By Nick Harris 26 January 2010 The revelation last night by Fifa’s president, Sepp Blatter, that bidding to host the 2018 World Cup could be restricted to candidates from Europe won’t necessarily increase England’s chances of staging the tournament. In those circumstances, eight key Fifa voters within Europe would get a “free hand” where to […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

By Nick Harris 4 January 2010 New figures collated by sportingintelligence.com following last night’s conclusion to the NFL’s 2009 regular season show that the world’s best-attended domestic sports league (by average crowd) has registered only a slight dip in numbers. The average number of people at the 256 regular season games was 67,509, or just […]

By Nick Harris 30 December 2009 Chelsea continue to lose money at a greater rate than any other football club in England, with today’s financial figures showing a £44.4m loss for the year 2008-09. That news was made worse by a reduction in income over the period, down year-on-year from £213.1m to £206.4m, at a […]