Features

* 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 […]

By Nick Harris 5 May 2014 It was self-evident in the 2012-13 Premier League that Queens Park Rangers provided their owner with the worst value for money. He spent many tens of millions on buying players and many tens of millions more on paying their wages. And they were ignominiously relegated anyway. But precisely how […]

* WHEN GFH Capital, a Dubai arm of Bahrain-based bank GFH, bought Leeds United in December 2012, executives including Salem Patel appeared on national television to assure the fans his company had the funds to take Leeds places. Patel said on the BBC (link here for video): “We wouldn’t have bought this club if we didn’t […]

. At the end of the 2010-11 Turkish football season, Fenerbahçe were crowned champions after finishing with the same number of points (82) as title rivals Trabzonspor, but with a better head-to-head record. But Turkish football was soon rocked as it emerged Fenerbahçe’s success was a result of one of the most devastating match-fixing scandals the game […]

By Brian Sears 14 March 2014 Seven clubs have been ever-present (EP) in the 22 seasons of the Premier League and six of them are in the top seven in the current table; this is no coincidence. Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal in first, second and third place before this weekend’s games, as well as Tottenham, […]

By Brian Sears 28 February 2014 Everton will start the weekend 11 points outside the Champions League qualification spots, albeit with a game in hand on fourth-placed Liverpool, and are now outsiders to reach Europe’s top table for 2014-15. But their home form and their historical record against Saturday’s opponents West Ham both suggest they […]

By Alexandra Willis in Melbourne “Does Wimbledon have an extreme heat policy?” It was a perfectly innocent question. But if you’ve ever been to Wimbledon, you will understand why it was an amusing one. Rain delays, rather than heat delays, are a fact of SW19 life. The skies darken, the clouds let rip, the court […]

By Brian Sears 24 December 2013 Famously the club at the bottom of the Premier League on Christmas Day has always ended up relegated with the sole and notable exception of West Brom in 2004-05. Sunderland are bottom for Christmas 2013, which statistically makes them 95 per cent doomed to the drop. But as the […]

* By Ian Herbert 22 December 2013 The sign on the exterior wall of the building where I started out in this business, on a September morning 24 years ago, has not kept up with the sad diminution of the paper which became a rich part of my life for a decade. “Liverpool Daily Post […]

By Lizzy Ammon 12 December 2013 If you were to read the UK newspapers, you’d be forgiven for thinking that England have already handed the urn back to Australia. It’s not quite that bad as England prepare for the Third Test in Perth that starts tomorrow (Thursday night, UK time). Two down with three to […]