Palace, in administration after their owner, Simon Jordan, finally ran out of sources of money, penalised 10 points and with their most promising player, Victor Moses, sold to Wigan, will worry about what relegation might mean for their very existence.

Wednesday, still laden with the £21m bank debts they have carted around the Championship and League One for a decade since they were relegated from the Premier League in 2000, say they will not implode. Several players are out of contract and could be released to pare the £6m wage bill down to a more frugal League One level, including the highest earner, Francis Jeffers, once a gilded teenager at Everton before moving to Arsenal. Jeffers began this season being fined, banned for three matches and transfer-listed by the then manager Brian Laws for butting Port Vale's captain, Tommy Fraser. He ends it personifying Wednesday's relegation plight, having failed to score in his 12 league matches this season.

Wednesday's chairman, Lee Strafford, says the club would be strong enough to cope, that the fans, 9,000 of whom have already bought season tickets, will stay loyal and that a takeover to wipe out Wednesday's debt, long desperately sought, can still happen. Last week the club announced it was talking to "other interested parties" as well as to Club 9 Sports, a Chicago-based consultancy that has been negotiating for months to invest in the club.

Strafford, weathered by having seen, as a fan, Wednesday relegated from the top flight with ominous symmetry in 1990 and 2000, has been insisting that relegation, if it happens in 2010, will be no crisis.

"The club is strong and we can rebuild as a League One club," he says. "But it will be easier and quicker to rebuild in the Championship."

Alan Irvine has called on fans to roar Wednesday to survival today but the club's manager betrays his fears when he pointed to the effect the 10-point penalty has had on his opponents. "Palace would not be in this position if they hadn't gone into administration," he says. "They're good enough to be in this division and they've shown that with the number of wins they've had."

Strafford's comments that Palace should have been relegated already because they went into administration were meant as an assertion of principle but smacked of resignation, too. "If you mismanage a football club to the extent where you end up in massive debt administration should not be an escape route," he said. "There should be a bigger punishment and I think that should be relegation."

That argument has some justification at Hillsborough because throughout this decade of slump Wednesday never went into administration, so have not left creditors unpaid, although the Co-operative Bank, owed £21m, and the club's directors and former chairman Dave Allen, owed £4m collectively, are expected to accept a cut if new investors do arrive.

Wednesday's is a cautionary story for clubs that have reached for success in the Premier League and failed and carries wider significance across football. Wednesday were arguably on course to be a major Premier League player when, under Trevor Francis as manager, they finished third, seventh and seventh in the top flight between 1992 and 1994, and reached the Wembley finals of the FA and League Cups in 1993.
Decline came after a £16m investment from a bank, Charterhouse, which had sniffed gains to be made in newly moneyed football. Wednesday spent this bounty on long, expensive contracts for players including the Belgian striker Gilles de Bilde and Dutch forward Gerald Sibon, neither of whom carved his way into a Wednesday hall of fame, and relegation was certain well before the last match of the 1999-2000 season.

Another crucial game today takes place in the Premier League, where Manchester United continue their pursuit of the title against Sunderland. This week United manager Sir Alex Ferguson scoffed at rumours that he was set to retire imminently, but Rob Shepherd in the News of the World correctly asserts that the 68-year-old is unlikely to have long left in the Old Trafford hotseat. He says Fabio Capello, the England boss, is the best man to replace the Scot:

Ferguson has nothing to prove to anyone any more after all he has achieved at United.

But go on for another season and Manchester City, not just Chelsea, could be a real threat such is the changing landscape of the game.

The dynamics at United have become increasingly complex, as the fight between the Glazer owners, the Supporters Trust and their Green and Gold campaign rumbled on.
Fergie doesn't deserve to be in the midst of all that political and financial posturing.

Even if there is significant money to spend this summer it should be for a new a manager. Fergie just can't do another five-year re-inventing plan.

But the succession is so big that it is too soon for Jose Mourinho, David Moyes, Alex McLeish, Brucie et al to take on.

No. The best man who has the credentials to succeed Sir Alex Ferguson a Manchester United is another Godfather of the game - current England boss Fabio Capello.

And from what I hear, whatever happens at the World Cup with England this summer, the job that would lure Capello back in to club football is taking over at Old Trafford
At 62, Capello is easily young enough to succeed Fergie.