Melting pot

* CHRISTOPHER DAVIES is a veteran football writer who paid 17 shillings and sixpence to be at Wembley for the 1966 World Cup final. A former chairman of the Football Writers’ Association, he is the current editor of FootballWriters.co.uk and the author of  ’Behind the Back Page: The Adventures of a Sports Writer.‘ Here he explains how […]

* EUROPE’S major leagues delivered a string of titles by procession in Spring 2013 as a group of the biggest, richest clubs across the continent romped to runaway victories. Most leagues have always had one or two dominant clubs but is there something else afoot now? And what if anything does that say about the […]

ALEXANDRA WILLIS is a multimedia sports journalist who flits between Wimbledon, SportingIntelligence, the TennisSpace and a few other outlets, while tweeting copiously and trying to improve her (terrible) backhand in her spare time. Follow @alex_willis on twitter On first viewing, American Football is pretty baffling. It looks very much like a lot of helmeted people running around crashing into […]

* ARSENE Wenger has helped to transform English football, on and off the pitch, since his arrival at Arsenal from Japan in 1996. Silverware and plaudits followed but since 2005, when the ‘big money era’ of Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea and Sheikh Mansour’s Manchester City have led to increased competition in the Premier League, the Gunners […]

* Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber recently announced plans to extend his organisation’s geographic reach by adding five new franchises by 2020. The new entrants will boost MLS to 24 teams – a haunting reminder for older American fans who witnessed the North American Soccer League’s swift demise after peaking at 24 franchises in […]

By Jonnie Baker 13 September 2013 On a good day, I reckon I could probably manage nearly 20 keepie-uppies – which is four times the number Gareth Bale managed when presented to the salivating hordes at the Bernabeu. I am, therefore, worth some £344 million on the open market. You may start the bidding at […]

. The days when the world heavyweight title was routinely feted as the ‘richest prize in sport’ may be long gone, drifted east in its increasingly fragmented forms before coagulating as the sole preserve of a pair of precipitous Ukrainian brothers who swat all-comers with nonchalant ease. But the chance to fight for the same […]

By Steven Slayford 2 July 2013 The NBA’s salary cap is well known but the league’s luxury tax is a less familiar beast – and one with potentially significant repercussions for many teams next season. The NBA salary cap states that each team is only allowed to spend a league-set amount on wages, that number was […]

. Andy Murray’s obsession with self-improvement has propelled him from promising Scottish kid to one of the best tennis players in the world. In Hugh MacDonald‘s long-form essay ‘Murrayball: how to gatecrash the golden era’, we learn about his commitment to ‘marginal gains’, which is the process by which an athlete makes small improvements in many […]

* Boxing’s  24-hour weigh-in lets fighters “boil down” for weigh-in day then pile the weight back on before the fight. It encourages extreme dehydration, leaving those who do it susceptible to heat stroke, heart failure, increased risk of brain damage and death. Little has been done adequately to investigate the subject, which is one reason […]