contract, which will begin at the end of this season. Gerrard’s only coaching experience to date is as coach of Liverpool’s under-18, where he did a solid job. Gerrard has announced that his assistant will be former Scotland midfielder Gary McAllister and he will also be joined by fellow Liverpool academy coach Michael Beale. At first glance, this seems like a great move for all concerned. Scottish football gets a big name in football coming to coach in its league; which in turn will boost the profile of the Scottish game and boost TV ratings. Rangers get a whole lot more attention from outside of Scotland and potentially become a more attractive proposition to new signings. Gerrard gets his first go at football management in the rare position of coming to a massive club, but doing so in almost unheard of circumstances, as nobody necessarily expects him to come and start winning trophies straight away. If he can establish Rangers as the second-best team in the Scottish Premiership ahead of Aberdeen and Hibernian, maybe beat Celtic in a game or two and goes deep in the two cup competitions and takes Rangers further in Europe than the disastrous campaign this season, that’ll be seen as a job well done. So, this is a no-brainer, right? Well, no. This is actually a massive risk by both Rangers and Gerrard. Make no mistake about it, Rangers are a gigantic football club. They have a vast fanbase-they average close to 50,000 fans every game- and facilities that are the envy of most clubs. But, they are also something of an empty shell of a club. For all of the shiny exterior, they are completely hollow inside. This is a club that is suffering on and off the pitch. This season Rangers have managed to go out of European football in July after blowing a 1-0 first leg lead to lose 2-0 Progres Nederkorn of Luxembourg, a team that not only had never won a European game before, but had only ever scored one European goal. That defeat was the beginning of the end for manager Pedro Caixinha, who was pictured trying to appease fans while being stood in a shrub. When Caixinha was fired in October, Rangers failed to find a replacement and appointed former Reading defender Graham Murty as Caretaker manager. Rangers have stuttered ever since. The job was just too big for Murty, who after two recent humiliations to arch-rivals Celtic, was somewhat unfairly fired. With one game left at the time of writing, Rangers could finish as high as second or as low as fourth. So not only will Gerrard will take over a team that isn’t pulling up trees, he’ll also be taking over a dysfunctional group of players that are utterly demoralised and even worse, are at each other’s throats. The 4-0 Scottish Cup semi-final defeat to Celtic saw midfielder Andy Halliday swear at a Rangers fan after being substituted, then Greg Docherty and Alfredo Morelos had to be pulled apart from each other in the tunnel after the game. Then, in the dressing room following the game, veteran striker Kenny Miller and club captain Lee Wallace got into such a furious confrontation with Murty they’ve both been suspended by the club and aren’t expected to ever play for Rangers again. So, Gerrard’s first job will be to restore some order to the chaos that has been the Rangers dressing room and then start to help the team regain their confidence. It seems evident that new signings are needed; though the already announced signing of Scott Arfield from Burnley is a good one. The question is do Rangers have the means to do so? If you remember, back in 2012, following some financial mismanagement that was so serious it led to criminal charges being laid at former owner Craig Whyte, who was acquitted, Rangers went bankrupt and, depending on your point of view, they either restarted back in the bottom division of Scottish football, or an entirely new team that bears a strong resemblance to Rangers did. Ever since, Rangers have bounced from financial crisis to financial crisis. They have been losing around £7m per year and are now completely reliant on loans from club directors to keep going. A lot of Rangers fans believe the club is in exactly the same position they were in when they went bankrupt. A few months ago, betting was suspended on Rangers being relegated for financial problems. While all of this has been happening, Celtic have not only established themselves as the dominant force in Scottish football- they’ve just won their seventh successive title- but are now head and shoulders above the rest financially largely thanks to some smart work in the transfer market, where they’ve managed to buy players cheaply then sell them on for a large profit. The gap between them and the rest is massive. If Steven Gerrard is serious about wanting a career in football coaching, then he’s taking a serious risk in starting at a club with so many unknowns. I’m sure he wouldn’t have taken the job had he not been given guarantees about the club’s finances; Gerrard turned down the job at MK Dons because he wasn’t convinced by what he saw. The wrongly held belief in England is that the Scottish Premiership is an ‘easy’ league, and therefore winning it is no great achievement. The average English fan, who will probably know nothing about the current realities of Rangers, will be expecting Gerrard to be winning titles immediately. If he doesn’t win a title at Rangers, and at this moment that is a very remote possibility, Gerrard will unfairly be tarred with the “couldn’t even win a title in Scotland” brush and that may be the end of his coaching career before it’s really begun. All coaches have to start somewhere. Rangers have decided that Gerrard’s lack of experience doesn’t matter. Maybe they’re right. Maybe Steven Gerrard will galvanise Rangers and then go on to have a coaching career as glittering as his playing career was. But, there’s an equal chance that this could blow up in either of their faces. Rangers are taking a chance on a completely unproven coach rather than a coach with a track record of steering a team through some troubled times. Gerrard is taking a risk on a club that has been a basket case for years and one that could stop his career at the first hurdle. Either way, this appointment is nowhere near the no-brainer that people may think it is.

