By Pete Wilson 11 February 2011 Manchester United have become the world’s most popular team, as measured by fans on Facebook, the social networking site that has more than 600 million active users across more than 200 countries. United overtook Barcelona in the past few hours, and currently have more than 9.053m ‘fans’ against Barca’s […]

By Brian Sears 10 February 2011 The biggest gap between any two clubs in the current Premier League table is six points – that is the margin separating Tottenham in fifth place (44 points) from Liverpool in sixth (38 points). Liverpool fans will argue with some justification that their ‘natural’ place is higher, but they […]

By Nick Harris 7 February 2011 Manchester United are set to overtake Barcelona as the world’s most popular football club at some point in the next week, according to data analysed by sportingintelligence from Facebook, which is effectively the biggest evolving opinion poll available. Remarkably, United only made their official entry into the land of […]

By Brian Sears 28 January 2011 It was in January last year that Liverpool became the 100th Premier League club to lose in the FA Cup to a team from a lower division, in their case to Reading. That made them the most ‘slain’ giants of the Premier League era, having lost seven times in […]

By Brian Sears 25 January 2011 Manchester United’s Premier League season reached the half-way mark, its 19th game, with the New Year’s Day 2-1 victory at West Brom. Since then they’ve played three more league games, beating Stoke, drawing at Tottenham and then thrashing Birmingham 5-0, all ahead of Tuesday’s match at Blackpool. As sportingintelligence’s […]

By Brian Sears 16 January 2011 The final game of this weekend’s Premier League programme will see Manchester United play Spurs at White Hart Lane in the tea-time game on Sunday. If Tottenham are to turn top-four aspirations into consistent realities they really should improve their Premier League record against United. No other Premier League club has […]

By Brian Sears 31 December 2010 Chelsea are the defending holders of the Premier League-FA Cup Double but Manchester United were the Premier League team of 2010, as our analysis of league results in the calendar year shows. (See table below). Of those 17 clubs who spent the whole year in the top division, United […]

By Nick Harris 19 December 2010 Few if any Manchester United fans can have failed to notice the recent coverage of Sir Alex Ferguson ‘overtaking’ Sir Matt Busby’s record reign as United manager, but in fact Ferguson overtook Busby 10 weeks ago. And the inconsistency in the way the ‘official’ United figures have been compiled […]

By Brian Sears 16 December 2010 It’s official and it’s demonstrable and it’s enough to leaving a Red feeling Blue: Chelsea are Manchester United’s toughest opponents in the Premier League. United of course have the chance to change the momentum in that relationship this weekend, with themselves on the up, apparently, and unbeaten, certainly, while […]

By Brian Sears 8 December 2010 Of the 436 Premier League goals scored this season, 181 have come before half-time (or 42 per cent), leaving a sizeable chunk of 255 goals (58 per cent) in the second half. Most clubs – 15 from 20 – scored most of their goals (a majority) in the second […]