spellingandgrammarchecker
As a non-footie fan, I have a question.
I was looking at sports news on the telly a week or so ago, pressed 'select' when I shouldn't have, and ended up on the footie pages.
My question is, where here Celtic gone?
They don't seem to be in the Premier Scottish division.
Have the BBC facked their page up, or are my eyes bad?
And after a quick scan of division tables, I noticed that in the Highland League, a team remain unbeaten, at this late stage of the season

Thank you for the many responses. I looked for myself in the end. It seems that as I saw Rangers I thought I was reading the Premier League.

Now, a new question for you all to ignore. Why are Rangers not in the Premier League any more, are they that bad these days?

And after a quick scan of division tables, I noticed that in the Highland League, a team remain unbeaten, at this late stage of the season

That was correct.

Brora Rangers are still unbeaten after 34 matches.

Spot on Slippy ,wasn't long ago that he forgot he had brought his daughter to the pub with him ..

West Ham will be moving into the Olympic Stadium next year.

It will cost 200m + to convert it into a football stadium with 54,000 seats, including 5000 corporate seats for the Prawn Sandwich Brigade. Nearly all of this will come from the taxpayer including 40m from Newham Council who preside over one of the poorest boroughs in the UK.

West ham's contribution will be 15m plus a "rent" of 2.5m a year. They will also get to keep the proceeds of the sale of Upton Park, valued at 71m in 2013. So they get a state of the art stadium for 2.5m a year and 56m+ in their back pocket.

The lucky lottery winners then are Baroness Karren Brady of Knightsbridge CBE and her employers, Messrs. Gold and Sullivan the well known pornographer spivs.

As it happens they are big pals with a certain George Osborne, David Cameron and Boris Johnson. So he can hardly be forgiven if he's got a claret and blue-tinged wet dream happening that's at the very forefront of his mind at present.

Cutbacks? Austerity? Well, it depends who you are..............and who you know.

Feck knows why they have to spend £200m converting it. I visited the Munich stadium recently and that did a decent enough job for Olympics and two football teams without any significant conversion.

Olympiastadion is a stadium located in Munich, Germany. Situated at the heart of the Olympiapark München in northern Munich, the stadium was built as the main venue for the 1972 Summer Olympics.

With an original capacity of 80,000, the stadium also hosted many major football matches including the 1974 World Cup Final and the Euro '88 Final. It hosted the European Cup Finals of 1979, 1993 and 1997. Its current capacity is 69,250.[1]

Until the construction of the Allianz Arena for the 2006 World Cup, the stadium was home to Bayern Munich and TSV 1860 Munich.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3056482/West-Ham-applauded-giving-little-fans-not-castigated.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490

Ever wondered how German football clubs afford cheap tickets? Easy. They do it the West Ham way. When the Allianz Arena in Munich was developed for the 2006 World Cup, the city and state incurred costs of over £150million to improve local infrastructure.

The redevelopment of the country’s Olympic Stadium came in at close to £180m — handy for the occupants, Hertha Berlin. Fortuna Dusseldorf inherited a stadium built for £200m; RB Leipzig’s arena was paid for by a combination of government and city at a cost of roughly £120m.

This, in part, is why Bundesliga tickets are affordable. The clubs have been subsidised as a by-product of events held for the public good. Germany wanted the World Cup and, subsequently, many facilities received an upgrade.

The fact that Bayern Munich did not have to wear the cost of adding extra lanes to the A9 motorway or improving Marienplatz U-Bahn station, means they can keep prices down. Yet whenever we hear about the good deals available to fans in Germany, nobody mentions this.

It is different here. Last week, West Ham announced they would be selling cheaper tickets as a result of the move to the London Olympic stadium, and it was grouse season again. The club could only do it, we were told, because the taxpayer had in part subsidised their new stadium. Indeed they had, and here was the club giving a little back.

Rival Premier League chairmen, including at Tottenham, were said to be angry at West Ham assuming the moral high ground on ticket prices. Tottenham’s bold plan for the Olympic Stadium was to level it, which would have gone down well in the wake of Super Saturday. It would be like turning up for The Beatles tour in Liverpool, to discover the original Cavern Club is now a hefty chunk of the Merseyrail underground loop.

Here is how legacy and arena planning in Britain traditionally works. The nearest Tube station to the Emirates Stadium is Holloway Road on the Piccadilly line. Did the local council and Transport for London get together to finance improvements, as happened in Munich when the Allianz Arena appeared? No. Holloway Road actually closes on matchdays to prevent overcrowding.

We blather about legacy in this country but it doesn’t interest us if it costs. And even when legacy is apparent, we are suspicious of it.

West Ham’s presence at the Olympic Stadium is legacy in action. The venue will be used, regularly, be maintained and be part of the community. And West Ham’s new ground isn’t strictly paid for by the taxpayer, as is often suggested, as we had to pay for the principal cost anyway.

We bid for the 2012 Olympics and needed a stadium. Now the Olympics are over we either let the venue stand idle, in decline, at considerable expense, or we make it fit for an anchor tenant who will help regenerate the area, as happened with the Commonwealth Games stadium to the east of Manchester.

West Ham will pay £15m, a rent of £2.5m per year, hand over the naming rights and share some of the matchday revenue. The reason West Ham did not pay for the entire renovation is because the club is a tenant, not an owner. The London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) are the landlords and those who have rented will know the landlord is responsible for the upkeep.

So West Ham weren’t about to buy a stadium with no roof, poor sight lines and an athletics track, just as a tenant wouldn’t sign on a flat with holes in the ceiling, no front door and a flood in the kitchen. He’d tell the landlord to sort it out first.

Equally, if the LLDC had driven a very hard bargain, West Ham would have walked away. What would have happened then? Well, West Ham would have returned to a popular, fit-for-purpose stadium they can fill almost every week; and the LLDC would have been left choosing between Leyton Orient, a fictional Grand Prix and an imaginary NFL franchise. Good luck selling the naming rights for that.

For this is one of the other ways West Ham will help pay back: by securing a naming rights agreement for the LLDC. If the stadium had been used for the occasional athletics meeting or pop concert, competing with Wembley and the Emirates and other London venues, what would that be worth? Well, put it like this. The Gateshead International Stadium, once home to British athletics, also boasts that it holds ‘many national and international events, including rugby and major rock and pop concerts’ and it hasn’t got a sponsor.

What West Ham will do is take the Olympic Stadium into millions of homes around the world each week through Premier League football — if the club’s present status is maintained — and that makes an immediate difference to the naming rights deal, all of which goes to the LLDC. Not that many are interested in hearing the positives. We’re too busy obsessing over the problems caused by cheap tickets, having driven the Premier League mad about offering them since the last television deal was struck.

The latest fears are being voiced by the Charlton Athletic Supporters’ Trust, who insist price cuts at the Olympic Stadium will suck their fans north through the Blackwall Tunnel. It’s nonsense of course. East London is a Charlton-free area, just as West Ham fans south of the river are scarce. There’s this club called Millwall separating them, as well as a river.

So it really is folly, this fear of subsidies and state aid and cheap tickets and usefulness. They wouldn’t distrust it in Germany. They would use it to build Yellow Walls and Red Infernos, new homes and roads and stations that work. And it couldn't happen here, as we used to say, smugly.