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Usually, when there’s investment in a football club, especially a lower league club it’s a mundane announcement. It’s usually a local businessperson or a company nobody’s ever heard of before who have decided to invest. It’s not usually that notable. So, last week when National League side Wrexham AFC announced that talks had progressed with two potential investors to the point where they could be named, very few people would’ve predicted that those two investors would be Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. It’s still early days, and only a potential investment. We don’t know what the size of the investment is and how much of a stake they are looking to take in the club. If it goes through, they will join other celebrity investors in English football like Lebron James (Liverpool) and Mindy Kaling (Swansea). What’s made Deadpool and Mac want to buy a stake in a football club at all is anyone’s guess; what possessed them to want to buy into a fifth-tier club is even more of a head scratcher (for example, Wigan Athletic are desperately looking for a new owner and are available for $5m), unless there’s some kind of personal connection that’s currently unknown. But instead they’re investing their money into a team that have been out of the Football League for 12 years, who earned the lowest league position in their history last season, and come from a town that has some of the worst depravation in the UK. Formed in October 1864, Wrexham AFC are the oldest professional club in Wales, and are the third oldest professional club in the world (they may be the second oldest, as Stoke City’s foundation date is disputed). To put that into perspective, Wrexham were formed before Nevada was a U.S. state. Wrexham play at the Racecourse Ground, which is the oldest international ground still in use today as it has hosted Wales games since 1877. It doesn’t host that many games anymore, but when Wales have a lower-profile friendly they are willing to play outside of Cardiff, they play at Wrexham. Wrexham have played in the English league system since 1921 for the simple reason that there wasn’t a Welsh league until 1992 (for the same reason Cardiff City, Swansea City, Newport County and Merthyr Tydfil play in the English leagues) and they were so established in the English leagues they chose to stay. Unlike all the other Welsh teams playing in England, Wrexham is in North Wales, and lies close to the border with England. As a consequence, Wrexham have much more of a rivalry with the English sides nearby than with their fellow Welsh sides. This includes a ferocious one with Chester, a city on the England-Wales border a few miles away. Wrexham’s performance in the English leagues was always solid yet unspectacular. The highest they got was finishing 15th in what is now the Championship, where they spent four seasons in the late 70s and early 80s. However, Wrexham were best known for their exploits in European football. A quirk in the rules meant that they participated in both the FA Cup and Welsh Cup every season until 1996. As they were one of the few professional teams in Wales, Wrexham won the cup regularly (they’ve won it 23 times) and as a result, qualified to play in the European Cup Winners Cup 8 times before UEFA ruled that the Welsh clubs playing in England can only play in Europe by qualifying through English competitions. In the 1984/85 season, with Wrexham being in the bottom division of English football, they pulled off a huge upset by knocking out Portuguese giants Porto in the Cup Winners Cup. They won the first leg in Wrexham 1-0, then came back from being 3-0 down in Porto to lose 4-3 on the night but got through on away goals. Wrexham floated along in the bottom two divisions of England for years before financial problems hit them in the early 00s. At one point the owner tried to evict Wrexham from the Racecourse Ground so he could sell the land to property developers. They later suffered the ignominy of being the first club to be deducted points for going into administration and were saved from liquidation by a late takeover. The off-field problems spread to problems on the pitch and in 2008, Wrexham were relegated from League Two into the National League, where they have remained ever since. Wrexham have since become the living embodiment of how difficult a league the National League can be to get out of, as they have been close to returning The club continued to struggle financially, and were taken over by a supporters trust in 2011, making Wrexham one of the few clubs that are supporter owned. It’s not been an entirely successful move, as the team have struggled on the pitch, and have never really looked like being able to earn promotion back to the league. Last season, Wrexham had a torrid time on the pitch, and were facing the prospect of being relegated into the regional divisions of the National League. Covid ended the season prematurely, and possibly saved the club from relegation, but Wrexham still finished in a record low position. Reynolds’ and McElhenney’s interest couldn’t come at a better time for Wrexham. Wrexham, like all lower and non-league clubs will be facing an uncertain future as rising Covid-19 levels in the UK have meant that plans to begin allowing spectators at matches have had to be put on hold. Clubs at that level depend on the gate money, and there will be a lot of clubs who are in desperate need of a financial boost The next stage will be for Reynolds and McElhenney to put forward their vision for the club at a Special General Meeting and the Supporters Trust will decide on whether to accept their investment. The initial plans were given 97.5% approval by the trust last week, so it seems like there’s a very strong possibility that this deal will go through,

