Booker Prize winner: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy John Peel Festive 50 Number 1: Cornership: Brimful of Asha Poet Laureate: Ted Hughes President of Libya: Muammar al-Gaddafi In recent years, parachute payments have helped ease the agony of relegation even if their bounteousness can lull a club into thinking the cash flow is never ending.

Absolutely delighted to welcome blogging legend and French football's main man Andrew Gibney to the party this hour.
Indefatigable, Andrew can be found all over the internet including The Mirror's football blog and, nominated as one of the year's best new blog, French Football Weekly.
Follow him @AGibneyFtbl
Here's Andrew on relegation issues in France and England:
From years of following Scottish football you get drawn into a malaise of comfort-ability.

By Chris Wright

With football team's now staging naked ballets in training and employing unicorns to canter down rainbows and deliver the matchball before kick-off, it's perhaps understandable that fans at Slavia Prague's match against Viktoria Plzen over the weekend thought they were being treated to a bit of half-time entertainment when a rogue parachutist plummeted from nowhere and landed on the pitch during the interval.

As far as pitch invasions go, there's Jimmy Jump, Antonio Cassano's BFF (Mario Ferri) and any moderately attractive willing to expose her bouncy parts to the elements. That's all that comes to the top of the head, anyway.

It matters not, as the hierarchy has been destroyed. This unnamed pitch invader, possibly Bond, James or Bourne, Jason, dropped in on the Sparta Prague Viktoria Plzen (big game on the Czech calendar) at the half.

TheOffsideRules.blogspot.com is over. As of today TOR will move exclusively to TheOffsideRules.com. I'll keep this address as an archive of good times-past and as a parachute in case both you and I agree that the new look is whack in the long run.
Pretty much the only thing that is changing is the layout/user experience, which is kind of a big deal but not really.

The Premier League approaches television rights negotiations as a collective, seeking the best price for all the leauge's clubs and then sharing the resulting revenue, for the most part, equally. And late on Tuesday, it became clear that Liverpool managing director Ian Ayre intended to lead a fight to destroy that system.

The Premier League is again a case of totting up balance sheets. The Championship's glorious unpredictability is gradually being eroded by the distorting effects of parachute payments. The most important aspect of Leagues One and Two could again be those dreaded asterixes against points totals which don't add up to games won or drawn.

For the purpose of our Football League reviews, we will be taking a look at the respective divisions in an overall sense rather than trying to make predictions or inspecting the clubs concerned too closely. If you are here looking for in-depth predictions made by the supporters of each of the seventy-two clubs of the Football League, we would recommend the venerable When Saturday Comes and its annual pre-season preview, which is available now from all good newsagents, or alternatively this collaborative project between two Football League blogs, The Seventy Two and The Two Unfortunates.

Robbie Savage's mega Championship preview plus Sarah's saying and this week's compo

Losing your best two players is a nightmare for anyone. Imagine United missing Rooney and Rio. Imagine Barca shorn of Messi and Xavi. Now imagine the Championship without me and Craig Bellamy.

At the end of last season, it rather felt as if one of the more significant success stories of the previous ten months had been overlooked. As the nation salivated over Barcelona in the Champions League and cheered Wimbledon back into the Football League, Norwich City supporters could have been forgiven for feeling a little bit forgotten for having achieved something a little bit special back to back promotions which ended with the club back in the Premier League.

Their Words I'm very happy with the way we scored the goals but not only that, the way we played, being so sharp defending. It's a good start to the World Cup. USA Women's coach Pia Sundhage. Other Sources Six ways to fix American soccer - from The San Diego Union-Tribune's Mark Zeigler: Here's how to avoid falling off, or at least how to open a parachute.

The football economy had an article today on what relegation means to West Ham financially. It does not paint a rosy picture if you are a West Ham fan.

More than half of West Ham's 2009-10 turnover of £71.7m came from Premier League revenue distributions. The minimum £40m of television and central sponsorship income for the bottom club (up from £31.

The football economy had an article today on what relegation means to West Ham financially. It does not paint a rosy picture if you are a West Ham fan.

More than half of West Ham's 2009-10 turnover of £71.7m came from Premier League revenue distributions. The minimum £40m of television and central sponsorship income for the bottom club (up from £31.

Is football over estimating the loyalty of fans? The Liverpool game at the end of the season has now been switched from a Saturday afternoon to a Monday night so it can be shown on television. This might not be such a bad thing, except that the game's long been sold out and many fans will have made their travel plans already.

Middlesbrough academy graduate Cameron Park is a transfer target for Liverpool reports the Times.
Described as an outstanding left-sided prospect, the 18-year-old winger has captured the attention of Reds' Director of Football Strategy Damien Comolli.
The Liverpool chief has reportedly been in touch with the Championship club over a possible move to Anfield in the summer.

Plymouth Argyle are languishing at the bottom of League 1, ten points having been deducted by the Football League for an ‘insolvency event', giving notice of their intention to appoint administrators.Players have not been paid since November and their debts are estimated at £13m.

Yet in 2008 they finished 10th in the Championship, had posted a £1.

Recently Robin van Persie was spotted over the coastal town of Portsmouth engaging in some leisure activity. Skydiving to be exact. In his full kit and cleats for Christ's sake.

It's all part of a new marketing effort from an American PR firm to add more excitement and synergy to the start of the match.

Avram, You're The Man.

Is West Ham's solution to saving the club from relegation as simple as the formula of sacking Avram Grant as soon as possible, sign Sam Allardyce to replace him and give the manager six players who can walk in to Upton Park and make an immediate difference?