De Zerbi, 46, has just been confirmed as the new manager of Tottenham on a five-year contract reportedly worth £12m a year, with a seven-figure bonus if he keeps Spurs in the Premier League this season.

His appointment is already causing huge controversy among some Spurs fans because of his support of Mason Greenwood when Greenwood was his player at Marseille.

The Tottenham Supporters’ Trust told BBC Sport that it had received “a lot of emails from supporters” lodging complaints.

The Trust said in a statement: “The Club has previously committed to challenging instances of violence against women and girls and acting with integrity and upholding its values when faced with any incidents. De Zerbi's comments about Mason Greenwood were unnecessary, ill-judged, and deeply offensive to a significant number of supporters."

De Zerbi has said Greenwood “paid in a strong way” after leaving Manchester United for Marseille after charges against him, including attempted rape and assault, were dropped.

As per the BBC, Ali Speechly, co-founder of Women of the Lane, said her group also opposed the appointment and she will stop attending matches over the issue.

Tottenham are currently 17th in the Premier League, on 30 points, or a single point above West Ham, currently occupying the third relegation spot. De Zerbi’s first match as Spurs manager will be away at Sunderland on Sunday 12 April before a home game against his old club Brighton on 18 April and then a trip to Wolves the following weekend.

The stakes for Spurs could not be higher. The last time they played outside England’s top division was for a single season in 1977-78, and that was the only season as low as that since 1949-50. There are literally hundreds of millions of pounds at stake here (in annual revenue) if Spurs go down. The Tottenham hierarchy are betting the house on De Zerbi.

So, no pressure.

That nine days with Brighton in 2023 provided me, and hopefully my readers at the time, with a remarkable insight into a Premier League club on the up-and-up, and showed how, inspired by a dedicated owner, Tony Bloom, and a brilliant chief executive, Paul Barber, it is possible for a “small” club to reach the big time and thrive.

They spent smarter, not bigger. They innovated. They operated not along traditional club lines but outside the box. And their appointment of De Zerbi in 2022 had been in keeping with all of that.

Seeing De Zerbi operate up close and at the heart of Brighton that week also showed me much about him, as a man and as a manager. He was, and I’m sure remains, as driven (to the point of obsession) by the game, and his own high standards.

Today’s piece will recap a lot of what I discovered at the time (which I tweeted in a thread back in September 2023) and also provide what I hope will be a greater insight into what I expect De Zerbi to bring to Spurs, for better or worse.

The rest of this feature is available to paying subscribers, without whom the work on this site would not be possible.

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The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attracted global condemnation after the killing of Minneapolis residents Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, in January this year, which followed the death at the hands of federal agents of Renée Good, another 37-year-old America citizen, earlier the same month.

There have been nationwide protests against ICE since then, as below, even as the Trump administration has vowed to increase ICE presence at US airports.

As The Guardian reported in late January, Pretti and Good were just two of eight people “who have either been killed by federal agents [in 2026] or who have died while in ICE custody [up to 28 January].”

The same piece reported: “The high-profile fatal shootings follow the deaths of at least 32 people in ICE custody in 2025 – the highest number since 2004.”

Since Donald Trump began his second term as US president, ICE has been focused on mass arrests and removals of “unauthorised immigrants”, and not just those with criminal records. This has involved “operations” in homes, workplaces and courthouses among many other situations.

How these operations will affect the men’s FIFA World Cup 2026 which kicks off on 11 June, in less than three months, is a question with growing momentum.

To what extent will ICE activities impinge on matches in the USA, if at all? Will fans or reporters covering the tournament, not least from nations perceived as enemies of America, will be at risk of ICE detention, violence, or even death?

As things stand at the time of publication, citizens from at least four of the 48 participating countries risk being banned from traveling to the USA, precluding visiting supporters and journalists from attending the tournament. Those four are Iran, Haiti, Senegal and the Ivory Coast.

So far, only players, coaches, (some) team officials, support staff, and immediate family members from restricted countries are exempted from the bans and will be granted entry/visas for the tournament.

Asked by Play the Game, FIFA both denies and confirms that journalists from certain countries may get into trouble:

“Media accreditation is open to media from all countries. No nationalities are blocked. Ability to enter Canada, Mexico and the USA are consular and immigration matters and not with FIFA,” a spokesperson writes.

No promise of press conferences

Meanwhile, FIFA has come under scrutiny because of FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s increasingly close relationship with US president Donald Trump. Infantino awarded FIFA’s inaugural “peace prize” to Trump, who has since started wars against the leaders of perceived enemies of the USA, Venezuela and Iran, while threatening other nations, including Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Denmark.

But it may not be easy to hold FIFA and its president to account. Asked if FIFA, like the International Olympic Committee during Olympic Games, will hold daily press conference during the World Cup, the answer is evasive:

“FIFA has a dedicated mailbox for all enquiries, which will be staffed every day, throughout the tournament, across global time zones. This will ensure journalists receive timely responses. Further invitations will be uploaded on the FIFA Media Hub, as per previous tournaments and events, including to FIFA Press Conferences.”

Will Gianni Infantino be giving any pressers during the tournament and if so, who will be allowed to attend?

FIFA say invitations to FIFA Press Conferences will be shared on the FIFA Media Hub closer to the time, adding the FIFA President routinely engages with international media, including CNBC and Sky in recent weeks, and he attended an open media scrum prior to the FIFA Club World Cup 2025 final, in New York, in July 2025.

FIFA expects a carnival-like event

For FIFA, neither internal or external unrest is a matter of official concern.

“National security matters, including the deployment of law enforcement agencies, is the responsibility of the relevant governments”, FIFA responds in writing.

“FIFA is confident that the efforts being made by the governments of Canada, Mexico and the United States will ensure a safe, secure, and welcoming environment for everyone involved. The FIFA Club World Cup 2025 already provided a strong example of the safety and security measures in place in the United States, with almost 2.5 million fans passing through the turnstiles and enjoying matches in a friendly, inclusive, and carnival-like atmosphere.”

Play the Game has spoken to individual reporters and journalists at major newspapers, broadcasters and online operations both in the United States and across Europe who will cover this summer’s World Cup.

There is a general consensus that the tournament will go ahead peaceably, and journalists will be able to do their work unhindered by political considerations. However, all the reporters we contacted had the same general caveat about the potential smooth running of the World Cup:

The consensus? “It should all be okay, but in Trump’s America, nothing can be ruled out on any given day.”

Media should have contingency plans

“What we are seeing in the United States, seems like a concerted effort to undermine freedom of the press,” says Katherine Jacobsen, who is the USA, Canada and Caribbean Program Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

“This administration came into office promising to restore or promising to protect the First Amendment. But it seems that they prefer to protect their version of the First Amendment versus what what is actually guaranteed, especially in regard to media freedoms.”

Katherine Jacobsen from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) advises journalists to have contingency plans if clashing with US authorities. Photo: CPJ

“We saw for the first time during the summer, the deportation of a journalist [Mario Guevara] who was detained in relation to his reporting and then transferred to ICE custody and ultimately deported back to his native El Salvador,” Jacobsen explains.

“He was in the country legally at the time of his detention. There are lots of other cases of individuals being targeted for their speech or for their work and ending up in the immigration system because of that. That should be really concerning.

“Newsrooms should be mindful of this when thinking about security around covering the World Cup and more broadly when sending their reporters to the United States.”

Another recent case, in March 2026, saw Estefany Rodríguez, a journalist for a Spanish-language outlet, who had been covering ICE immigration raids, arrested without her captors presenting a warrant. Her case has been widely reported around the world.

Jacobsen recommends that reporters at the World Cup should all have “a contingency plan”.

“Worst-case scenarios need to be worked through. What happens if a journalist is detained while covering covering a protest outside of a World Cup venue, for instance? And be hyper-vigilant of the changing political landscape in the United States and the polarisation that has made it very difficult for reporters to work in certain environments.”

Be careful with social media

The CPJ has issued an advisory that all reporters in the USA - and not just on sport - should consider using burner phones and be careful about using social media.

“Journalists should go through their social media and see what information is available out there about themselves, and also be very cognisant of any other comments that they might have made on social media websites, including liking a photo or a comment or anything like that - even on their personal sites - that the current administration might not agree with.”

“The US administration is smart enough to know the world will be watching,” said one source. “They won’t want any high-profile fuck-ups over perceptions of media freedom.”

Two sources to whom Play the Game spoke said that they had been advised to use burner phones during the World Cup, while a third said their company had told them to make sure their mobile phone was switched off while passing through immigration.

“We’ve been told the authorities cannot force us to switch on our phones, so if there’s anything on there they might not like, they won’t be able to see it,” they said.

“The Trump administration has been aggressive in its efforts to marginalise critical journalists and smear them as enemies of the MAGA project. At the same time, they have built a quasi-paramilitary force in ICE, who are as well-armed as they are poorly trained, and are likely to be deployed to host cities, many of which could be the site of protest against the US government.”

McGeehan finds that Gianni Infantino has “hitched FIFA’s wagon to a MAGA World Cup” and does not expect the FIFA President to stand up for journalists and the media if they are subjected to violence or mistreatment.

“As we saw in Brazil [at the 2014 World Cup] and South Africa [in 2010], protests can often fade into the background when the football gets going, but it is clear that the conditions for serious unrest and violence exist.”

Consistent attacks on media rights

Clayton Weimers, the executive director of the USA arm of Reporters Without Borders, thinks that you can’t separate the conditions for covering this World Cup from the broader conditions for journalism in the U.S. today.

“The Trump administration has consistently attacked press rights and access to information in very concrete ways … One of the ways that might impact journalists who are coming to cover the World Cup is that we’ve seen a lot of very heavy-handed policing of protests, for example, that has led to injuries for journalists and even arrests for journalists.”

Are journalists who cover the World Cup going to be freely able to cover those aspects of it because covering a World Cup is not just about covering what happens on the field?

“It’s about what happens before, during, and after the games, inside and outside the stadiums. These tournaments are so much bigger than 90 minutes of football. And so, it’s critical that FIFA really holds itself to account and holds its host countries to account on living up to its stated values that include press freedom and making sure that there is access.”

As for FIFA transparency, Weimers adds:

“FIFA has an uneven record when it comes to transparency and access. There are moments when it does the right thing and like any big organisation, there are moments when we don’t think they’re doing the right thing. In recent years, there have been issues with the availability of leadership at press conferences and for interviews and a very tightly controlled media availability in general. That is something we’re strongly encouraging FIFA in public and in private to change.”

“This is the world’s game. It belongs to the fans and if the folks who are running it from the very top are not available to those fans, then it sort of betrays the whole ideal of what the World Cup is supposed to represent.”

