Part of Sportingintelligence’s guide to the 2016 FIFA presidential election: HOME PAGE here . PROFILE: Michel Platini           Age: 60. Born: 21 June 1955, in Jœuf, France. Twitter: None          Website: None        Manifesto (PDF download): None Football background: professional football player (1972-1987, AS Nancy, Saint-Étienne, Juventus); international (France, 1975-1987; Kuwait, 1988), manager (France, 1988-1992), […]

Part of Sportingintelligence’s guide to the 2016 FIFA presidential election: HOME PAGE here . PROFILE: Gianni Infantino          Age: 45. Born: 23 March 1970, in Brig, Switzerland. Twitter: @Gianni_2016          Website: http://www.fifaforward2016.com/ Manifesto (PDF download): Via this link Football background: UEFA 2000-present, currently General Secretary (October 2009-present), previously was secretary general to the International Centre for Sports […]

By Roger Pielke Jr 15 September 2015 Intercollegiate sports in the United States are as much a part of universities as math and physics, and the start of the 2015 NFL season is as good a time as any to explore one financial aspect of this. Today at the elite levels of college football and basketball there […]

By Roger Pielke Jr 3 August 2015 After flirting with the possibility of trying to stay on, it looks like FIFA President Sepp Blatter will indeed be standing down early next year. Blatter has announced that FIFA will hold an election to choose his successor on 26 February, 2016. Everyone loves an electoral horse race, […]

By Roger Pielke Jr 20 July 2015 The fastest time in the 100m in 2015 so far belongs to Justin Gatlin, the American sprinter twice sanctioned for doping violations. That Gatlin has come back from suspension during 2006 to 2010 to become the top sprinter in the world today makes for a remarkable story. The […]

By Roger Pielke Jr 26 May 2015 Another Premier League season is in the history books, and with it another campaign where we can now assess the accuracy of forecasts made about the season. Once again, we learn that skillful prediction is really, really hard. Here I evaluate 60 predictions by fans, journalists, analytics experts and […]

By Roger Pielke Jr 20 March 2015 The salary that FIFA pays Sepp Blatter, its long-serving president, has never been disclosed. We know how much US president Barack Obama makes, $400,000, and the head of the United Nations (about $240,000) and even the CEO of the biggest company in Switzerland (Nestle, $10.6 million). But Blatter’s […]

By Roger Pielke Jr 12 March 2015 Sport, it is often said, is a mirror to society. That is no more true than in the revelations found in the report of the Cycling Independent Reform Commission (downloadable as a PDF on this website), which earlier this week released its report on doping in professional cycling. […]

. By Roger Pielke Jr 28 January 2015 In 2011, at the Play the Game conference in Germany, I heard Dick Pound, a member of the International Olympic Committee since 1978 and the founding President of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), make some remarkable claims about the unwillingness of sports officials to police doping. Then at […]

. By Roger Pielke Jr 7 January 2015 You almost certainly had no knowledge that it was happening, let alone followed it closely, but events at a cyclocross World Cup event held last month in Namur, Belgium, highlighted the ongoing disparities between the treatment of men and women in global professional sport. And this happened […]