News

By Steve Menary 6 September 2013 FIFA has been accused of playing God after football’s world governing body used rules designed to prevent child trafficking to deny a 17-year-old British schoolboy the chance to take up a place on a college course – in Wiltshire. To make matters worse, the boy’s family has concerns that […]

Brian Sears 26 August 2013 David Moyes takes control of his first home league game as Manchester United manager on Monday evening seeking to uphold United’s astonishingly good home record in the Premier League era. How good? Well, they’ve played 405 home league games since the division was revamped as the PL in 1992-93 and […]

By Brian Sears 22 August 2013 The Premier League is not even two fixtures old and already the top three in the table – Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United – are probably most people’s idea of the final three in some order, while the three promoted clubs, among the favourites to go down, are […]

By Alex Miller 21 August 2013 The strength and popularity of the Championship has been highlighted in new research that shows England’s second-tier clubs combined sell more shirts per season than all the German, Italian, Spanish and French second-tier teams put together. According to findings released to Sportingintelligence by veteran analyst Dr Peter Rohlmann and […]

By Brian Sears 20 August 2013 It may seen ill-timed after a weekend of Premier League matches where four of the 10 games finished 1-0 and none of them were won by a 2-1 margin, but there is an unmistakeable trend in England’s top division that the 1-0 result has been overtaken by the 2-1 […]

By Alex Miller 20 August 2013 The combined shirt sponsorship income of the Premier League’s 20 clubs has again defied the recession by rising £18.65m year-on-year to a record £165.75m this season – with big winners but some fallers among the new deals. An increase in the total sponsorship revenues reconfirms the strength of the […]

By Nick Harris and Brian Sears 15 August 2013 The chances of correctly predicting the way the Premier League will finish in the 2013-14 season are minuscule; if we assumed that any team is capable of finishing in any position, the probability of getting top to bottom in the correct order is, mathematically, 2.432902e+18 to 1. […]

. By Nick Harris 11 August 2013 The Premier League in 2013-14 will again be a melting point of nations, with players from 67 countries currently represented within the first-team squads of the 20 clubs ahead of the start of the new season on 17 August. A graphical representation of where these players comes from […]

. 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 […]

By Nick Harris 24 June 2013 As tennis’s most prestigious grass court tournament begins at Wimbledon today, the presence of one particular American qualifier in the men’s singles draw highlights the sport’s deeply complex relationship with match-fixing, doping and whistle-blowing. Wayne Odesnik, 27, is the world No107 and has previously been ranked inside the world’s […]