Weimers also stressed that the United States, by and large, still welcomes visitors from other countries:

“I don’t want to intimidate people out of coming, but you have to be a little bit more aware of the conditions. You have to be prepared that there may be some tough questions asked of you at the border - that may feel inappropriate.

“But at the border, you are most vulnerable. It is unfortunately true that a border agent can ask you to unlock your devices and to look through them. If you’re a journalist who works with sensitive sources, for instance, you might want to think about taking clean devices. You want to take every precaution to protect those folks.”

AIPS: no restrictions, but be careful

Rudy Nuyens, the chair of the football working group of AIPS (the International Sports Press Association), met with FIFA last week in Atlanta, Georgia, in the USA and said much of their discussions revolved around logistics such as press boxes, mixed zones and so on.

Mr Nuyens said he couldn’t answer all our questions but would go on the record in relation to two of them.

Are there any security requirements, restrictions, or risks journalists should expect when covering this World Cup, especially the US and Mexico?

“We briefly discussed this with the people at FIFA, and according to them, there are no restrictions. There are no journalistic restrictions.”

Are there any precautions journalists should take when traveling to the US or Mexico, for example, checking your social media, etcetera?

“That seems most important to me because as a journalist, you also have to apply for a visa. That’s a whole file you have to complete and you’re also asked for all your social media. You can say that you don’t want to do that, but I don’t think that’s advisable at all, because I think that would just be a reason to search more. But politically tinged commentary on social media, that’s what you have to be careful with.”

Russia’s friendly face

Samindra Kunti, a freelance journalist based in Belgium, who has helped with this investigation, has covered multiple World Cups, and can compare the 2026 edition to Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022.

“Under Vladimir Putin, Russia hosted a tournament amid - or following - scandals ranging from sports doping to spy poisonings, political murders, the annexation of Crimea and repression of the press.

“At the time, Russia ranked 148th on RSF’s world press freedom index. Journalists in Russia were confronting escalating violence that often occurred openly and went unpunished. Legal protections for reporters remained scarce. State censorship and intimidation - both physical and digital - were intensifying.”

“In an act of sportswashing, Russia showed a different face during the tournament. Organisers scaled back some of the visibility of the massive security operation that had accompanied the 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup – where FIFA accreditation limited reporters to “‘solely cover the FIFA Confederations Cup 2017 and related events.”

“During the World Cup 2018, they put on free trains for fans and media. This worked to show off the country - from St Petersburg to Kazan, Russia upheld a month-long facade to welcome the world and foreign reporters, who could largely work without intimidation or fear by the Russian state.”

Democracy in decline

Kunti calls the Qatar 2022 World Cup “the most controversial in modern sporting history - because of the way Qatar had won the rights to stage the finals and the plight of migrant workers who helped transform the Gulf Nation building infrastructure, often at the expense of their own lives.”

The reporting environment was hostile, Kunti recalls.

“This was exemplified at FIFA’s main hotel in Lusail which became a fortress to keep nosey journalists out - only those with a specific appointment could enter, copying a media strategy from the IOC. It was difficult to pass the entry gate and inside the hotel lobby, security personnel monitored journalists. This reporter was kicked out repeatedly, even when he had an appointment. It turned out later that prostitutes had easier access to the hotel than journalists. Although, in Qatar, prostitution is criminalised.”

In the light of the past two World Cups, the United States, co-host of the 2026 World Cup, was seen as a safe haven, says Kunti. That all changed when Donald Trump returned to power for his second term.

“This summer sports media from around the world will once again be confronted with the question of how to cover a tournament that is being hosted by a democracy in decline. Trump has realised that the World Cup is the biggest TV show on earth, so how does one hold both the US government using the World Cup as a sports washing tool, and FIFA who facilitate this, to account?”

In less than three months, we may have an answer to that question from some of the more than 10,000 media professionals expected to cover the FIFA World Cup 2022. If, of course, they are allowed to work without restrictions.

Nick Harris is an investigative journalist and owner of Sporting Intelligence. In 2024, he received the Play the Game Award.

Ailing Tottenham aren’t going to be in the last eight either, after getting humped 5-2 in their first leg by Atlético Madrid. And Manchester City have an uphill task to reach the last eight after getting smashed 3-0 by Real Madrid, or specifically Federico Valverde, in their first leg.

It is possible if unlikely that none of the six English clubs in the last 16 will reach the last eight, while Bodø/Glimt, the Norwegian minnows from inside the Arctic Circle, will do so.

Strålende for dem!

But few will be surprised if Newcastle join Chelsea, Spurs and Man City in leaving the tournament after next week’s second legs, while you’d expect Liverpool have a decent chance of overcoming a first-leg 1-0 deficit to Galatasaray when they play the second leg at Anfield on Wednesday, just as Arsenal will be favourites to progress on Tuesday at home after a 1-1 first leg against Leverkusen.

So what does this tell us about the Premier League clubs’ status in Europe? They were apparently so dominant before the last 16 started, with six of 16 contenders, but are now getting humiliated at the CL business end.

The Guardian had some analysis. As did The Independent. So did Sky, which was more a description of what happened than analysis. Ditto the BBC.

Meanwhile the New York Times (aka The Athletic) scrutinised events in more depth, summarising with the headline: “The failure of Premier League clubs in Europe owes more to wasted money than fatigue.” James Horncastle’s piece was detailed and extensive and thoughtful, and worth your time.

Today’s read on Sporting Intelligence will:

• Plough part of the same Horncastle furrow in financial terms, as well as pinpoint the workload of the clubs involved. And also consider the amount of competitive games each of the CL last-16 clubs have played since 1 June last year, and tell you which ties are being won by the most “rested” teams.

• It will also try to argue that, where the “busier” clubs are beating those who have played fewer games, it is via the prism of pure financial might.

• It will analyse a new piece of research published this week, about the value of squads across the world, not least among Europe’s elite, and see what that tells us.

• It will update you on last week’s investigation into football “influencer” (journalist?) Fabrizio Romano and just a few of the new lines of inquiry on his activities including but not only: is he JUST a plagiarist?; does he meet Italy’s stringent journalism standards?; what about his new commercial company?; and does he work with agents (he obviously does) but does he get paid by them?

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The Italian football media personality, Fabrizio Romano, self-identifies as “a journalist.” That’s what the 33-year-old told The New York Times in an interview in 2022, saying: “I’m not a star. I am a journalist, and a journalist is an intermediary.”

He has long been controversial, for reasons we’ll get to quickly, but it’s safe to say that whether he’s actually a journalist (he’s not, in any traditional sense), or an “influencer”, or just someone who will do and say whatever someone pays him to say, he has an absolutely huge following on social media.

He has 27 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, and 43 million on Instagram, and 30 million on Facebook, and 21 million on TikTok. Why? Because he posts primarily about football transfer news, some of which is genuinely exclusive (because of his various arrangements with sources and clubs) and much of which has been gleaned from elsewhere, sometimes but far from always attributed to the actual journalists who unearthed the information in the first place.

Romano is a polarising figure and became even more so earlier this week when posting a video lasting 2 minutes and 14 seconds (view it here and screen grab below) effectively endorsing the supposed humanitarian regime of Saudi Arabia, where the de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), orchestrated the 2018 assassination of a journalist critic, Jamal Khashoggi.

Khashoggi was killed and dismembered with a bone saw in Istanbul, by an MBS hit squad, before his remains were incinerated in a barbecue pit.

(Read the US intelligence files on this case for more details, if you can stomach them. The 15-man hit squad were flown to Turkey and back from Saudi Arabia in a private plane, which, by the way, was later used by Newcastle United for warm weather training trips, since Newcastle have effectively become owned by Saudi Arabia via the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the PIF).

OK, no big deal. A bloke in his early 30s, after a decade and more of scrabbling to become an authoritative “ITK” (“in the know”) person in the world of football transfers, has now become so popular that he can charge huge sums to shill for despotic human-rights abusing regimes.

Well done to him, and perhaps that’s just the world we live in.

You will notice that his controversial Saudi advertorial came with an “#ad” hashtag, signalling he had been paid to advertise whatever content he was distributing this time. (Pro-Saudi propaganda in this case).

He has often declared that what he does is advertorial, whether for bookmakers Betway’s ‘Betway Scores’ app (up to 10 times this year already), a Juventus crypto-currency partner, and Pepsi, and FIFA (note the “paid partnership” message on that TikTok), and on and on.

Most of the time he doesn’t state that what he is tweeting or promoting has been paid for, and therein lies one problem among many.

Journalist? Charlatan more like.

Since asking my own social media followers earlier this week who might have any insight into Fabrizio Romano’s world, and how he effectively makes money by saying what paying clients want him to say (often), I have been inundated with examples of his mis-steps and frankly woeful conduct.

As one correspondent and former associate of Romano told me, “probably the most disgusting thing he’s ever done” (in this person’s opinion) was in 2023, in the immediate aftermath of the Turkey-Syria earthquakes that claimed around 60,000 lives.

On his Facebook page, in a post from 2023 (below), Romano told his followers on 7 February 2023 that the footballer Christian Atsu (formerly of Porto, Chelsea, Everton and Newcastle among others) was alive and in hospital after being found with a foot injury and breathing difficulties. Actually Atsu was dead, and his body was found on 18 February.

An actual journalist, with any scintilla of credibility, would have reported that Atsu was alive according to whoever provided that information. But Romano instead stated as fact that Atsu was alive, and in recent days I’ve been told that his family took hope from this declaration from an “authorative” source.

In reality, Romano’s reporting of Atsu being alive was empty bullshit, circulated widely without any checks.

Romano was tragically and categorically wrong, but the fact that he posted it to millions of followers (with ZERO mention of his supposed source, which turned out to be false) gave false hope to the player’s family.

I use this example because yes, it’s extreme, but if you’re going to tell millions of people information on a literally life-and-death matter that is so appallingly wrong, how careful are you going to be about telling them the truth about a football transfer?

Fabrizio Romano and “stories for cash”

Romano became the subject of (mild) media scrutiny in 2024 after it was reported that he was making social media posts for cash, not least in Scandinavia.

In February and March 2024 Idrettspolitikk.no wrote a piece on football clubs in Scandinavia being approached with offers to purchase publicity through the social media channels of Romano. This was a follow-up of a story first highlighted by the Danish newspaper Tipsbladet.

The Danish publication reported on 28 February 2024 that it had reviewed documents showing a company claiming ties to Romano had contacted clubs offering paid promotion through his platforms.

