Academia

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 May 2016 The first peer-reviewed academic study on the phenomenon of suicide among Test cricketers has concluded the sport is ‘not to blame’ and there is no evidence of a higher incidence of such deaths among players than among the general population. Academics from England and Australia found instead that the Test […]

By Tim Walters 7 March 2016 The recent election of Gianni Infantino and adoption of a package of minor reforms has done little to reassure those who closely follow FIFA that football’s international governing body is about to fundamentally change its ways. Indeed, much about Infantino himself gives ample cause for concern that this is […]

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 15 September 2015 Intercollegiate sports in the United States are as much a part of universities as math and physics, and the start of the 2015 NFL season is as good a time as any to explore one financial aspect of this. Today at the elite levels of college football and basketball there […]

By Roger Pielke Jr 20 July 2015 The fastest time in the 100m in 2015 so far belongs to Justin Gatlin, the American sprinter twice sanctioned for doping violations. That Gatlin has come back from suspension during 2006 to 2010 to become the top sprinter in the world today makes for a remarkable story. The […]

By Roger Pielke Jr 26 May 2015 Another Premier League season is in the history books, and with it another campaign where we can now assess the accuracy of forecasts made about the season. Once again, we learn that skillful prediction is really, really hard. Here I evaluate 60 predictions by fans, journalists, analytics experts and […]

. By Roger Pielke Jr 28 January 2015 In 2011, at the Play the Game conference in Germany, I heard Dick Pound, a member of the International Olympic Committee since 1978 and the founding President of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), make some remarkable claims about the unwillingness of sports officials to police doping. Then at […]

* At the completion of the Italy-Costa Rica match in Group D in Recife, half of the 2014 World Cup group games (24 of 48) had been played.  There have been expected victories for some nations, big upsets for others – Adios Spain! Bye-bye England! – and more goals than most fans would have expected. So […]

. Recent months have seen some extraordinary numbers bandied around for the values of English Premier League clubs. Arsenal were rumoured to be the target of £1.5bn offer by a Middle Eastern consortium, who have gone strangely quiet since. In January, Forbes said Manchester United had become the world’s highest value ‘sports franchise’ worth $3.3bn (£2.1bn). […]