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One thing you often hear when fans talk about their team, is the idea of identity, or the lack of it. They mean the defining characteristics of a particular club, manager or set of players. That identity is different for different teams and can change all the time. For some clubs, that identity is woven into its fabric and always remains constant no matter what goes on around it. The most famous example is Athletic Bilbao whose Basque identity is so important to them that they have a self-imposed unofficial policy of only signing players who are from the Basque country. Another club who had a clear identity was Glasgow-based Scottish League Two club Queen’s Park. They were notable for two things. That they played at Hampden Park, the stadium that’s used by Scotland and one of the stadiums that’s regularly used by UEFA. The other was that they have gone their entire 152-year history retaining their amateur status. But now both are about to change. Queen’s Park will leave Hampden at the end of this season, and yesterday, its members voted to allow players to be paid for the first time in the history of the club. Queen’s Park were formed in 1867, which makes them the oldest football club in the world outside of England and Wales. Their club motto is Ludere Causa Ludendi, meaning ‘to play for the sake of playing’, which reflected their amateur status. Queen’s Park are an incredibly important club in the history of football. When they formed, football was actually a prohibited activity in Scotland thanks to a law from 1424, and was played under weird sets of rules that each team could set. It was Queen’s Park that established the association rules from England as the dominant code in Scotland, and later into Ireland. They organised and provided the entire Scotland team for the first ever international game v England in 1872, and the reason that Scotland today play in dark blue shirts is because that was the colours of Queen’s Park back then (they adopted the black and white hoops they play in now a few years later). The reason we have half-time, free-kicks after fouls and a crossbar on the goals is because they all were innovations introduced to the game by Queen’s Park. Passing the ball to teammates was a radical idea introduced to the game by Queens Park and replaced the old kick-and-rush style of play common at the time. Queen’s Park were one of the eight founder members of the Scottish Football Association (SFA) and, alongside Kilmarnock, are the only ones still in the Scottish League system today. Initially, they were incredibly successful. They won the inaugural Scottish Cup in 1874, and won it another nine times in the next 20 years. They were invited to play in the English FA Cup on several occasions and made it to the final twice. But, as with the other amateur clubs of the time, Queen’s Park couldn’t keep up with the advent of professionalism and started to fall behind. They resisted joining the Scottish Football League for 10 years, until they found arranging fixtures too difficult and joined in 1900. For most of that time, they’ve been in the lower divisions of Scotland and are currently in Scottish League Two, the bottom division in the Scottish Leagues. That’s still an incredible achievement as for all of that time, they’ve remained amateur, paying players nothing more than their expenses. That amateur status though means that the club has always been vulnerable to losing their players for nothing, as they are free to leave should they get offered professional contracts. In the bottom two divisions of the Scottish League, and the Highland and Lowland League below that, virtually every club is semi-professional and operates on a part-time basis. Players will have day jobs, or be in full-time education, but will be paid to train and to play football, with the amounts varying from about £50 ($65) a week to the best players, or former big names, getting more like £500 a week, which can add up to a nice sum of money on top of a regular job. Queen’s Park couldn’t compete financially with other clubs, but had one big thing in their favour, which was that Queens Park’s home stadium is, for the moment, Hampden Park, the stadium used by the Scottish national team. Queen’s Park have played at Hampden Park since they had it built in 1903 (it’s the third stadium