Former marketing director Mehran Amundsen-Ansari of the Norwegian club Vålerenga FC confirmed to Norwegian journalist Andreas Selliaas that he received such an approach in 2022.

“I remember being completely caught off guard and thinking it had to be a joke,” Amundsen-Ansari told Idrettspolitikk.no.

Amundsen-Ansari served four years as marketing director at Vålerenga after joining from HamKam. He has since returned to the Hamar-based club.

According to Amundsen-Ansari, the unusual inquiry was discussed internally at the club, and colleagues decided to continue the conversation to see if the offer was genuine.

“And then there were quite a few emails back and forth,” he said.

He said the [intermediary] company offered services ranging from spreading rumors about players available for transfer to creating buzz around the club itself.

Emails reviewed by Idrettspolitikk.no show the company claiming to act on behalf of Romano and offering clubs a direct line to him.

“You can submit the request directly to Fabrizio Romano here,” one of the emails stated.

According to one message seen by Selliaas, the price for a single Fabrizio social media post was listed at 11,600 Norwegian kroner (around €1,000), plus VAT.

The outreach reportedly came from a representative of the company Memmo, which at the time did most of its business offering personalized video greetings from celebrities.

On Memmo’s website, users could order a personal video greeting from Romano for about 2,065 kroner.

Emails offering promotion also included links to a registration form for video promotions, where clubs could submit a message and preferred publication time. When Selliaas began investigating the case, the form allowed users to book a promotional video for 63,070 kroner.

Amundsen-Ansari said Vålerenga never made use of the service.

“It was never an option for us to pay those amounts,” he told Selliaas.

“In my seven years in top-level football I’ve received many strange inquiries, but never anything like this. This is supposed to be one of the world’s most famous ‘journalists.’ It’s completely unserious,” he said.

He added that the episode changed how he viewed Romano’s work.

“After this incident, I stopped following him on social media,” he said.

Not long before this, Romano reported detailed information about the record transfer of striker Andrej Ilić from Vålerenga to LOSC Lille in a deal reportedly worth up to 50 million kroner.

Asked whether Vålerenga had been contacted by Romano or a company claiming ties to him to promote the transfer, the club’s managing director Svein Graff said: “No, VIF did not receive any such offers.”

Idrettspolitikk.no contacted the Memmo representative who sent the emails to clubs in Norway and Denmark but did not receive a response. Later it was informed that Memmo had changed owners and that the client lists from the former owner was no longer available. They claimed they did not have the opportunity to find out if Romano had a deal with them.

Romano was also contacted and asked whether he had used Memmo for marketing promotional access to clubs or whether he charged for promoting players through his social media channels.

He was sent the following questions on WhatsApp by Selliaas:

• Hi Fabrizio Romano, I am a Norwegian journalist. I have seen emails from Memmo offering a club in Norway to help drive engagement and excite supporters on new players or help promote players for sale from your social media platforms for a price of NOK 11.600+VAT. 1) Do you have/have had a deal with Memmo to organize deals like this? 2) Do you take money to promote players clubs on your social media platforms?

He called Selliaas and said he had zero knowledge of Memmo and did not take money to promote clubs but did not want to comment on this in public. He did not want to help outlets like Idrettspolitikk.no to get coverage, he said. That phone call lasted seven minutes.

When the story came out, he sent Selliaas a message via Idrettspolitikk.no. “Hello Andreas. Hope you are OK. Can you talk? Thanks?”

Selliaas and Romano talked and Romano was not happy about the article and told Selliaas that he was considering taking legal action. That phone call lasted 14 minutes. Since then, there has been no contact between Idrettspolitikk.no and Romano, and no legal action.

Romano: a chancer and bluffer since he was a teenager

After posting on social media earlier this week about Romano shilling for Saudi Arabia, I have been inundated with messages from people who have known him since be began his career as a “journalist” in his teens.

I will protect the identities of these people for now, but in case Fabrizio Romano decides to become litigious, he should know they are willing to go on the record, and have documentary evidence to support their claims about him.

When Romano was 18, he worked for the website FCInterNews, an independent portal of the club he supports, Inter Milan. According to one colleague at that time, Romano “secured” an exclusive interview with a major Inter star … except he didn’t. Romano was, in effect, “catfished”, and did the “interview” with a bluffer pretending to be the star.

When it was published, both the club and the player made public declarations that the player had never spoken to Romano, and, according to the source, Romano always insisted in fact he had done the interview.

“He was completely unrepentant,” a source close to that story tells me. “He can’t acknowledge mistakes. He is a always reluctant to give any credit to people who help him. He considers himself to be a journalist, but actually he does whatever anyone pays him to do.”

Another former colleague of Romano, an Italian journalist, has told Sporting Intelligence that he, and not Romano, coined Romano’s catchphrase “Here we go!”

The colleague had between 300 and 400 Twitter followers at the time that Romano was getting into the thousands, and the latter warned him: “Please don’t use my slogan.”

In a message sent in mid-June 2021, Romano again told the colleague not to use “Here we go”. And the following month, after Romano posted a hugely popular tweet about Eduardo Camavinga moving to Real Madrid (a story his colleague had in fact broken first), Romano, according to that colleague, told him to “be quiet.”

I have contacted Fabrizio Romano for comment and he hasn’t responded.

I have spoken to multiple people about his career that I haven’t reported in this piece, for various reasons.

As a reader you might well be asking: “Why are you doing this?”

All I can say in response to that is Fabrizio Romano is not a journalist, and his shilling for Saudi Arabia this week annoyed me immensely as it (again) debased the “normal” person’s view of what actual journalism should be.

At the annual powwow of Europe’s great and good, UEFA, Real Madrid and the EFC - formerly the ECA, chaired by Qatar’s Al-Khelaifi - had just signed an agreement, signalling Real Madrid’s retreat from the ill-conceived Super League and the reintegration of the Bernabeu club into the European football family.

It was a curious moment. Real Madrid briefed that they had won. UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, echoed Al-Khelaifi’s words and said that football was the winner. From Florentino Perez to the ubiquitous Gianni Infantino, the “football family” demonstrated more unity than ever.

In a dense statement, the three parties wrote that they had “reached an agreement of principles for the well-being of European club football, respecting the principle of sporting merit with emphasis on long-term club sustainability and the enhancement of fan experience through the use of technology.

“This agreement of principles will also serve to resolve their legal disputes related to the European Super League, once such principles are executed and implemented.”

What did that even mean? Real Madrid’s return was framed as the ultimate collapse of the Super League, but few at the UEFA Congress were willing to shine a light on the finer details of the agreement.

A senior UEFA official indicated to Sporting Intelligence that Real Madrid had gained little. They had become isolated, even if the club’s longstanding boss Florentino Perez had been one of the main drivers of the Super League project.

They have returned to the European establishment in different circumstances. The EFC and the joint venture that the EFC now have with UEFA - which is called UC3 - call the shots in the continental club game.

UEFA’s annual financial report discloses as much, saying: “We also transferred the management, sale and delivery of all media, sponsorship and licensing rights to our elite men’s and women’s club competitions to UC3, a UEFA-EFC joint venture.”

Real Madrid and the other elite clubs can therefore now lobby from the inside for any future reformatting of the Champions League. Sources say that one reformatting proposal is that the current 36-team group phase becomes a “two division” phase, with the “biggest” clubs in one 18-team league, and “the rest” in another 18-team league, with more teams from the “big clubs” pool getting to the last 16 than from the “other” pool.

It should be stressed: this is all up for grabs and proposals remain in their infancy. But the bottom line is that Europe’s “biggest” clubs - Real Madrid, Barcelona, PSG, and the major clubs from the Premier League, Bundesliga, and Serie A will have enhanced chances of success, and crucially, enhanced chances of making more money, under any reformatted version of the CL.

The EFC currently takes €25m from UEFA annually, as first reported by The Independent. Those funds, it is understood, come from UEFA club competitions. On page 29, UEFA’s 2024-25 financial report discloses: “€25m was allocated to European Football Clubs (EFC) in accordance with the memorandum of understanding signed by UEFA and EFC.”

In total, over the course of multiple seasons, an estimated €96m has flown from UEFA to the EFC. With this cash going to the EFC rather than to clubs who might (should) have earned it via European competition, it means lots of clubs have lost out on income.

Aston Villa (€631,000) and Celtic (€1.2m) are among dozens and dozens of clubs to miss out on extra revenue because of the money going to the EFC from UEFA. In the 2024-25 season, Scotland’s Heart of Midlothian missed out on €43,000 through their participation in the Conference League while Arsenal, the losing semi-finalists in the Champions League, lost out on €883,000.

A full list of how much each club across has “lost” because of UEFA’s funding of the EFC is available in a downloadable spreadsheet below. The remainder of this piece, and accompanying documents, is available to paying subscribers, without whom this site would not exist.

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It also provided an even greater opportunity for black market betting companies to exploit the popularity of the England team to try and connect with customers. This is effectively illegal activity, not only done without the permission of the England and Wales Cricket Board but in the face of their express opposition.

It appears that no regulatory authority has any appetite or power to stop betting firms that are at best dodgy and at worst downright criminal from using cricket to make untold sums of cash.

The Indian subcontinent has a population of around 1.8 billion people and cricket is king. Betting is, largely, illegal but a huge black market exists. It has been estimated this illegal black market is worth around $100 billion a year.

India’s government has been trying to stamp out advertising by illegal operators for years, but Sri Lanka’s new Gambling Regulatory Authority, which only started work in December, is well off the pace.

England’s recent Sri Lanka tour was awash with adverts from illegal betting operators, such as Babu88, which was an “official match sponsor” for the three T20s in the series. At least that is what Babu88 told its customers in adverts (below).

Babu88 is predominantly aimed at punters in Bangladesh and claims to have a licence from the Malta Gaming Authority (MGA). Except that is a lie. Online betting companies use a dynamic seal for their licences, which takes any potential punters to details about the company, including its ownership.

There is no dynamic seal on the Babu88 site. The MGA confirmed to Sporting Intelligence that Babu88 did not have a licence and promised to put a note on its site warnings users about this.

Proving who owns Babu88 is not easy because there is no licence. The only company spokesperson is head of public relations, Sachin Meta.

Meta does not have any social media profile and his photo is hard to find on publicity for Babu88. A reverse image search found the same image available from stock photo libraries and used on other websites from the Aviator app to another unrelated betting website, Melbet, to a Bangalore-based IT company, NUCOT Academy.

As regular readers of Sporting Intelligence - and investigations by its editor Nick Harris - will know, it’s not uncommon for dodgy companies to use models or actors to pretend to be senior executives in marketing campaigns produced to make them look authentic. Who can forget, for example, that a supposed senior executive for one-time Manchester City commercial partner 8xBet was actually a London-based actor and lingerie model called Jasmine?

