By Nick Harris 16 January 2010 Arsenal are the only major English club that would meet Michel Platini’s own “Financial Fair Play” criteria for European club competitions if the Uefa president were able to introduce them now, according to senior sources within the organisation, although any such rules are at least three years away and […]

By Nick Harris 15 January 2010 Manchester City’s wage bill has surged by more than 52 per cent in a year from £54.2m to £82.6m, sportingintelligence can reveal. The figures, included in the club’s full annual report – just filed at Companies House – were excluded from the data presented to the public when the […]

12 January 2010 News that the Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU) has fined Russia’s fined Ekaterina Bychkova $5,000 and banned her for 30 days for not reporting an approach about match-fixing has only been widely dispersed now that John McEnroe has spoken out on the issue. That was a report from Seattle yesterday, and an example […]

12 January 2010 Mark McGwire is the former Major League Baseball player who was part of the  1998 run chase with Sammy Sosa to break Roger Maris’ single-season home run record. McGwire hit 70 to break the record that year, before Barry Bonds broke it with 73 in 2001; and both men’s achievements swirled in […]

By Nick Harris 10 January 2010 West Ham’s Icelandic owners look likely to sell the club before the end of January, with at least two rival bidders “at an advanced stage of the due diligence process”, according to a source familiar with the situation. The source added that “negotiations are ongoing with more than one […]

By Nick Harris 9 January 2010 The majority of the footballers at the African Nations’ Cup are uninsured by their national associations for “catastrophic” events including terrorist attacks and kidnapping. The responsibility for such insurance thus falls onto individual clubs, and several Premier League players currently in Angola for the tournament are not covered because […]

8 January 2010 Terrorist gunmen in Angola – host nation for the 2010 Africa Nations Cup, which starts on Sunday – today shot and wounded members of Togo’s team and their support staff, two of them “seriously”, as they travelled by coach through the host country. The central defender Serge Akakpo, 22, who plays in […]

8 January 2010 The first snooker tournament of the new year and a new era starts on Sunday at Wembley arena when The Masters gets underway. The old regime at World Snooker –  the commercial arm of the WPBSA governing body – was swept away last month when Sir Rodney Walker was deposed as chairman. […]

By Brian Sears 8 January 2009 English football crowds are on course for a 50-year high if ticket sales in the current season are maintained across the nation’s four professional divisions. An initial forecast by sportingintelligence is that total gates in 2009-10 will be in the region of 30.4m people. That would be higher than […]

4 January 2010 With the NFL regular season ending last night, it strikes us that there is something quirky about the standings: every owner that also has a stake in an English Premier League club has endured an awful season back home in American football. The Cleveland Browns of Randy Lerner (Aston Villa) finished with […]