Thursday February 16, 2012 at 2:52pm
There was news last week that the only Olympic Sport with tickets available was football. Some people were surprised at this, saying that Football was the Nation’s sport and they thought the tickets would be snapped up. In actual fact the figures of the thing are quite interesting. The tickets start at £20 but rise to a quite astonishing £125, and there are around 800,000 that have been sold. This makes football the most popular Olympic sport, a fact the organisers have been ke....
Thursday February 16, 2012 at 2:38pm
This column makes no apologies for yet again mentioning Tony Pulis. The Stoke boss yet again has decided to make an idiot of himself following his Centre Half Robert Huth getting sent off against Sunderland. The rights and wrongs of the decision not to rescind the red card are not what is being debated here, but Pulis’s reaction. First, rather than accepting the red and the subsequent three match ban, the Welshman (supported by his Chairman Peter Coates) used his press conference last week....
Wednesday February 15, 2012 at 2:26pm
When Harry Redknapp walked free from court last week not only did it set a chain of events in motion that saw the England Manager lose his job, it led to reports in the press that the trial itself had cost £8m. Football Franchise tweeted on Friday: So an £8m 5-year investigation to find that someone who was accused of fiddling tax on less than 200 grand was innocent #moneywellspent and they were far from the only ones to share those views. In fact so fierce was the out....
Tuesday February 14, 2012 at 2:14pm
Mick McCarthy’s sacking earlier this week came after a dismal performance in the Black Country derby brought into sharp focus what is a pretty sorry season for the football teams of the Midlands. As a proudly Midlands based firm, Leisure Leagues has many members of staff who support the teams from the Central belt of the UK, and those of us that support Premier League Teams in particular are not having a great time of it. Indeed at the time of writing the regions four Premier League Teams ....
Monday February 13, 2012 at 2:59pm
It was certainly a weekend for apologies. First Carlos Tevez said he wanted to come back to Manchester and help City win the league (surely the right thing for all concerned as this blog suggested a fortnight ago) then Mick McCarthy had to say sorry for his teams disgraceful second half capitulation in the Black Country derby. But they say these things come in threes and the one we all not just wanted, but needed to hear came too. As we have said before on this blog, somebody, somewhere at Liver....
Thursday February 9, 2012 at 5:33pm
So here we are again with England looking for a new Manager. The fallout from the John Terry affair cost the England Manager his job. And, strangely you can see right on both sides of the argument. The FA had no real choice but to sack Terry as England skipper. The allegations surrounding his use of racist language to Anton Ferdinand when Chelsea played QPR earlier in the season have cast a cloud over the whole season. This was brought to a head last week when the date for the court trial that w....
Thursday February 9, 2012 at 5:26pm
So Fabio kissed goodbye to a £6m a year contract last night, and apparently did so on a point of principle. Good luck to him, but as someone remarked this morning it’s a damn sight easier to have principles when you are on £6m a year than when you are on £6 an hour. The fact of the matter is, though, that no one would actually give a monkeys what Fabio Capello had earned during his tenure as England boss if he had actually done a good job. People talk about value for mone....
Thursday February 9, 2012 at 5:12pm
On Monday night, it probably would have been beneficial for all concerned if Luis Suarez had slipped quietly back into action after his eight game ban was completed. But it didn’t happen, did it? And it didn’t happen for two reasons. First he was booked – and in the view of many in the Football Business office he was lucky not to get sent off – for kicking Scott Parker, and second, because Kenny Dalglish decided that a matter that should have had a line drawn under it was....
Friday February 3, 2012 at 4:50pm
It is not for us –for all sorts of reasons – to speculate as to the guilt or otherwise of Messrs Mandaric and Redknapp. But there is one thing we can speak about, which has become common knowledge as part of the evidence is the issue of managers receiving part of the fees for selling players to other clubs. Redknapp, it emerged, received in the region of £200,000 for selling Peter Crouch to Aston Villa in 2002, and these payments are common place. They were written into his con....
Friday February 3, 2012 at 4:40pm
Amit Bhatia became the latest person at QPR to take to Twitter to air a grievance last week. It does rather seem that down Loftus Road way that anything more than 140 characters doesn’t need to be said, given the way that Joey Barton and co-owner Tony Fernandes behave, but Bhatia took to that medium to become the latest person within football to call for the introduction of a “referral” system in football. Bhatia said (one assumes in a series of tweets) "I'm convinced it's....
Friday February 3, 2012 at 4:28pm
As Derek McGovern put it in the Daily Mirror this week: “since the start of December, Manchester City have kissed goodbye to the Champions League, to the FA Cup and to the Carling Cup, but not to Carlos Tevez.” And so it was that perhaps the most surprising aspect of the transfer window is the fact that Carlos is still at the Etihad. In recent months it was said he was going to PSG, to one of the Milan Clubs, back to South America, that he was going to retire from football, but nothi....
Friday February 3, 2012 at 4:21pm
The news that spending was down 70% in this transfer window will have come as a surprise to no-one who follows these things. According to accountants Delloite spending in January 2012 was estimated to be around £60m amongst the Premier League clubs, which of course is considerably less than the money spent on taking Torres to Chelsea and Carroll to Liverpool last year. In the last couple of days there has been much discussion as to why, with Delliote’s own Director of Sports Business....