Or that one-time Fulham FC commercial partner, Titan Capital Markets, was actually a Ponzi-esque financial scam, and their “chief techniology officer”, Scott Gibson, was actually a singer and voice artist from Malaysia called Daryl who, in real life, was a frontman in a punk band. When Harris exposed this scam in November 2022, Fulham immediately ditched Titan. But so many other scams in sport run unfettered, not least in the gambling sector.

Tracking down ownership of illegal betting companies often leads to dead ends, but another route for Babu88 arrives in …. London.

Companies wanting to protect their brand will typically register it as a trademark. Babu88 was registered with the World Intellectual Property Organisation on October 10 last year by someone called Igor Sheglov. There is no social media profile for anyone of that name, but WIPO describes Sheglov as a UK resident, whose address is near South Kensington underground station in Chelsea.

The UK government trademark database shows Babu88 as first registered in the UK in July 2025, but Babu88 was sponsoring cricket two years before. In 2023, Babu88 had deals with the Montreal Tigers in Canada’s GT20, the Northern Warriors in the Abu Dhabi T10 and Dambulla Aura in Sri Lanka’s Premier League.

These low-profile pop-up tournaments are typically saturated by advertising from betting companies, who are mostly illegal. These private franchise tournaments seem to exist as little more than vehicles for these operators to connect with customers in countries where betting is banned.

Players – particularly those whose national board contracts have elapsed such as Alex Hales or David Warner - are offered significant sums. Marquee players can get $120,000 in some T10 tournaments.

Attracting these players helps the organisers get these games onto international broadcasts, and, as a consequence, provides advertising for these betting companies to viewers in countries where betting is illegal, such as the Indian subcontinent.

The result is often poorly organised events, unpaid players, allegations of match-fixing and an increasing flood of betting sponsorship into cricket.

Last year for Play the Game, I sought to identify as many betting adverts in professional cricket as I could find. Doing so is not easy. Some adverts are announced on social media, but increasingly betting companies do not sponsor cricket, they are now ‘powered up partners’.

Betting operators also manage to sneak in adverts during broadcasts, which has brought companies without a licence to operate in the UK onto TV screens here.

In Pakistan’s series in Sri Lanka in January, adverts for 1xBat – a news gateway site for 1xBet, a Russian owned bookmaker which sponsored Chelsea and Liverpool football clubs until being banned in 2019 for promoting a porn hub – could be seen on UK TV screens. So could Fun88, which sponsors Newcastle Utd.

In May 2025, the British Gambling Commission warned five English football clubs, including Newcastle, about promoting illegal betting companies.

Football has long been swamped by illegal betting sponsorships – and cricket increasingly looks to be following suit.

For the latest Cricket Research Network conference at the University of Cambridge which will happen on 25 February, I’ve gone back to my original research and dug deeper, using image searches and looking at companies which I had no idea were betting operators.

Between 2005 and the end of January 2026, I’ve now found 256 betting sponsorships in professional cricket.

Some were perfectly legitimate. Others may have had licences somewhere, but the Council of Europe’s Macolin Convention defines illegal betting as “any betting activity, type, or operator not allowed under the applicable law of the jurisdiction where the consumer is located.” Under that definition, the majority of those sponsorships were by illegal betting operators.

Tracking down the exact number of sponsorships is impossible as some will only be known if present at the game, but there has been significant growth since Spring 2023, when the International Cricket Council allowed gambling sponsorships at bilateral events, such as England’s 2026 tour of Sri Lanka.

Deals with teams, particularly in pop-up T10 or T20 franchise events, are the most popular but some of cricket’s most well-known players have tied up deals with shady betting operators. These are usually when the chance of a national team call-up is gone and they are travelling the world on the franchise circus or working as a coach or pundit.

England coach Brendan McCullum, for example, was a ‘brand ambassador’ for 22Bet in 2023 and is currently an ambassador for Mostbet.

Other big name sponsorships include Darren Gough, who had a deal with Ladbrokes in 2025 and Jason Roy was working for Krikya in 2024. The crucial difference between these deals is that Ladbrokes has a British gambling licence, while Krikya has an ‘offshore licence’ from the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao.

Under the terms of Ladbrokes’ licences, the company must notify the police and sports bodies over any signs of suspicious betting that could indicate potential manipulation. Ladbrokes will also share the account details if required. This can help in investigations like the probe that sent former Essex bowler Mervyn Westfield to jail for four months in 2012.

Offshore licences however have no such stipulation. Companies with licences from Curaçao or Anjouan – an Indian Ocean island that is part of the Comoros – not only do not have to share this information, but they also do not need to let people know who really the owner is.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crome (UNODC) has warned that Illegal betting is the number one factor fuelling corruption in sports’ with up to $1.7 trillion wagered on illicit betting markets controlled by organized crime.

This is why allowing bilateral series like England’s visit to Sri Lanka to become a vehicle for these companies is a mistake.

The presence of Babu88 was not an aberration. When Harry Brook was stumped in one game, there was a whole gang of illegal bookmakers on show.

The likes of Fun88, 1xBat and Yolo have gone through the hoops of at least getting an offshore licence for appearances but there is no evidence of a licence on any of the sites for Taj777, which like Babu88, is easily accessible in the UK without the use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Taj777 is not even registered as a trademark with WIPO and website Scamadvisor.com warns that Taj777.in could be a scam.

In 2025, India’s Enforcement Directorate announced the arrest of two men over a series of online scams, including gaming fraud, multi-level marketing schemes, fake loan disbursal, and investment frauds. Punit Kumar and Ashish Kakkar were accused of laundering Rs. 4,978 Crore (around £400,000) through a series of circular transactions including www.taj777.com.

Yet Taj777 were all over England’s series in Sri Lanka like a cheap suit, which is not a good look for English cricket – even though the England Cricket Board had nothing to do with this.

With 11 sponsorships identified in January alone, 2026 could be the biggest year yet for illegal betting operators in cricket. Time, perhaps, for a change.

This was a venture sponsored by British Airways and organised in association with the British Olympic Association. The Olympic medal-winning swimmer Sharron Davies was on the trip as “camp mother” and a senior mentor.

A small group of sports writers were invited along to chronicle the project, and I went as a staff writer at The Independent at the time, and wrote about it here.

Mark Lewis-Francis, then also 16, was another of the young hopefuls who would go on to become an Olympian, and indeed an Olympic gold medal winner in the 4 x 100m relay in Athens in 2004.

But of everybody at that camp, it would be Mo Farah who would go on to conquer his sport in the most emphatic fashion.

Widely considered to be one of the greatest distance runners of all time, of any nationality, he won, among many things, gold medals in the 5,000m and 10,000m at London 2012, repeating that feat at Rio 2016, and won gold medals at the athletics world championships in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017.

He also won half marathons and marathons, including the 2018 Chicago marathon in a European record time of 2 hours 5 minutes and 11 seconds.

There was no way that any of us, back in Spring 1999, could possibly have foreseen what a staggeringly successful career Mo would have.

In The Independent we flagged him up (below) as Mohammed Farah, a promising 16-year-old 3,000m and cross country runner , and reported what Mo told me about not being able to speak English very well when he started running at 11. He told me that it wasn’t long before that that he’d moved to the UK from Somalia with his father, leaving his mum and siblings back in Africa.

Fast-forward 13 years and Farah was one of the stars of London 2012, not least “Super Saturday”, voted as the greatest occasion for British Olympians in any Summer Games. Farah won the 10,000m gold that day, adding the 5,000m gold a week later.

“It would mean a great deal to run for Britain,” Mo had told me back in 1999, and my goodness, that certainly worked out.

As I wrote on the original Sporting Intelligence website back in August 2012: “These past two weeks, it’s meant a great deal for Britain that Mo Farah has run for it. Here is the best of contemporary Britain: a 29-year-old black, Muslim immigrant being screamed to victory by an 80,000 strong crowd as he makes the very best of all his extraordinary talent. Twice.”

Many of you reading this will know that Farah’s life and career took lots of twists and turns after 2012. Indeed in a 2022 documentary, The Real Mo Farah, he revealed he wasn’t really Mo Farah, but that he was actually born Hussein Abdi Kahin in March 1983, and that his father was killed in the Somali Rebellion when he was four, and that he was trafficked to the UK and effectively enslaved by a woman he didn’t know when he was nine.

It is an astonishing story, and the documentary was described by one reviewer as a “searing emotional confession” and “a revelation” that left viewers “punchdrunk” and “bewildered”.

To be completely frank, I was certainly bewildered. I don’t doubt for a second that Mo Farah was trafficked, or given his new identity by exploitative people, or that his entire childhood veered from traumatic to surreal.

But I’d also experienced Mo telling previous stories about his life - perhaps understandably - that didn’t turn out to be accurate. And in one case, in a matter of a couple of weeks in summer 2012, I went from thinking that Mo was a national hero and iconic role model to somebody unsure of who he really was.

The rest of today’s article, available for paying subscribers without whom this site would not exist, will explore:

• How a newspaper revealed in 2012 Mo had a secret identical twin brother back in Somaliland, and Mo initially said this wasn’t true, even denying it to a journalist who was his ghostwriter (for a regular newspaper column) and friend.

• How Mo’s agent, at a press conference shortly after the 2012 Olympics and the day after Mo’s wife Tania had given birth to twins, blamed me for the story about Mo’s secret twin.

• How Mo’s coach, Alberto Salazar, was banned in 2019 for four years for doping offences involving athletes he coached.

• How Mo, in trying to distance himself from Salazar around the same time, claimed he wasn’t sharing an apartment with Salazar earlier in his career (in 2012) when an eye witness said they were, and that there were doses of banned testosterone sitting on the kitchen counter in the apartment that Mo and Salazar were sharing. Multiple sources, including Mo’s social media and autobiography, said Mo was away from his family and sharing an apartment with Salazar at that time.

• How one of Mo’s training partners in rural Kenya in 2013 and 2014 was filmed buying EPO, claiming it was for athlete associates, but after being arrested, rescinded his whole story.

Read more

There are numerous other links to sport that I hadn’t spotted and this short piece today is postscript No1 to the original piece. Other postscripts may follow as various sources furnish me with more information about figures close to both FIFA and Epstein at various points in the recent past.

Today’s update relates to the majority owner of AS Monaco of France’s Ligue 1, a Russian oligarch called Dmitry Rybolovlev (below, pictured in 2012).

He has had close links to US President Donald Trump for years, and his name occurs 21 times in the Epstein files at the DOJ website.

