Academia

* GAVIN FLEIG is the head of performance analysis at the reigning Premier League champions, Manchester City. He heads up a full-time performance analysis staff of 10 people at City alone, with six focussing on developing players and four on first-team analytics. With ‘soccermetrics’ analysis still in its infancy, City are about the launch a […]

. By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 23 July 2012 There is typically a strong relationship between the size of a nation’s population, its financial resources and the amount of medals it wins at an Olympic Games. A variety of studies has shown this to be the case, and predictions for […]

* In 2009, Arsenal’s manager Arsene Wenger likened being a football manager to living on a volcano: any day could be your last. Three years on and his view has surely been reinforced this season, a campaign in which he endured sustained discontent from some fans and some sections of the media for the first […]

By Sportingintelligence 6 February 2012 The NFL has the ‘fairest’ distribution of salaries across its 32 teams of any of the ‘big five’ US sports leagues (NBA, MLB, NFL, NHL and MLS) when you take into consideration the differential between the best paid team and the worst paid team. It is also much fairer than […]

By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 9 September 2011 The resumption of the Premier League this weekend after the international break coincides with the release of new predictions for the title races in Europe’s five major leagues. Chelsea are tipped to win England’s top division in 2011-12 after a three-horse race […]

. In their “Freakonomics for sports” book, Scorecasting, Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim challenge conventional wisdom, uncover the hidden influences in sports and uses reams of data to investigate questions that tug at every fan. Are there really make-up calls in sports? Is there, in fact, a home field advantage? Is there really […]

By Nick Harris 10 August 2010 Researchers at Staffordshire University studying the extent to which homophobia is common within football have found that two-thirds of fans believe the environment surrounding the game will be liberal enough to allow a gay pro to come out “over the next two to five years”. At one level this […]

By Nick Harris 29 July 2010 Rugby referees in charge of matches featuring teams from their own country against foreign teams tend to make hugely biased decisions, according to extensive new research by academics at Cambridge University and the University of London. The bias is present in referees in both codes of the game – […]

By Nick Harris 8 June 2010 England will reach the World Cup final and beat Spain to lift the trophy, according to predictions based on the ages of the 32 squads and five other key “indicators” identified as being influential at previous events. The predictions have been made by the Professional Football Players’ Observatory (PFPO) […]

By Nick Harris 8 April 2010 The failure of England’s leading football clubs to reach the semi-finals of the Champions League was a predictable consequence of the declining value of the pound, and not a sporting aberration, according to a leading Cambridge academic. Lionel Page, a Frenchman resident in England, is a behavioural economist and […]