14 September 2010 Blimey: it’s now a full 10 years since the Sydney Olympics, which opened on 15 September 2000 with a ceremony where Cathy Freeman lit the flame. In an interview in The Australian (edition 15 Sep, online now) to mark that anniversary, the athlete who became an icon for a Games memorable for […]

14 September 2010 A troubling but absorbing article in The New York Times (linked here) tells the story of Owen Thomas, a University of Pennsylvania football (gridiron) player, who hanged himself in April. He had no previous history of depression but a new autopsy on his brain tissue has found he was suffering from chronic […]

14 September 2010 The 2010 NFL season got underway in America at the weekend with a win for the owners of Manchester United (the Glazers) against the owner of Aston Villa (Randy Lerner) when the Glazers’ Tampa Bay Bucs beat Lerner’s Cleveland Browns 17-14 in Florida. But the game was played amid concerns about lack […]

By Nick Harris 14 September 2010 Rafa Nadal’s success in the US Open final this week means his Grand Slam singles titles tally moves to nine, and he moves up to seventh place on the all-time list, behind only Federer, Sampras, Emerson, Laver, Borg and Tilden (see details below). Famously Rafa also becomes the seventh […]

By Nick Harris 14 September 2010 Football is the world’s truly global game but where do passions run highest? Which clubs inspire not just the most support, per se, but the biggest share of the local (domestic) support? According to new research by sportingintelligence, the five football teams with the biggest share of their populations […]

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 Football’s status as the most popular team game in the world by some margin is supported by all kinds of data from participation numbers to crowd levels to TV rights sales to the popularity of the World Cup, which is the biggest single-sport tournament in the calendar. Many nations […]

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 Brian Sears 10 September 2010 The first Premier League match of the weekend, tomorrow lunchtime, features two of the teams ‘ever present’ in the League since it began in 1992, with Everton hosting Manchester United. Only seven sides have been ‘ever present’, that pair plus Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Aston Villa and Tottenham. Thus 42 […]

By Brian Sears 10 September 2010 The Wolves will be on prowl in London this weekend, hunting by the river. They’re playing Fulham. And Wolves have won more Premier League points against Fulham than against any other Premier League side. Yes, yes. I know Wolves are only experiencing their third Premier League season; one season […]