As I wrote yesterday, it will take days, or perhaps even weeks or months for investigative teams to trawl through the three million new documents, 180,000 hitherto unseen images and 2,000 new videos relating to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in August 2019, aged 66.

But as one Sporting Intelligence subscriber suggested to me, it’s possible that AI tools can speed up that process.

Taking that on board, I have used AI to further interrogate the DOJ Epstein database about Rybolovlev, a man who owns a major European football club, currently languishing in mid-table in France but also still in this season’s Champions League.

And this is what the AI concludes:

The relationship between Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev and Jeffrey Epstein, as revealed in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) documents released in 2025 (often referred to as the “Epstein files”), appears to be indirect rather than direct or personal.

The files do not indicate any evidence of meetings, communications, or collaborations between the two men. Instead, Epstein references Rybolovlev in a handful of 2019 emails as part of broader conspiracy-laden speculations about financial dealings involving Donald Trump, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), and potential money laundering or payoffs.

These emails were sent shortly before Epstein’s arrest on sex-trafficking charges in July 2019 and his subsequent death in August 2019. Below, I’ll outline the key revelations from the documents, focusing on Epstein’s mentions of Rybolovlev, the context, and the implications he drew.

Background context from The Epstein files highlight Epstein’s long-standing social and business ties to Trump, which dated back to the late 1980s and included shared social circles in Palm Beach, Florida.

A key flashpoint in their relationship was a 2004 bidding war over a luxurious oceanfront mansion called Maison de l’Amitié in Palm Beach. Epstein and Trump competed aggressively for the property, which was being sold out of bankruptcy. Trump ultimately won with a $41.35 million bid, reportedly outmaneuvering Epstein, who had initially led with $37.25 million. This incident is cited in the files as a possible catalyst for a falling out between the two men, with Epstein later insinuating in emails that Trump may have retaliated against him by tipping off authorities about his sex crimes (local police began investigating Epstein shortly after the sale).

Four years later, in 2008, Trump sold the mansion to Rybolovlev for $95m —more than double his purchase price—despite Rybolovlev never living in it and eventually demolishing it. This transaction has long fueled speculation about money laundering, as Rybolovlev was a fertilizer magnate with ties to Russian oligarch networks, and the sale occurred amid Trump’s financial difficulties post-2008 recession. The DOJ files do not provide new evidence of illegality in the deal but amplify Epstein’s 2019 theories about it.

Notably, this sale was briefly examined during Robert Mueller’s 2017-2019 investigation into Trump-Russia ties but yielded no charges.

Epstein’s emails portray Rybolovlev not as a personal acquaintance but as a figure in a web of international intrigue. Epstein speculated that Rybolovlev’s actions were part of hidden financial schemes benefiting Trump, possibly involving self-dealing or payoffs. He described Rybolovlev as someone who “knows all,” implying insider knowledge of Trump’s alleged secrets or corrupt dealings.

However, the files offer no substantiation for these claims, and the DOJ’s 2025 memo explicitly states there is no credible evidence of Epstein blackmailing prominent individuals or maintaining a “client list” for such purposes.

Specific Emails Mentioning Rybolovlev

The most direct revelations come from Epstein’s 2019 correspondence with author Michael Wolff (who interviewed Epstein extensively for his books on Trump). These emails, part of the DOJ-released tranche, show Epstein using Rybolovlev as a puzzle piece in theories about Trump’s finances and foreign influence. Epstein’s writing style is often rambling, typo-filled, and cryptic, reflecting his attempts to leak narratives to Wolff while reframing himself as a victim of Trump’s machinations.

Key excerpts:

• January 15, 2019 (to Wolff, cc’d to Kathryn Ruemmler, a former White House counsel): Epstein outlines a theory that Rybolovlev may have been “buying the house from himself” through Trump as a front man. He parallels this to Trump’s business model of licensing his name for real estate deals owned by others, suggesting it was a way to launder or hide funds. Epstein references a 1997 art auction (the Ganz Collection, sold for $206 million) as an analogous example where hidden owners benefited. He implies this setup allowed Trump to earn fees while disguising true ownership, and ties it to the 2004 mansion bidding war, claiming Trump “set him up” afterward.

  news.artnet.com

• February 1, 2019 (to Wolff): A follow-up where Epstein provides “behind-the-scenes” details on the 2004 auction rivalry with Trump over Maison de l’Amitié. He sends it with a casual “have fun” note, continuing to insinuate that the fallout led to his legal troubles. Rybolovlev is mentioned indirectly as the eventual buyer, reinforcing Epstein’s suspicion of the 2008 sale as suspicious.

  news.artnet.com

• May 30, 2019 (exchange with Wolff): This is the most explicit mention, linking Rybolovlev to both the mansion and a high-profile art deal. Epstein writes: “is it a coincidence that the russian that bought the house in palm beach and knows all, is the same guy that sold a painting last year to mbs for 450 million dollars. that was only worth 1.5m?” The painting is Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which Rybolovlev sold at Christie’s in 2017 for a record $450 million to an anonymous buyer later revealed as MBS (or a proxy). Epstein claims his “art guy” said the painting “wasn’t very good” and was vastly overvalued. When Wolff asks if MBS was “paying him [Rybolovlev] off? Why? Ideas?”, Epstein replies: “reminder trump overuled congress on yemen. maybe as a favor to trump. in exchange for yemen and iran support. . smells doesnt it?” He suggests the art sale was a covert payoff tied to Trump’s foreign policy favors for Saudi Arabia (e.g., overriding congressional blocks on arms sales amid the Yemen conflict). Wolff responds enthusiastically: “Starting to smell sweet, the way you put it!” Epstein adds details on the painting’s provenance, noting Rybolovlev bought it in 2013 for $127 million via dealer Yves Bouvier, who had acquired it for $80 million.

These emails are framed in the files as Epstein’s attempts to influence public narratives about Trump, possibly to deflect from his own scandals. Wolff later described Epstein as obsessed with such theories, using him as a source for books like Siege: Trump Under Fire (2019), where similar ideas about the mansion sale appear.

Broader Implications and Recent Developments

The DOJ files emphasize that Epstein’s speculations about Rybolovlev lack evidence and align with his pattern of promoting conspiracy theories to journalists.

No documents suggest Epstein and Rybolovlev ever interacted directly—Epstein seems to have known of him only through public reports and his Trump connections. However, the files tie into larger themes of transnational oligarch networks, with Epstein positioning Rybolovlev as a “go-between” in Russia-U.S. dealings.

In a 2025 update noted in analyses of the files, Rybolovlev appeared as part of Russia’s delegation in Ukraine peace talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, sitting across from Trump’s team. This has renewed interest in Epstein’s 2019 claims, as it echoes his theories about Rybolovlev’s ties to MBS and potential influence operations. One document excerpt in the files speculates that Trump’s “long business relations with Russia” remain active, reinforced by Rybolovlev’s role in such talks, and frames U.S.-Russia negotiations over Ukraine as a “division of spoils” benefiting oligarchs like him.

Again, this is interpretive rather than evidentiary.

The DOJ has a portal where anybody - including you - can search this mammoth cache of material to see who appears in it, whether in a significant and potentially criminal way, or, much more likely, is mentioned in passing.

To do your own search, go to this DOJ link, confirm that you are aged 18 or older, and then search for whichever person or subject you are interested in. But be aware that many of the findings will be completely banal, for example coming up with links to newsletters or news alerts that Epstein subscribed to that contained the name or subject you were looking for.

For example I asked the DOJ’s “full Epstein library” to update me on everything it had on David Beckham. There were 13 results! And they are ALL media reports about Beckham from sources Epstein subscribed to, none of them particularly interesting let alone scandalous.

A search for Richard Branson, on the other hand, turns up 644 results, many of which are emails between Branson (or his staff) and Epstein (or his staff), and while potentially salacious, fall some miles short of evidence of wrong-doing by the Virgin empire founder.

Search for Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly and you’ll find 80 results, many of which also involve Peter Mandelson, although there is far too little information to understand why, precisely.

Search for the man formerly known as Prince Andrew, or indeed Mandelson, and yes, you’ll get a load of stuff that looks a bit more murky. OK, a lot more murky. But it will take weeks, or even months, for any news organisation to properly digest these new millions of pieces of information and work out who did what (or not) and when, in the orbit of Epstein, and work out whether that was illegal, or just morally wrong, or completely innocent.

This preamble is meant only to attempt to explain that “document dumps” can be both a journalistic blessing and a curse. You need lots of time, and forensic attention, and then loads more follow-up time when leads seem promising, to actually get to the point where you might be able responsibly to write a story that matters, instead of something that might seem great (salacious) but doesn’t actually hold up to scrutiny.

Today, this piece will take you through my own experience of five “document dumps” relating to sport, and detail how I went about interrogating them, and explore what, if anything, I was able to write after doing so.

Before we get to those five, I’ve done a few sports searches on the latest Epstein “dump.” A German colleague of mine, Jens Weinreich, has already found some connections in the latest documents between Epstein and Olympic figures related to 2028 summer Games in Los Angeles.

I started with a simple search for “FIFA” in the new Epstein “dump” and came up with 73 hits, and arguably the most interesting of those were direct emails between Epstein and a person known as “Jabor Y”.

This person is believed to be Jabor Yousef Jassim Al Thani (or Sheikh Jabor bin Yousef bin Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani), a businessman and member of the Qatari royal family.

If you cast your mind back to 27 May 2015, law enforcement officials raided hotels in Zurich and arrested numerous football officials, kick-starting the 2015 FIFA corruption case, and signalling the beginning of the end of Sepp Blatter’s FIFA.

Then on 28 May 2015, Epstein emailed “Jabor Y” (with whom he frequently communicated about various geopolitical issues, not least around the Middle East), and told him: “If the fifa issue requires legal help, let me know.”

“Jabor” replies: “I will do. Thanks my friend.”

That email can be seen below, and also here in the DOJ document dump.

What exactly might Epstein have been able to do for Qatar or Qatar-related parties as FIFA burned? Who knows?

The other FIFA / Epstein material includes multiple communications between Nicole Junkermann (a football “influencer”) and Epstein; and talk about an apparently Russia-related “Rostov”, involving videos that have now been deleted by YouTube “for violating YouTube's policy on nudity or sexual content.” Rostov in this case was almost certainly a place, not a person, but again, it’s not certain.

I can’t tell you much more, because it’s so opaque and there are few clear leads to go on.

But anyway, today’s piece isn’t about Epstein’s case and that docs dump, but rather about five previous document dumps relating to sport.

