Football

By Nick Harris 23 April 2010 The Manchester United Supporters Trust’s campaign to oust the club’s American owners will move into a new phase tomorrow when MUST will start targeting the club’s sponsors and commercial partners – including Nike, Audi, Budweiser and Betfair – to ask them to “choose sides” between the fans and the […]

By Nick Harris 23 April 2010 Nine out of 10 football fans in Scotland want structural change in the game north of the border, with 96 per cent unhappy that teams play four league matches every season against every other team in their division, according to a survey published today. The poll was undertaken by […]

By Nick Harris 22 April 2010 The Minister for Sport, Gerry Sutcliffe, and his counterparts in the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party, Don Foster and Hugh Robertson, have revealed key ideological differences in their approach to the governance and organisation of sport in Britain in an exclusive series of interviews for sportingintelligence, but they […]

By Nick Harris 21 April 2010 The administrator of Portsmouth, Andrew Andronikou, last month revealed exclusively to sportingintelligence the true extent of the club’s debts was closer to £100m than the £60m widely reported and now in an extraordinary document available for public scrutiny – parts of which we extract here – he has laid […]

By Nick Harris 19 April 2010 As the former Chelsea striker Adrian Mutu has declared himself “not happy” at what he calls an “excessive” nine-month ban from all football, handed out in Italy under anti-doping laws for taking an appetite suppressant, sibutramine, an analysis by sportingintelligence of disciplinary action taken by the Football Association in […]

By Pete Wilson 15 April 2010 (with 16 April update at the bottom) Birmingham City’s owners have been set a deadline of 27 May to pay a debt of £2.2m to the investment bank, Seymour Pierce, or else risk having their shares sold off to meet their obligations. But the club have this afternoon dismissed […]

By Nick Harris 14 April 2010 With Britain’s three main political parties now having published their election manifesto documents, a sportingintelligence analysis of the sections relating to sport shows that the Labour Party has dedicated more of its space to the subject than either of its rivals: 1.8 per cent of the manifesto. That is […]

By Nick Harris 13 April 2010 Dave Boyle, the chief executive of Supporters Direct, the organisation that works with football fans’ groups to help them acquire shares and influence at their clubs, has today welcome the unprecedented inclusion in the Labour and Conservative election manifesto documents of proposals on supporter ownership. Writing for sportingintelligence today […]

By Nick Harris 13 April 2010 Stan Kroenke, the billionaire American sports franchise owner who is also the single largest shareholder in Arsenal, decided in the early hours of this morning (late Monday, US time) to make a bid for complete ownership of the St Louis Rams NFL franchise, in contravention of widespread belief he […]

By Nick Harris 13 April 2009 Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith is believed to be seeking around £100m for her 15.9 per cent stake in Arsenal, for which she is seeking buyers via Blackstone, the New York-headquartered global investment and advisory firm. That would value each of her 9,893 shares at just more than the market rate […]