In 2012, Grant Wahl wrote a profile piece about FC Barcelona for Sports Illustrated. It was headlined The World’s Team and for it, he was given unparalleled week-long access to the club’s new training facility – which he memorably titles ‘The Hogwarts of Soccer’. This was FC Barcelona in 2012, basking in the afterglow of […]

  David Winner’s classic, Brilliant Orange, published in 2000, is a different kind of football book. It begins: “If this is a book about Dutch football at some stage you’ll wonder why it contains pages and pages about art and architecture, cows and canals, anarchists, church painters, rabbis and airports.” Winner saw Dutch football as […]

In 1994, Simon Kuper won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for his first title Football Against the Enemy. He visited 22 countries on a tiny budget, digging into the effects football can have on politics and culture and why different countries play the game so differently. The Times said: “If you […]

By Nick Harris 26 November 2017 Oklahoma City Thunder of the NBA are now the best paid team in global sport according to Sportingintelligence’s Global Sports Salaries Survey (GSSS) for 2017, published today. This year’s GSSS is a 140-page special edition, which, for the first time, includes an ‘audit’ that quantifies the gulf between men’s and women’s professional […]

By Alex Miller  25 July 2017 Premier League clubs have smashed their own record for combined shirt sponsorship deals, with the 20 clubs generating £281.8 million for the 2017-18 season, a rise of more than £55m on last year. The increase underlines the commercial strength of the League with shirt sponsorships close to trebling in seven years. The combined total in 2010-11, when Sportingintelligence […]

By Sportingintelligence 1 June 2017 Chelsea’s Premier League title win in Antonio Conte’s first season as a manager in England earned them almost £151m in prize cash, with official figures released today showing they have pocketed £150,811,183 from central funds alone. The money comes primarily from the PL’s huge TV deals but also includes Chelsea’s share of […]

By Edmund Willison 25 April 2017 This week sees the return of the former darling of tennis, Maria Sharapova, after a 15-month drugs ban from professional sport. The highest earning woman in global sport plays as a wild card in the Porsche Grand Prix in Stuttgart from Wednesday. In the wake of her positive test early last year for a recently banned […]

By Nick Harris 13 November 2016 The Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA are now the best paid team in global sport according to Sportingintelligence’s Global Sports Salaries Survey (GSSS) for 2016, to be published in full tomorrow, and with key extracts in today’s Mail on Sunday (links below). The average first-team pay at the Cavaliers, home to NBA icon LeBron James, […]

By Alex  Miller 16 October 2016 Manchester United have regained their status as the world’s most popular football club by sales of official replica shirts according to authoritative new research. The Old Trafford club sold an average of 1.75m shirts per year in the five-season period from 2011-12 to 2015-16 inclusive. That puts them in the […]

By Sportingintelligence 16 September 2016 Brian Sears, the in-house statistician for Sportingintelligence who was a founding partner in this website and a weekly contributor for almost seven since years since our launch in late 2009, passed away suddenly last night. Brian, 73, was a retired school teacher whose abiding passions were, in order, his family, Watford FC, and his […]