The rest of this article, available to paying subscribers without whom this site would not exist, will detail:

• The “evidentiary package” of evidence of state-sponsored doping in Russia, which has since been removed from the internet but which I’ll show you how to access these days anyway. I spent two weeks solid going through this in 2017 and landed a scoop as a result.

• The 'Football Leaks’ dump of documents, acquired mainly but not only by Rui Pinto, and largely (but not only) reported by Der Spiegel. The Manchester City case grabbed many headlines but it was far, far, far from the only material published.

• The USADA document dump of the case against Lance Armstrong, published in 2012, which brought down the 7-times Tour de France winner and set in train multiple cycling investigations, including one by me that started in 2012 and really only ended in 2024 when I published my full findings on here.

• The IAAF blood database leak that provided detailed information on 12,000+ blood tests on international-level track & field athletes between 2001 and 2012, with the results giving strong indications about which athletes were cheating. If you are a subscriber, you’ll be able to download that full database as an XLS below and then interrogate it by named athlete, nationality and blood results.

• The “Fancy Bears” leaks of alleged dodgy behaviour by mainly western sportspeople, leaked by Russian hackers for PR reasons.

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“The Independent has also been told the independent panel of three judges have not yet made a decision, as the club themselves revealed with the publication of their annual accounts in December.”

Miguel is one among a handful or so of reporters who have closely and persistently followed City’s run-ins with various football regulatory bodies over the past decade and more.

Honorable mentions must also go to Tariq Panja of the New York Times (formerly of Bloomberg), Rob Harris of Sky News (formerly of The Associated Press), Martyn Ziegler of The Times (formerly of the Press Association) and Matt Slater of The Athletic / NYT (formerly of the BBC and also the PA).

Any reporter with any real depth of knowledge about UEFA’s FFP, and particularly City’s relationship with FFP and infringements of it, and knowledge of City’s resistance to transparency on these and related matters since their initial €60m fine and various other sanctions in 2014, will be aware this is tricky territory to cover.

On the one hand, City effectively shut up shop on answering questions in around 2014, with some notable exceptions within the club, their parent company CFG, and a few folk inside some of their controversial commercial partners, none of whom, for obvious reasons, have ever wanted to go on the record. (City have also tried to intimidate reporters doing their jobs).

On the other hand, City have a fan base within which many fans, perhaps a minority, but a vocal and aggrieved minority, continue to believe they are victims of what is effectively a conspiracy against them, led by a cartel of rival clubs, most typically known as “the red cartel”, and that any misfortunes they have suffered in terms of regulatory accountability, stems from this.

That’s nonsense, obviously, as you’ll read in this piece today, with supporting evidence that it’s nonsense. There isn’t and never has been a conspiracy against City, a club like all others who freely signed up to UEFA’s FFP when it was introduced as part of their being allowed to play in European competitions.

It is. of course, an entirely reasonable position to take that the original FFP was flawed. Readers of Sporting intelligence since 2010 will know of the genesis of FFP. The architects were not a cartel, but principally eight independent experts under the chairmanship of a former Prime Minister of Belgium, Jean-Luc Dehaene. One of the experts was the late Brian Lomax, the much admired founding father of the Supporters' Trust movement in Britain.

Lomax told me a mere 16 years ago, back in January 2010, as they debated how to formulate FFP, how he'd like to tackle debt but legally it would be hard to enforce. Eventually they came up with a licensing system that would encourage good practice, allowed for unlimited spending on stadiums and other facilities, academies, youth development, women's football and community projects, and allowed 'benefactor funding' on top, within limits.

City failed FFP at the first hurdle. Making a conscious decision to spend massively more than they could afford within the rules and believing they could make their books look legitimate with creative accountancy, they failed in that aim.

It wasn’t their last run-in with the authourties, and it led to a punishment that also wouldn’t be their last. Miguel’s piece has again raised the issue of how much longer we might have to wait for a verdict on City’s “115 case”, being prosecuted by the Premier League for almost three years, since February 2023, and that after four and a half years of investigations.

This piece today, available in full with lots of supporting documentary evidence to paying subscribers - without whom this site wouldn’t exist - addresses 12 key questions will we continue to wait.

Those 12 questions are:

• When can we expect a verdict?

• Which of 115 charges (grouped below) will most likely end in guilty convictions, and why?

  

• What are the possible outcomes, depending on the verdicts, for both City and the Premier League?

• When were financial irregularities or rule-breaking by City under Sheikh Mansour first picked up, and what were they?

• Defenders of City say it is normal business practice to be innocent but agree to a €60m fine (initially, later reduced to “only” €20m) for doing absolutely nothing wrong. Is that really true / feasible, or just pro-City propaganda?

• What does a case like the illegal signing of under-age Brahim Diaz by City in 2013 tell us about City’s integrity and willingness to stray into areas that, being generous, might be described as grey?

• City were charged again by UEFA in 2020, and banned from the Champions League for two years. The ban was later overturned and instead City were given an intial €30m fine for non-cooperation in the case, later reduced to “only” €10m. What did we learn from this process?

• Did a senior Manchester City official lie under oath to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in the appeal process, which ended with City’s ban being overturned? And why won’t City ever address documentary evidence that he did?

• Were the “leaked emails” that formed part of UEFA’s case against City, and part of the Premier League’s case, real, and legitimate and accessible in arbitration and court hearings?

• What are the most uncomfortable questions about alleged wrong-doing City have always refused to answer?

• Why have the vast majority of the details of the Premier League versus Manchester City in the “115 case” remained so secret?

• What are the best case scenarios and the worst case scenarios for the Premier League and for City in the 115 case?

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It can be argued that English football’s governing body has been pursuing low-hanging fruit, and mostly dealing with these cases with small fines or simple warnings, while doing little to nothing to deal with an ingrained culture of gambling within the professional game.

Betting has been wholly normalised in English football, from front-of-shirt ads for betting firms, most of them foreign, to ubiquitous pitch-side hoardings for foreign companies where the target consumer is living in another country. Some of the operators paying for this hoarding exposure have been linked to organised crime and people trafficking and the exploitation of children.

The FA has some of the strictest betting rules in the global game and players and staff down to the eighth tier of the English game – known as Step 4 and covering the bottom of the Isthmian, Northern and Southern leagues – are banned from betting on any football, anywhere in the world.

Analysis of the monthly charges brought by the FA and published on its website up to the end of last year show a total of 274 charges for betting-related offences against players and staff who placed nearly 200,000 bets. Fines of £491,000 were issued.

Three quarters of the charges were against non-league players and staff, who placed 148,968 bets and were fined a total of £152,418.

A player playing for a club in the first qualifying round of the FA Cup who then bets on the final is, legally speaking, betting on their own game. The FA are rarely that harsh. Depending on the circumstances and the response when charged, some players and staff are let off with a warning and fines as low as £75 to £100.

An exception was made last Autumn for James Byrne of Yate Town, who was fined £48,939 for a nine-year betting spree before being caught and ordered to repay all his winnings.

The introduction of these draconian rules came after a number of incidents at non-league level, some of which were chronicled by Moses Swaibu in his recent book and award-winning podcast, ‘Fixed: My Secret Life as a Match Fixer.’ Formerly of Bromley and Whitehawk, Swaibu was sentenced to 16 months in prison for his part in a 2013 non-league fixing scandal.

This site covered the Swaibu case in detail - and covered related match-fixing in general in more depth - in pieces you can read here and here.

Since the introduction of the current rules in 2014, the non-league game has been largely free of scandals but there has been a steady stream of charges against players and staff for betting.

The FA has identified a number of clubs where there was clearly, judging by the amount of people charged, a betting culture, such as Bowers & Pitsea, where nine people were charged between 2020 and 2021.

Charging so many players is possible because betting companies with a licence from the British Gambling Commission are obliged to report any incidents of suspicious betting, which can indicate potential match fixing, and evidence that players and staff are betting.

These betting companies have account level data for those placing bets, which can be cross referenced with registrations to help the FA catch those breaking the rules.

What the data shows is that there is clearly an issue with non-league players and staff betting on football, but that can hardly be a surprise. Players at this level are swamped by betting adverts whenever they watch live coverage of their own game at a higher level.

The Premier League is drenched with betting adverts and while the Gambling Commission has ruled that clubs cannot feature betting adverts on the front of club shirts from 2026-27, this can continue on sleeves and hoardings.

As this recent story on investigative website Josimar shows, the Premier League and the Gambling Commission plans to take no more action despite calls from multiple groups from fans to charities and pressure groups such as the Coalition to End Gambling Ads.

As Sporting Intelligence editor Nick Harris explored during an investigation for the Mail on Sunday in January 2023 (below), a wide range of dodgy betting companies who then sponsored Premier League football clubs, were linked to a British tech company that had effectively been controlled by a jailed Chinese billionaire with ties to criminal triad gangs.

Alvin Chau, now 51, was sentenced to 18 years in prison in January 2023 in Macau, China, after being found guilty of more than 100 charges relating to organised crime and illegal gambling activity exceeding £85.7billion.

An investigation by the MoS found links between the Isle of Man-based firm, TGP, which runs betting brand websites and provides all of them with their UK betting licences, and Chau.

The FA, which does not have a betting partner and is not directly responsible for the regulation of gambling adverts, is in an invidious position as players clearly should not be betting on their own matches and are quite correctly enforcing their own rules.

There are no betting adverts in non-league football but the sponsor of the Trident League - the umbrella organisation for the Isthmian, Northern and Southern Leagues – is Pitching In, a corporate social responsibility exercise by betting giant, Ladbrokes.

Below the eighth tier, or Step 4 as its categorised in the FA criteria, players and staff are only banned from betting on their own games, which is also reasonable, but why can players bet on this level in the first place?

This is where the FA finds itself on stickier ground.

The availability of bets on elements within a game, such as the timing of a goals to corners or yellow cards – known as in-play betting, or prop bets in the USA – have surged in recent years, driven by the growth in smartphones.

These types of bets are more susceptible to manipulation as it is far easier to persuade a player get a yellow card on purpose than fix an entire result. This was what the FA accused West Ham’s Lucas Paqueta of in a case that ultimately failed to secure a conviction despite costing millions.

Because live coverage of games is generally delayed (albeit by a few seconds), betting operators can lose money from in-play bets if punters are in a ground and get a bet on before the live odds are updated.

To avoid this happening, betting companies pay for live data, which is collected in person by scouts sent by data companies.

At the top of the game, data companies pay for exclusive licences. Even in the National League and the two regional divisions below, North and South, where many players are full-time, there is an exclusive licence held by Genius Sports.

