By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 11 June 2012 The chaotic way in which Blackburn Rovers has been run under the ownership of Venky’s is further exposed today by the revelation that transfer policy at the club in the past year has been partly informed by tips from fans via Facebook. […]

By Pete Wilson 11 February 2011 Manchester United have become the world’s most popular team, as measured by fans on Facebook, the social networking site that has more than 600 million active users across more than 200 countries. United overtook Barcelona in the past few hours, and currently have more than 9.053m ‘fans’ against Barca’s […]

By Nick Harris 15 September 2010 Read a version of this article in English Facebook istatistiklerine göre dünyanýn en çok hayran kitlesine sahip kulübü 4,5 milyon taraftarý ile Galatasaray. Kulübün Ýþ Geliþtirme Müdürü Ertuð Silay’ýn giriþimleri ve Facebook’taki sayfanýn yöneticilerinden Umut Öfkeli’nin çabalarý önemli. Sportingintelligence olarak kulübün bu baþarýsýndaki önemli pay sahiplerinden kulübün pazarlama ve […]

By Nick Harris 14 September 2010 Manchester United’s official Facebook fan page has become the fastest growing of any sports team in the world, registering almost 2.4m fans within two months of being set up. The club, relatively slow to embrace Facebook as a platform for interaction with supporters compared to some of their major […]

By Nick Harris 14 September 2010 Read a version of this article in Turkish The most popular sports team in the world at the moment, according to the number of fans on official Facebook sites, is Galatasaray, with almost 4.5m fans. This is thanks in part to the long-term efforts of the club’s business development manager, […]

By Nick Harris 10 January 2021 It was about 10pm on Friday 19 August 2016, and Great Britain’s women’s hockey team were playing in the Olympic final in Rio de Janeiro. I was in my car on the forecourt of a petrol station in the west of Scotland, crying. Eight hours earlier we had been for a ‘precautionary’ MRI scan […]

In 2012, Grant Wahl wrote a profile piece about FC Barcelona for Sports Illustrated. It was headlined The World’s Team and for it, he was given unparalleled week-long access to the club’s new training facility – which he memorably titles ‘The Hogwarts of Soccer’. This was FC Barcelona in 2012, basking in the afterglow of […]

By Nick Harris 25 July 2016 The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was aware Russia ran a state-sponsored doping programme in which the head of that nation’s WADA-accredited lab was a central figure as long ago as the first week of July 2013. I know this because I told them. I told them on the phone […]

Screen Break By Martin Kelner           To sponsor this column, see foot of page 18 April 2016 Does God support a Premier League football team? I’m not a religious man, I only ask because there has been an uncommon amount of talk this week about divine intervention. I was otherwise engaged […]

Screen Break By Martin Kelner           To sponsor this column, see foot of page 11 April 2016 This time there was no escape for Murdoch. Regular readers will know the apparently still potent press potentate had a last-minute reprieve at the cricket last week when my tenner and Ben Stokes fell at the […]