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 […]

 By Brian Sears  19 August 2016 It was this time a year ago that we wrote that Chelsea’s title hopes were as good as gone after two games – purely from a statistical history point of view. Jose Mourinho’s team (as they were then) had lost both their opening games, and in the piece linked here we […]

By Joel Oberstone 18 August 2016 Arsenal began the season with a home defeat. Some fans already have their annual revolt against Arsene Wenger underway. It’s business as usual, this growing disquiet that club and manager will make a mess of hiring good new players. With the next fixture on Saturday away at champions Leicester, now is perhaps […]

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 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, […]