By Brian Sears  12 August 2016 So the 25th Premier League season is about to start and we reckon that Hull and Watford have the trickiest starts. West Brom have it easiest, followed by Jose Mourinho’s Manchester United. By the end of August each club will have played three league games before the international break. One ‘objective’ […]

By Alex Miller and Nick Harris 31 July 2016 Premier League clubs have set a record for combined shirt sponsorship deals, with the 20 clubs generating £226.5 million for the 2016-17 season, a rise of £3.6m on last year. The increase underlines the commercial strength of the League with shirt sponsorships more than doubling in six years. The […]

By Nick Harris 25 July 2016 The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was aware Russia ran a state-sponsored doping programme in which the head of that nation’s WADA-accredited lab was a central figure as long ago as the first week of July 2013. I know this because I told them. I told them on the phone […]

By Andy Carpenter 10 June 2016 If England’s squad were a single footballer and you compared his goal-scoring record for the 2015-16 season with his Euro 2016 rivals in a Golden Shoe-style contest, then he would be starting the tournament as the continent’s hottest striker. England would be top of the table ahead of Germany in second place, then Russia, […]

By Nick Harris 10 June 2016 Two interesting and credible studies published this week have attempted to quantify the cost (and separately, the value) of the 24 squads that will contest Euro 2016, which begins this evening in Paris when hosts France face Romania at the Stade de France. The first was conducted by Profit […]

By James Corbett 4 June 2016                 CLICK HERE: FULL GUIDE TO THE ELECTION In September 1997, when Britain was still intoxicated by the biggest general election landslide in the country’s history, the Labour Party spin doctor Derek Draper published a book, entitled ‘Blair’s 100 Days.’ A self-styled […]

By Sportingintelligence 24 May 2016 Leicester’s miraculous 5000-1 Premier League title win in 2015-16 made them globally famous but the prize money table for the season was topped by Arsenal, with official figures released today showing they have pocketed £100,952,257 from central funds alone. The money comes primarily from the PL’s huge TV deals but also includes Arsenal’s share […]

By Nick Harris 23 May 2016 The first peer-reviewed academic study on the phenomenon of suicide among Test cricketers has concluded the sport is ‘not to blame’ and there is no evidence of a higher incidence of such deaths among players than among the general population. Academics from England and Australia found instead that the Test […]

By Brian Sears  14 May 2016 Winning away from home is now officially a ‘thing’ in the Premier League. The trend has been inching towards better away performances for a few seasons now but the amount of points won on the road in 2015-16 is guaranteed to be at record levels no matter what happens on […]

By Brian Sears  6 May April 2016 Only three goalkeepers of the 45 who have played in the Premier League this season have played for every minute of every match and it seems appropriate that title-winner Kasper Schmeichel of Leicester City has the best record of those three. The 29-year-old Dane has appeared for every second of […]