By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 22 April 2012 AS the Premier League title race comes to the boil, Rio Ferdinand has spoken about the culture of success at Manchester United, ‘the desire’ for glory that pervades Old Trafford, and why he hopes that United’s blend of experienced winners and fearless […]

. By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 15 May 2011 Manchester United’s point at Blackburn yesterday earned them a 19th English league title. In the run-up to the game, I interviewed Rio Ferdinand in Manchester for a feature (linked here) and another story (third item in the column linked here) in today’s […]

By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 12 May 2011 Rio Ferdinand is closing in on a new Twitter landmark of one million followers, a milestone that will cement the Manchester United centre-half’s place as the most popular English footballer on the micro-blogging network. The 32-year-old England international is also the most […]

By Sportingintelligence 26 April 2011 So the battlefield of Twitter proved too much for Darron Gibson (reported here in Belfast among other places) but the race for tweeting supremacy continues apace between a group of other Manchester United footballers, and in turn between them and Piers Morgan. As our updated chart shows (below) Rio Ferdinand […]

By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 24 April 2011 Wayne Rooney has apparently made his social networking debut on Twitter, with @wazzaroon08 amassing more than 135,000 followers in under 24 hours since Manchester United’s Rio Ferdinand (@rioferdy5) recommended that his own followers follow ‘Wazza’. Ferdinand is a famous joker but club […]

Brought to you in association with the UK Concrete Show (“The whole of the concrete industry under one roof!“) . By Martin Kelner 4 July 2016 Those wretched Germans. Not content with going round winning tournaments, getting to semi-finals and so on, they’ve now started subverting our much-loved national stereotypes. I mean, what are European football championships […]

By Brian Sears  6 May April 2016 Only three goalkeepers of the 45 who have played in the Premier League this season have played for every minute of every match and it seems appropriate that title-winner Kasper Schmeichel of Leicester City has the best record of those three. The 29-year-old Dane has appeared for every second of […]

By Ian Herbert 3 October 2014 Are Manchester United fans wealthier than Manchester City fans? The question is not part of an attempt to demonstrate a new flank of red superiority but to resolve a debate which has turned into a serious preoccupation this week. It began on Tuesday night, when City attracted a crowd […]

* Until quite recently, the Belgium international football team, and particularly its national governing body, had fallen out of favour with fans across the nation. The Belgian FA were perceived as a hindrance and a negative influence on the game; the team were not embraced. Ian Herbert explains how things have changed, rapidly. This is […]

* In the second instalment of a new weekly Monday column, Tell Me Why, the Independent’s brilliant man in the north-west, Ian Herbert, asks whether readers actually care any more whether what they are reading is true. In a world of churnalism, SEO-dictated content and made-up nonsense that becomes ‘fact’ by dint of being re-Tweeted enough times, […]