they’ve played in called Hampden Park!) and it has been the home of the Scotland national team for years. While they may not have been able to pay wages, the chance to play league football at an iconic stadium every other week was a carrot Queen’s Park could dangle in front of prospective signings. That’s all about to change. The SFA’s 20-year lease on using Hampden runs out in 2020, and they indicated they weren’t willing to renew it. The SFA dangled the idea of moving Scotland games out of Hampden to share between Ibrox or Celtic Park in Glasgow or to Murrayfield, the Scottish rugby union stadium in Edinburgh. This left Queen’s Park with a problem. They rely on the money from the Scotland games, and were faced with the prospect of having a massive stadium that they couldn’t pay for and, had Scotland left, they would have had to pay back a huge amount of government funding they had received. The SFA knew they had Queen’s Park over a barrel and following some fractious negotiations, with Queen’s Park accusing the SFA of lowballing them, including an offer for £1, Queens Park eventually agreed a sale of Hampden Park to the SFA for £5.1m, with the SFA taking on all the liabilities of the stadium. From next season, Queen’s Park will play at Lesser Hampden, a small stadium next to Hampden Park that has been used to host youth team games and will spend the money from the sale in renovating that. There was always something a bit daft about a club that struggles to get 600 fans for a game playing in a stadium that holds 52,000, but it still seems a shame that they have to leave the place they’ve called home for so long. Queen’s Park do manage to entice players away from other clubs, but for the most part they rely heavily on their excellent academy to produce players for them. Queen’s Park has produced Liverpool player and current Scotland captain Andy Robertson, as well as his fellow current Scottish internationals Lawrence Shankland and Barry Douglas. Sir Alex Ferguson started his playing career there too. However, there was a growing sense that things couldn’t continue as they were. A few years ago, the Scottish League, the SPFL, introduced promotion and relegation to the league. This was designed in part to prevent teams who were consistently terrible from being allowed to fail season after season without any consequence, but also to give an incentive to the ambitious teams from the Highland and Lowland Leagues that sit below Scottish League Two on the football pyramid to keep going. At the end of the season, the Highland and Lowland League champions play each other, with the winner taking on the team that finished bottom of League Two for their league spot for the next season. That’s a prospect that is frightening to Queen’s Park. Their amateur status means they are always in danger of having their players picked off, and they know that one bad season could see them out of the league. There would be no guarantee of getting back in either; the Lowland League contains some wealthy, ambitious sides and relegated teams have found it tough. East Stirlingshire haven’t looked like coming back since being relegated, and Berwick Rangers, who were relegated from League Two last season have had a torrid time. The straw that seems to have broken the camel’s back was the loss last summer of four players that had come through the Queen’s Park academy and were part of the team that reached the semi-final of the Scottish Youth Cup. Those players, who likely would’ve been in the first team this season, were offered professional contracts and left, and the amateur status of Queen’s Park meant that they received nothing to show for all of the time and expense they’d spent developing those players. That, coupled with the fact that they missed out on some signings last summer to teams in the Lowland League because they couldn’t even offer them a modest contract, meant that the board called a meeting of the club’s members to discuss allowing them to pay their players. They needed 75% to agree; in the end over 90% did. Club president Gerry Crawley said “The committee of the club plotted a course to try to defend ourselves against the threats of other ambitious clubs around about us wishing to become a senior league club "We are keen to arm ourselves to fend that off and progress ourselves. It was head against heart. The heart of a lot of the membership would be we really don't want to do this, but we have to do it." This was a brave move, but probably the right move to make. Without a change, Queen’s Park would have faced the prospect of losing one of the things that made them attractive to other players without solving any of their other problems. Now, they can attract other players. They can receive fees for the players they develop. They can look to a brighter future away from Hampden Park. One of the members put it best saying, “A huge cheer went up when the results were delivered. In a perfect world we would have stayed amateur. However, our world has changed”

Shame to end on a note of unresolved drama

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