As betting companies typically want to be able to offer bets round the clock, those companies excluded from these exclusive contracts must go looking further down the non-league pyramid for games for live data that they can collect and sell to betting companies.

As a result, games in the seventh and eighth tier are routinely on global betting markets, particularly midweek, when there are fewer higher-level games being played.

Clubs at this level do not want their matches on shady Russian or Asian betting markets. As part of one award-winning investigation that I worked on, The Devil in the Data, the Trident League polled clubs about the issue in 2023.

The survey found that between half and three-quarters of clubs are not aware that data scouts are attending their games yet between 29% and 44% claim to be aware their matches are available for live in-play betting.

Even when scouts were at games collecting data, they virtually never identified themselves. Scouts – or statisticians, as they are sometimes described in job adverts – often pay for entry at grounds to avoid detection then claim the cost of the ticket back from their employers.

The FA know all this goes on because the same data companies that collect and sell this data for betting also – in an astonishing conflict of interest - have separate integrity operations, which work with the FA on education and investigation.

In addition to banning betting at non-league level, the FA could also ban data scouts. This would drastically reduce the amount of in-play betting on non-league football and therefore also cut the chances of manipulation.

Or the FA could at least tell clubs what is going on - but instead choose to do neither. Instead of trying to protect the lower levels of the game from exploitation, the game’s guardians – riven by conflicts of interest and driven by commercial incentives – are looking to cash in.

This was epitomised by FIFA’s recent agreement for the collection of betting data with Stats Perform, which will mean even more low level games around the world will end up on betting markets.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

One project I worked on called Play Local, Fix Global looked at how low down data scouts were collecting data from in a number of countries from Belgium to England. The project inspired journalists in other European countries to apply the same approach to their local leagues. This resulted in an award-winning documentary, Attack on Amateur Football, by ARD, which subsequently prompted non-league clubs in Germany to start finding scouts at games and throwing them out.

In England, many people staffing non-league clubs are volunteers, who do not have sufficient time on match days to try and find data scouts. Instead, they are busy selling tickets, programmes and food or acting as stewards and many do not understand how data from these scouts is fuelling betting markets.

The irony is that all those non-league players caught up in the FA’s dragnet could easily avoid censure.

Instead of betting with a licenced UK betting company, the players could place their bets with some of the myriad companies being advertised at Premier League clubs.

Most of these companies like 8xBet or BJ88, do not have licences in the UK but can be easily accessed with a Virtual Private Network, which bypasses geo-blocking, as the FA and Gambling Commission are well aware of.

These companies do have licences but usually from places like Anjouan or Curacao, which do not offer the same player protections as British licenced companies.

These offshore companies on Premier League shirts do not provide details of suspicious betting and will certainly not be sharing account level details with the FA of non-league players betting on their own games. Below, for example, are screenshots of dodgy betting firm 1xBet offering odds on minor league games in England last night (Wednesday).

How offshore operators such as 1xBet, which was thrown out of England in 2019 for running a porn hub, get in-play data to offer bets on low-level English non-league games remains a mystery and is not a question the FA is likely to ask any time soon of their data company partners.

Additional reporting by Nick Harris

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It was more than five years ago that City were then banned for two years from the Champions League for other financial cheating (The Times report here; ESPN here; BBC here; New York Times here), before having that sanction overturned, and escaping with a fine of “only” €10m for not co-operating with any of the investigations into their behaviour.

It is more than eight years since the Premier League opened an investigation into 115 charges (and more) of alleged financial cheating by City, and amost three years since City were charged with 115 (and more) breaches of financial rules.

And it’s been more than a year since the completion of a 10-week hearing when City presented what they said was a “comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence” to support their claim of innocence, and we are still yet to have a verdict.

If you are interested in detail then it’s probably worth reading this piece from November last year which came with lots of downloadable documents that supported the claims that City did in fact make the extraordinary sums alleged in Football Leaks documents (as below) from sponsorship deals with Abu Dhabi entities. Those allegations and documents are available in full via that piece.

If you want more general background into City’s alleged financial cheating over more than a decade then I suggest you briefly look here and here.

But today’s piece is something different. It’s a story of how Manchester City have set out to intimidate and effectively bully reporters (specifically me in this case) who have consistently produced investigative journalism since 2014 that has asked questions about their dubious financial practices.

More specifically, today’s piece looks at a single newspaper article from 2023 (by me, for the Mail on Sunday) - which, on the face of it, was relatively innocuous - which asked questions about the financial advantages that a multi-club organisation (MCO) such as the the City Football Group (wiki page here, their own page here) might gain from being an MCO.

The rest of today’s piece, for Sporting Intelligence paid subscribers, without which this site could not exist, includes:

• My initial email to Man City in May 2023, asking basic questions about transfers of players between CFG entities. I had already extensively researched this but wanted City / CFG to give me guidance if I was wrong, or correct me when open source information was erroneous. This should give you an insight into how responsible and diligent reporters behave, fact-checking and asking questions about stories before we publish.

• The initial threatening response from City, which wasn’t from the club but from a law firm, sent to my bosses and effectively trying to get me sacked for asking questions (!!), without answering my questions.

• A second letter from a law firm on behalf of City, after we published the article in question, basically saying it was total rubbish, but actually providing information that showed my initial research was solid.

• My response to the Mail on Sunday’s lawyers, explaining how I had gone to great lengths to get accurate information for the article, and how City had declined to answer any questions about the subject, pre-publication. I also told the MoS lawyers that City would NOT want us to publish the “accurate” information they gave us, because they were obtuse and just trying to get me sacked. “That would be weird,” one of my paper’s senior lawyers told me. And guess what? When asked by the MoS lawyers if we could use the club’s own figures to update the article online, City refused! No further action happened and my original article about Manchester City “gaming the system” remains unchanged on the Mail website. City simply wanted to intimidate me and persuade my bosses I needed to be sacked.

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The cheapest ticket for the 2026 final is £3,129, or about six times as much as tickets for the 2022 World Cup final.

The disdain for supporters around the globe who might hope to travel to the event is plain, and disgusting. As the Football Supporters’ Association in the UK put it so succinctly: “The prices set for the 2026 World Cup are scandalous, a step too far for many supporters who passionately and loyally follow their national sides at home and abroad.

“Everything we feared about the direction in which FIFA wants to take the game was confirmed – Gianni Infantino only sees supporter loyalty as something to be exploited for profit…

“This is a tournament that is supposed to be celebrated by the world, where fans of all nations come together for the love of football. FIFA have decided to make it all about the money and the elite who can afford it.”

The direction for pricing comes from the top, specifically Infantino. And while I have thought this for a while, and know that many others agree, it’s time to say it again: both as a FIFA president and as a human being, Infantino is worse than Sepp Blatter.

We all know that Blatter had many faults, presiding as he did over arguably the most corrupt sporting electorate in global sporting history. Key ExCo members from his time in charge included serial criminals Jack Warner, Chuck Blazer, Nicolas Leoz, Julio Grondona, Ricardo Teixeira and multiple others.

Blatter’s No2 Jerome Valcke was a ticket tout on an industrial scale on Blatter’s watch. Blatter awarded himself massive dodgy bonuses, and as FIFA president was an unreconstructed dinosaur when it came to the women’s game.

So yes, absolutely, Blatter had a rap sheet. But in 17 years as FIFA president he grew the global game, he cared about the sport itself, and knew he had to keep it accessible. And, crucially he was well aware of the power he held, and and when world leaders and senior politicians came to him wanting things, as they so often did, his first question to himself was: “What can these people do for football?”.

Infantino appears to function on the basis of “What can I do for these people, and what will I get out of it?”.

The company Infantino has kept since being elected in 2016 speaks volumes about the man, from the grifting butcher Salt Bae, to warmonger Vladimir Putin, to serial human rights-abusing leaders in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, to Donald Trump, and even to supposed football “heroes” such as Samuel Eto’o, who today, all evidence suggests, is yet another corrupt and thieving football administrator, who Infantino endorses.

Today’s piece, the remainder of which is for Sporting Intelligence’s paying subscribers, without whom this site could not exist, will delve into all this and more, including:

• Why Infantino’s reign as FIFA president came near to ending almost as soon as it began as allegations swirled about corruption and impropriety. I’ll publish below the internal FIFA ethics memo laying out the case against him.

• How the factors that led to Infantino coming to power included one of his election rivals, Sheikh Salman, facing corruption and human rights abuse allegations (published by, erm, me, in the days before the election), which led to legal letters (to me) from Sheikh Salman, which I’ll also publish today.

• Specific scandals that Infantino’s FIFA in effect helped to cover up to appease bad people, including doping in Putin’s Russia, and the deaths of thousands of migrant workers in Qatar.

• The continuing mystery / scandal of how Saudi Arabia came to win the hosting rights to the 2034 men’s World Cup, at exactly the same time Infantino needed someone to fund his new and expanded Club World Cup, which ended up being bankrolled, in effect by … Saudi Arabia.

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I’ll make it available in full below but it was notable for several reasons, not least because:

• It ran to three pages but was completely half-arsed. Generally speaking, the longer the legal letter, the poorer the case of the person sending it. If they have a real case they keep it short and make a direct threat. My first major legal was in the 1990s from Carter Ruck on behalf of Ken Bates and it ran for pages and we won. (Bates was one of the most litigious people in world sport in the late 1990s, and later we’d settle our disputes with long slanging matches over the phone on Sunday mornings, but he always loved sending a legal letter).

• RA’s 2023 letter made claims largely so baseless (Abramovich hadn’t been forced to sell Chelsea; Abramovich wasn’t an ally of Putin; the UK government were the people stopping the proceeds of the club going to the victims of Putin’s war of aggression) that they were laughable.

• Abramovich’s people hadn’t responded at all to pre-publication questions, and when confronted with a post-publication response from me that said, in effect “Your legal letter was bullshit”, they let it lie.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here is the story that prompted the legal letter from June 2023 (TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO), saying that the proceeds from the sale of Chelsea might never reach the victims of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Abramovich had a key role in that.

NB: Not a penny of the proceeds of the sale of Chelsea has yet reached ANY victim of Putin’s illegal war, anywhere.

Here is how that 2023 story it looked in print.

The remainder of this piece will go into detail about why my June 2023 reporting was accurate and has since been proved to be so; and why Abramovich’s legal threat of the same period was tenuous, and remains so; and how the supposed £2.3bn from the sale of Chelsea will in fact NEVER get to the victims of the war, because other Abramovich companies will snaffle the majority of it first.

