By Brian Sears 17 February 2011 With the FA Cup fifth round taking centre stage in English football this weekend, it still remains possible that a record low number of Premier League teams (one) could make it to the sixth round, or a joint-record high number, namely all eight of eight quarter-finalists. For the ‘romantic’ […]

By Pete Wilson 11 February 2011 Manchester United have become the world’s most popular team, as measured by fans on Facebook, the social networking site that has more than 600 million active users across more than 200 countries. United overtook Barcelona in the past few hours, and currently have more than 9.053m ‘fans’ against Barca’s […]

By Brian Sears 10 February 2011 The biggest gap between any two clubs in the current Premier League table is six points – that is the margin separating Tottenham in fifth place (44 points) from Liverpool in sixth (38 points). Liverpool fans will argue with some justification that their ‘natural’ place is higher, but they […]

By Nick Harris 8 February 2011 Super Bowl XLV on Sunday evening set an all-time TV viewing record in America as an average audience of 111m people watched the Green Bay Packers beat the Pittsburgh Steelers, beating the previous record (the 2010 Super Bowl, 106.5m) into second place. But that isn’t the only positive news […]

By Nick Harris 7 February 2011 Manchester United are set to overtake Barcelona as the world’s most popular football club at some point in the next week, according to data analysed by sportingintelligence from Facebook, which is effectively the biggest evolving opinion poll available. Remarkably, United only made their official entry into the land of […]

By Brian Sears 7 February 2011 The Premier League’s 41-goal Saturday was a record for the 20-team division, but other intriguing stats can be found in two specific score lines: Everton’s 5-3 win over Blackpool, and Newcastle’s 4-4 draw with Arsenal. This was the first time in the Premier League that both these eight-goal thriller […]

By Nick Harris 4 February 2011 The three Pakistan cricketers at the centre of the ‘spot-fix’ scandal arising from the fourth Test against England at Lord’s last summer are to face criminal charges, the Crown Prosecution Service has announced today. Separately, Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir will discover on Saturday the verdicts from […]

By Brian Sears 3 February 2011 What do West Ham, Wigan and Wolverhampton all have in common aside from all beginning with the 23rd letter of the alphabet and all being current occupants of the Premier League’s relegation zone? They are also the only three Premier League sides so far unable to muster a point […]

By Nick Harris 1 February 2011 Chelsea’s bullishness that they won’t immediately fall foul of Uefa’s imminent Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules is because they will be able to ‘write off’ a huge chunk of their wage bill in the scheme’s early years, sportingintelligence can reveal. [NB: to clarify ‘early years’, this means written-off wages […]

By Brian Sears 1 February 2011 Arsenal host Everton on Tuesday evening for the 19th time in the Premier League era and statisically-minded Gunners will be licking their lips. Arsenal have won more home points against Everton since 1992 – 45 points from 18 games for a whacking 2.5 points per game on average – […]