THE SPORTS LAWYER is actually a posse of Britain’s brightest lawyers, from the Sport & Media team at the UK law firm, Thomas Eggar, who will be contributing features, analysis and insight on a regular basis on the key sports law issues of the day. In TSL’s latest column, Andrew Nixon considers the implications of a […]

* By Nick Harris 9 February 2010 * The enthusiastic feedback to the publication yesterday of sportingintelligence’s updated list of most popular domestic (professional) sports leagues in the world has prompted us to look at the absolutely extraordinary numbers of fans who watch college football in the USA. (See graphic at bottom). The NFL average […]

By Nick Harris 8 February 2011 Super Bowl XLV on Sunday evening set an all-time TV viewing record in America as an average audience of 111m people watched the Green Bay Packers beat the Pittsburgh Steelers, beating the previous record (the 2010 Super Bowl, 106.5m) into second place. But that isn’t the only positive news […]

By Nick Harris 7 February 2011 Manchester United are set to overtake Barcelona as the world’s most popular football club at some point in the next week, according to data analysed by sportingintelligence from Facebook, which is effectively the biggest evolving opinion poll available. Remarkably, United only made their official entry into the land of […]

By Brian Sears 7 February 2011 The Premier League’s 41-goal Saturday was a record for the 20-team division, but other intriguing stats can be found in two specific score lines: Everton’s 5-3 win over Blackpool, and Newcastle’s 4-4 draw with Arsenal. This was the first time in the Premier League that both these eight-goal thriller […]

By Nick Harris 4 February 2011 The three Pakistan cricketers at the centre of the ‘spot-fix’ scandal arising from the fourth Test against England at Lord’s last summer are to face criminal charges, the Crown Prosecution Service has announced today. Separately, Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir will discover on Saturday the verdicts from […]

By Brian Sears 3 February 2011 What do West Ham, Wigan and Wolverhampton all have in common aside from all beginning with the 23rd letter of the alphabet and all being current occupants of the Premier League’s relegation zone? They are also the only three Premier League sides so far unable to muster a point […]

By Brian Sears 3 February 2011 For a variety of reasons – Ole, ole – Chelsea fans will welcome Liverpool to Stamford Bridge this weekend. Not least of them will be that in the Premier League, they’ve seen their team win a dozen times at home against Liverpool in 18 attempts. Chelsea’s record is the same […]

. Football will thrive if the purist’s desire for a meritocracy is wedded with a business approach that heeds the principles of economics, argues Oscar Howie, who contends that Uefa’s Financial Fair Play is a step in the right direction – and that Fernando Torres (left) can’t be value for money. .. . . By […]

* . . . which accompanies this piece. NB: this article has been amended on 5 Feb to reflect an earlier error in calculations. Season 2011-12: Club X loses £101m. Season 2012-13: Club X loses £39m. Club X is monitored for first Uefa FFP monitoring period, 2011-12 and 2012-13. All other things are equal and […]