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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 […]

By Tim Walters 22 April 2020 In the midst of our global pandemic, the football world finds itself entangled in a vast and intricate Gordian knot of scheduling logjams, contractual obligations, and financial relationships from which there appears to be no clear way to proceed. Understandably, the rush is to get football and the football […]

By Nick Harris 23 December 2019 Lionel Messi’s  Barcelona have retained their status as the best paid team in all of global sport, measured by average basic pay in their first-team squad, according to Sportingintelligence’s Global Sports Salaries Survey (GSSS) for 2019, published today. Barca’s average pay is just over £9.8m, with Real Madrid in second place […]

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 Alex Miller  30 July 2018                                                          This article was updated on 14 August with a new graphic Premier League clubs have broken their own record for combined shirt sponsorship deals, […]

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 Sportingintelligence 17 May 2018 Manchester City’s stunning and record-breaking Premier League title win in Pep Guardiola’s second season as a manager in England earned them almost £150m in prize cash, with official figures released today showing they have pocketed £149,438,654 from central funds alone. The money comes primarily from the PL’s huge TV deals but […]

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 […]

  David Winner’s classic, Brilliant Orange, published in 2000, is a different kind of football book. It begins: “If this is a book about Dutch football at some stage you’ll wonder why it contains pages and pages about art and architecture, cows and canals, anarchists, church painters, rabbis and airports.” Winner saw Dutch football as […]

On the eve of the 2014 Major League Baseball season, Sports Illustrated ran a cover story – left, written by Ben Reiter – predicting that the Houston Astros would win the World Series in 2017 (link here). At that point, they were the worst team in baseball. Many had them as the worst team in […]