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2 weeks ago | 
sportingintelligence832.substack.com | Nick Harris
In the build-up to Tuesday’s Champions League quarter-final first leg against Real Madrid, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta described it as “100 per cent the biggest game of my managerial career.”What followed was an astonishing result, with mind-blowing goals, not least the brace scored from free-kicks by Declan Rice. This piece will recap what happened, and briefly consider Arsenal’s chances of making the semi-finals from 3-0 up.
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2 weeks ago | 
sportingintelligence832.substack.com | Nick Harris
There has been no confirmation, yet, that the FX / Disney+ documentary Welcome to Wrexham will be renewed for a fifth season. It is “virtually guaranteed” that it will happen if Wrexham, currently second in League One, go up to the Championship, as they and most of their fans expect they will. That final push for the Premier League could be TV gold, whether they defy the odds and make a serious Championship challenge, or even better in dramatic terms for neutrals, if they crash and burn.
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3 weeks ago | 
sportingintelligence832.substack.com | Nick Harris
I’ve loved Ted Lasso on Apple TV+ unconditionally since it first aired in 2020, a godforsaken year when the planet was in the grip of Covid, politics was becoming ever more insane and my own world had flown off its axis. It goes without saying the programme was and remains “Marmite” TV, something you adore or hate, and I understand why.
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3 weeks ago | 
sportingintelligence832.substack.com | Nick Harris
FIFA last week announced details of prize money for this summer’s Club World Cup (CWC), an event to be played in major venues in the USA from 14 June to 13 July, and already much derided in some quarters. Players (here and here), coaches (here, here and here), welfare unions, fan organisations and human rights groups are among those who have already been critical but we’ll come back to that.
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4 weeks ago | 
sportingintelligence832.substack.com | Nick Harris
One of the winners at the SJA British Sports Journalism Awards on Monday was an audio documentary, “Confessions of a Match Fixer”, adjudged to be the single best piece of journalism in the audio sports documentary category in 2024.
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1 month ago | 
sportingintelligence832.substack.com | Nick Harris
There was an interesting opinion poll last week published by YouGov that found that 42% of Premier League football fans would subscribe to a Premier League-specific subscription service, where games are sold direct to fans via an “over-the-top” (OTT) channel dedicated to Premier League matches. The full details of this poll are here, and the results found that: 37% of fans only watch matches involving teams they support.
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1 month ago | 
sportingintelligence832.substack.com | Nick Harris
This afternoon at the Costa Navarino resort in Greece, in a process that will make a Papal conclave look like a beacon of transparency, members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will elect a new IOC president to succeed the current incumbent, Thomas Bach. Whichever of the seven candidates prevails will become one of the most powerful people in global sport, heading the body responsible for the Olympic Games.
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1 month ago | 
sportingintelligence832.substack.com | Nick Harris
I spent some time in Newcastle after the takeover by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) in October 2021, including two matchdays with Amanda Staveley, one of them in April 2022 and one in January 2023. They were fascinating, insightful occasions that I have never written about before. Staveley was a minority shareholder in the club, owning 10% of NUFC at the time.
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1 month ago | 
sportingintelligence832.substack.com | Nick Harris
Sometimes you make snap judgements that turn out to be right, hopefully more often than not, and sometimes you make calls that turn out to be wrong. And on Tuesday morning, having watched and listened to Sir Jim Ratcliffe throughout Monday trying to defend job cuts and food cuts for staff at Manchester United, I tweeted some judgements, that, on reflection, were only partly right, and definitely could have been more nuanced.
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1 month ago | 
sportingintelligence832.substack.com | Nick Harris
It was in January 2017 that UEFA’s president Aleksander Ceferin openly acknowledged that a small group of “super clubs”, including five from the Premier League, were becoming so wealthy that nobody else had any realistic chance of catching them financially. This warning came in a remarkable UEFA “benchmarking report”, a fascinating and detailed document, based on official data provided directly to UEFA by top-flight clubs across Europe.