Melting pot

. 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 […]

. Disclaimer: only most of the events and people in this narrative are based on reality . By Smokey Baloney Special investigations editor 14 June 2011 . This a story about the day they knifed The Boyler. It’s a bloody tale and it ain’t easy to explain, even now. The Boyler ran a racket, okay, […]

By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 4 June 2011 . The winner of this afternoon’s Derby was Pour Moi, ridden home by Mickael Barzalona, aged just 19 and the youngest jockey to have won the race since Walter Swinburn. In 1981, Swinburn, also 19, was aboard Shergar as the Aga Khan’s star horse […]

By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 24 May 2011 So what next for West Ham, Blackpool and Birmingham, the three teams who were removed from Survival Sunday in body bags? To hazard a guess based on recent trends and on a hunch, I’d say that in four years: one of them […]

. By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 15 May 2011 Manchester United’s point at Blackburn yesterday earned them a 19th English league title. In the run-up to the game, I interviewed Rio Ferdinand in Manchester for a feature (linked here) and another story (third item in the column linked here) in today’s […]

* 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 discusses the alleged […]

* 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 discusses the alleged […]

By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 26 April 2011 I’m not certain who started it, although Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt had a role in spreading the myth that the Royal Wedding on Friday will be watched by a global audience of 2 billion people. Hunt even cited this figure of 2bn […]

** JOHN ROBERTS wrote for the Daily Express, The Guardian, the Daily Mail and The Independent, where he was the tennis correspondent for 20 years. He collaborated with Bill Shankly on the Liverpool manager’s autobiography, ghosted Kevin Keegan’s first book, and has written books on George Best, Manchester United’s Busby Babes (The Team That Wouldn’t Die) and Everton (The Official […]

22 April 2011 In 2010, sportingintelligence’s review of global sports salaries revealed baseball’s New York Yankees to be the best paid team in global sport (by average earnings of first-team players). Today we publish the Global Sports Salaries Survey 2011, an updated review of pay and performance in the world’s most popular – and richest […]