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 […]

A ‘soccer’ lesson (Or … A few words from the States on the most contentious of words)   PDF here to read offline . By Steve Hendricks 6 December 2015 This month marks the 130th anniversary of one of the most traumatic events in British football. Lay historians may think I’m referring to the English Football Association’s […]

By Roger Pielke Jr 12 September 2014  It is a favorite debating topic among football fans in the United States: has soccer arrived in the United States? On one level the question simply reflects the fundamental insecurities of the American soccer supporter of a certain vintage. But those insecurities are based on experience. If you […]

By Nick Harris SJA internet Sports Writer of the Year 20 March 2011 . Money talks in football, with reams of evidence that the more you spend on wages, the better you perform. That’s why, using soccernomics theory, Manchester City and Chelsea, who meet on Sunday at Stamford Bridge, should be vying with each other […]

25 July 2010 The World Cup final attracted more than 24m TV viewers in the USA, or double the average number of fans who watched the 2009 World Series baseball games between the New York Yankees and the Phillies. The USA now has more than 4m young players, and around 500,000 fans are expected to […]

By Gary Hopkins 26 June 2010 A historic day in American soccer lies ahead today with the possibility that long-standing TV viewing records for the sport in the USA will tumble. When the USA play Ghana today at 2.30pm Eastern Time on a Saturday afternoon (7.30m in the UK and 8.30pm is South Africa), and […]

27 December 2009 Pim Verbeek, the head coach of Australia’s football team, has hinted heavily that any player wanting to make it into his 23-man squad for the 2010 World Cup finals will need to be playing club football at a decent level in Europe between January and the summer. “On May 11, I will […]

By Nick Harris 26 November 2018 La Liga giants Barcelona, home to Lionel Messi, are the best paid team in global sport and the first sports team in history to have average basic annual pay of more than £10m according to Sportingintelligence’s Global Sports Salaries Survey (GSSS) for 2018, published today. Download the GSSS 2018 This year’s […]

By Ezechiel Abatan Senior Analyst / Head of Football at Sportcal 12 June 2018 Major League Soccer (MLS) will imminently become one of the world’s top 10 soccer leagues by average revenue per team, according to an exclusive new Sportcal report. MLS teams were collectively losing $100m a year as recently as four years ago […]

By Nick Harris 26 November 2017 Oklahoma City Thunder of the NBA are now the best paid team in global sport according to Sportingintelligence’s Global Sports Salaries Survey (GSSS) for 2017, published today. This year’s GSSS is a 140-page special edition, which, for the first time, includes an ‘audit’ that quantifies the gulf between men’s and women’s professional […]