This is not a directory for official websites of clubs, teams, events or governing bodies, which in all likelihood are linked to from various other places around our site; for example you’ll find links to some of the major sports leagues or Premier League football clubs and fan sites on those respective pages.

We’re on the lookout for suggestions for useful, innovative or otherwise interesting websites from off the beaten track. Know one? Then feel free to share, putting “Web recommendation” in the subject line when you email us at . . .

submissions@sportingintelligence.com

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Football

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The CIES Football Observatory was set up in 2005 by Raffaele Poli and Loïc Ravenel under the name of the Professional Football Players Observatory (PFPO). Since 2011, it is one of the cornerstones of the vast CIES Observatory project, dedicated to the statistical analysis of sport in all its diversity. As well as the realisation of two annual reports, the CIES Football Observatory regularly carries out mandates for various stakeholders of the football industry. CIES’s team of researchers is notably specialised in the demographic study of the footballers’ labour market, performance analysis at team and player levels, as well as in the elaboration of predictive models to determine the outcome of competitions. Sportingintelligence often draws on the research of CIES for stories on this site, some of which can be found here.

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The Germany-based Transfermarkt (this links to the English version) is a mine of information about players, contracts, and transfers, obviously.

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Soccerbase is a largely accurate record of league matches in England. More reliable the more recent the match.

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Football-lineups does what it says on the tin, and tells you how a team lined up in a given match. Data on the 4-4-2-ness or otherwise of a huge array of club and international sides is available.

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Basic club and performance stats of every player to have played a game in the history of England’s football league (since 1888), can be accessed at allfootballers.com (formerly and appropriately known as since1888.com). Some of the information at this site is available via subscription only.

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Individual fan pages exist for many footballers, away from their official sites, with a prime example being a site dedicated to Cristiano Ronaldo at Ronaldo7. The news section aggregates updates on the Real Madrid footballer, who is a prime force in helping Real be the joint biggest shirt sellers in the world.

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Aspiring football writers from a range of nations gather together at World Football Columns to muse on the game as it’s played in most places. They are based in Germany and the USA and Canada; they’ve got specialists dealing in Africa and Eastern Europe; and they’ve got quirky features like Over A Pint, where two writers chew the fat on a relevant topic, in cyberspace. They’d like you to read them. They might even let you write for them.

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Swimming

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There’s only one independent swimming news site in town, and that’s SwimNews, although the governing bodies of swimming’s major nations can be found at the following places for The USA, Australia and the UK, while swimming’s world governing body is Fina, found here.

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Snooker

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If it’s worth hearing about, then it should be on Dave Hendon’s Snooker Scene blog. The official World Snooker site is here.

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Tennis

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Peter Bodo’s Tennis World is a popular read for good reasons; original, opinionated and funny.

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Twitter

A one-stop shop for tweets from professional athletes on Twitter can be found at Twitter-athletes.

A feed of Tweets specifically from tennis players can be found on the gototennis tennis tweets page.