Football

By Nick Harris 2 August 2010 Take a sample of the world’s population and ask them to nominate their favourite sports team and many experts would expect to find football’s Barcelona or Manchester United, or baseball’s New York Yankees or basketball’s LA Lakers at the top. Yet take a global sample of an enormous magnitude, […]

By Nick Harris 2 August 2010 Cristiano Ronaldo is the world’s most popular athlete in all of global sport according to new research by sportingintelligence to coincide with Facebook reaching the landmark of 500m active users. Social networking is increasingly important in the promotion and marketing of sports stars and teams. Thus Facebook, now the […]

By Alex Miller and Nick Harris 29 July 2010 NB: This story has been amended on 13 August 2010 due to Wolves informing us their current shirt deal is worth £1.1m for the 2010-11 season, not £400,000 as originally reported. We apologise for the earlier error. The Premier League’s 20 clubs for the 2010-11 season […]

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 26 July 2010 Manchester United are hopeful they will sell most if not all of the 54,000  “ordinary” season tickets available for the 2010-11 season, having already broken the 50,000 barrier and with the first-come, first-serve sale ongoing of the remaining 4,000. Some opponents of the club’s American owners, the Glazer family, […]

By Nick Harris 30 June 2010 As Liverpool prepare for the official unveiling of Roy Hodgson as their new manager, the Spirit of Shankly fans group is calling on supporters to join a demonstration on Sunday (4 July, Independence Day), to “declare your independence” from the club’s American owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett. SoS […]

By  Nick Harris 30 June 2010 With all the ratings data now available from the USA’s weekend defeat to Ghana, it has been confirmed that the match was the most-watched football game in American TV history. It drew an average audience of 19.4m, with almost 15m watching on ABC (a figure known soon afterwards), plus […]

By Gary Hopkins 26 June 2010 A historic day in American soccer lies ahead today with the possibility that long-standing TV viewing records for the sport in the USA will tumble. When the USA play Ghana today at 2.30pm Eastern Time on a Saturday afternoon (7.30m in the UK and 8.30pm is South Africa), and […]

By Nick Harris 21 June 2010 The match between Uruguay and Mexico in Group A at the World Cup in South Africa on Tuesday will be a draw according to the global betting markets, which have seen an unprecedented amount of cash laid on that outcome. There is no suggestion of a fixed result between […]

By Nick Harris 17 June 2010 Record TV ratings in some key markets suggest the 2010 World Cup is on course to be a contender as the most-watched single-sport event in history. For that, much will depend on the numbers in the most populous nations, including China (not represented but tuning in) Brazil and the […]