Today’s article will also tell another story about another piece I wrote in 2023, about Manchester United, that caused MASSIVE damage to Man Utd’s share price. How massive? Erm, a £600m loss in a single day, certainly the most damaging story I’ve EVER written in 30 years, in terms of financial damages.

But this story will also tell how I never received a single word of rebuke from Man Utd, let alone a legal letter.

Why? Because my story was fundamentally true, and some people, even the Glazers, realise that fundamentally true journalism has a place in society, and we all have to play by the laws of the land, and the courts, and the stock markets.

Why am I writing this now? Good question - and if you haven’t been following then it’s because in recent weeks it’s because of a piece I wrote in late October, about Bradley Wiggins’ latest autobiography, and his new “Jiffy-gate” theory and how covering British cycling had led me to receive multiple threatening legal letters.

Then in the revelatory piece I wrote about Blackburn eight days ago, I said: “And in the coming weeks and months I intend to publish loads of legal threats sent on behalf of state-owned dodgy football clubs, and human rights-abusing nations, and a corrupt bribe-paying Sheikh, and Mo Farah, and household-name cyclists, and other Olympians.

“This won’t be so much a peak behind the curtain as a no-holds barred exercise in telling you, the general reader, the extent to which dodgy and corrupt people will go to make sure you don’t know what malfeasance they are perpetrating.

“I think I might even publish some stuff relating to Roman Abramovich. Did you really think he ever intended the proceeds of the sale of Chelsea to be spent on the victims of Putin’s war on Ukraine? Of course not. But that’s for another day.”

Anyway, it’s another day now, Tuesday, and today is the day for some Abramovich revelations. The remainder of today’s article is for paying subscribers.

You’ll get the Roman Abramovich legal threat and my response and the fallout.

You’ll get the background to my wiping £600m off Man Utd’s shares, and their lack of response, and their previous lack of response to massively significant stories because their attitude always seems akin to the Royal Family, ie: “never apologise, never explain.”

Even when your manager is apparently linked to a couple of mistresses.

And more.

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And then in late October, I wrote about Bradley Wiggins’ latest autobiography, and his new “Jiffy-gate” theory and how covering British cycling had led me to receive multiple threatening legal letters that scared various editors into not publishing true stories about dodgy and / or corrupt behaviour in sport.

In the latter piece I asked you, Sporting Intelligence’s subscribers, whether you would be interested in reading about some of the the challenges that some journalists face, in terms of legal threats, in trying to report stories. Lots of you said yes.

Today’s piece therefore combines more detail - and revelations, and documentary evidence - about the Blackburn saga under Indian ownership as it first unfolded from 2010 into 2011 and 2012 - plus the legal threats that were used by certain parties to try to stop my reporting at the time.

And yes, that does mean I’m going to publish multiple legal letters in this piece as well as various hitherto secret contracts signed during this period.

If you have never really paid any attention to what has happened at Blackburn since late 2010, or don’t care, fair enough. I’ll try to keep it simple.

What follows is really a document dump of incendiary material that was never meant to see the light of day, but frankly I can’t see now why it shouldn’t.

And in the coming weeks and months I intend to publish loads of legal threats sent on behalf of state-owned dodgy football clubs, and human rights-abusing nations, and a corrupt bribe-paying Sheikh, and Mo Farah, and household-name cyclists, and other Olympians.

This won’t be so much a peak behind the curtain as a no-holds barred exercise in telling you, the general reader, the extent to which dodgy and corrupt people will go to make sure you don’t know what malfeasance they are perpetrating.

I think I might even publish some stuff relating to Roman Abramovich. Did you really think he ever intended the proceeds of the sale of Chelsea to be spent on the victims of Putin’s war on Ukraine? Of course not. But that’s for another day.

Today is about Blackburn, and Schillings, self-described as “a British reputation and privacy consultancy staffed by lawyers, investigators, communications advisors, security experts and diplomacy specialists.” Or, in other words, a company that will say or do anything to launder the behaviour and reputations of people who pay them enough money, not least through legal threats.

If you want more detailed background on the takeover of Rovers by Venky’s (matriarch Mrs Desai and her two younger brothers, Balaji and Venky, pictured left to right below) then start here.

An abbreviated version is that the club was put up for sale in 2010 after the Jack Walker Trust felt Rovers needed new blood, and investment. The Trust asked various intermediaries, including football agent Jerome Anderson, to try to find a buyer.

Anderson separately told the Rao family - who he met via contacts in India - that he’d seek them a good investment opportunity in sport. Amazingly, he found them an opportunity in Blackburn. Double bubble!

Also, by good chance, when the Rao family wanted professional advice on how to run a football club, a company called Kentaro were on hand to offer their services. On the day the takeover was complete, a contract came into force whereby Kentaro would provide Venky’s with “consultancy services in respect of football-related business”, including advising on the hiring and firing of managers and players as well as commercial deals.

Coincidentally Anderson’s player management agency, SEM, were corporate partners with Kentaro, who had a Swiss HQ and are long defunct having been under investigation by the Swiss Attorney General in relation to the 2015 FIFA corruption scandal.

Anderson worked closely with the Rao family before and after the takeover, and was listed in late 2012 as among the Kentaro ‘senior management’ on the now defunct Kentaro website. You can access that page via this Wayback Machine link.

Anderson talked openly about being based for a period at the Rovers training ground in the first transfer window of the Venky’s reign, in January 2011, and being involved in moving players in and out.

By this time Rovers had sacked Sam Allardyce, the manager of Rovers when the Rao family took over, and replaced him with Steve Kean, who was, entirely coincidentally, a client of Anderson’s SEM. Under Kean, Blackburn would also sign Anderson’s son, Myles, in summer 2011; he never played a minute of league football for Rovers in his two-year stint there.

I wrote a story in April 2011 revealing that Myles Anderson would join Rovers of the Premier League that summer, despite limited professional experience. In the same story I wrote that I had met an SEM employee at a recent Soccerex conference who had disparagingly described the Rao family as “chicken nuggets”.

The morning that story appeared, a furious Jerome Anderson called me on my mobile to tell me what a great footballer his son was, and how an unnamed scout had described Myles as “the next Chris Smalling”, a reference to the centre-back who spent 10 years at Manchester United, playing 206 PL games for United as he was also capped 31 times for England.

Anderson Snr was furious at the implication that Myles being given a contract by Rovers was anything to do with him. As for the “chicken nuggets” comment by one of his employees, he grudgingly conceded it was “unfortunate” but said it was not meant with any malice. I didn’t believe him.

It was earlier in 2011 that I had been to Pune, India, to meet the Rao family and find out about their main business (a poultry conglomerate, Venky’s), and to hear them outline their plans for Blackburn.

At around the same time, the English FA had started an investigation into who was actually running Rovers, asking the club written questions about this. This came in the wake of a letter dated 4 January 2011 to Mrs Desai in which Rovers’ then chairman, John Williams, managing director Tom Finn and finance director Martin Goodman expressed grave concerns about who was running the club, ie not them! That letter in full is in the cache of documents available below.

With the FA now looking into things, Blackburn’s secretary at the time, Andrew Pincher, wrote back to the FA’s head of integrity, David Newton, to disclose the Kentaro contract. Pincher’s letter is available below.

Pincher also confirmed SEM had received payments for work performed for Blackburn, including the hiring of SEM client Kean as Allardyce’s replacement.

Pincher also told the FA in early 2011 that Venky’s had received consultancy services in the run-up to their 2010 takeover of Blackburn from a company called Crescendo Sports Limited, registered in Bandar Seri Begwan in Brunei, south-east Asia. He told the FA: “We understand from VHPL that an officer of SEM Limited, Jerome Anderson, has a connection with Crescendo.”

One of the specific areas the FA were looking at is whether Anderson might have contravened clause H8 of the FA’s regulations then in force in relation to agents, which prohibited them from being in a position to influence affairs at the club.

He always denied that the sacking of Allardyce and hiring of Kean was his decision, and that the signing of SEM players including Nick Blackman and his son Myles were anything to do with him.

Both to me directly, on the phone, and via multiple letters to my newspaper from his lawyers, Anderson argued that ultimately the owners signed off on all decisions. For example they sanctioned the signing of a young striker, Ruben Rochina, for a bit less than £400,000.

A fee of £1.65m was paid to the player’s agent, Manuel Salamanca Ferrer. That agent told me he worked with Anderson on that deal. Anderson admitted he worked on it but said he never received a penny.

Another player bought by Rovers in that same window was an Argentinean striker, Mauro Formica, for £3.2m plus agents’ fees of £500,000. The deal was initially declined by the Premier League because there was a banned element of third-party ownership but the move was amended to go through.

In Allardyce’s autobiography, he wrote it was clear that “Anderson was going to have a big say in the running of the club” from the start of the Rao family takeover.

Anderson even summoned Allardyce to London early in Venky’s tenure to present him with a list of players Anderson wanted Allardyce to sign. Allardyce declined. When he was sacked and heard Kean was his replacement, he says his reaction was: “Steve Kean. Are you having a laugh? … He did, however, have a rather influential agent – Jerome Anderson!”

Anyway, onto the cache of documents that chart some of the murky chaos that engulfed Blackburn from early 2011 onwards, as well as the legal threats Anderson’s lawyers sent to me as I attempted to tell the story of what had unfolded at Ewood Park by the end of 2012, by which time Rovers had been relegated to the Championship.

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As a result, I have expanded the piece multiple times over the past 22 hours, to incorporate new information as it has come in, and new documentary evidence, including documents, that illustrate the murky nature of this whole story.

If you’ve already read the piece, but only once, and found it interesting, then you might discover more by revisiting it for the extra detail and documents.

If you haven’t read it at all yet, and are interested in sports corruption and journalistic process, then give it a try.

And if you’re not interested at all in cycling or corruption in sport, fair enough, and have a great weekend.

There are some utterly extraordinary revelations and claims in Bradley Wiggins’ latest autobiography, The Chain, which was published yesterday, and I promise if you choose to read the entirety of this piece today, you’ll find out all about the stories behind those stories, and much more.

The truth about Team Sky has been a secret waiting to be exposed pretty much since Wiggins because the first Briton to win the Tour de France in 2012, at which point, as he details in The Chain, his career and life began to implode.

He was trying to cope not just with global fame but the surfacing traumas of being sexually abused for years as a boy by a cycling coach, Stan Knight; the murder in 2008 of his father, Gary - an Australian former cyclist who doped as a rider and then drank as his post-racing life spiralled; and the way in which he, Wiggins Jnr, turned to drink then cocaine to try to ease his pain.

Make no mistake, The Chain is a blistering read.

How about the fact that Wiggins says when he signed his first four-year deal with Team Sky, to ride for them from 2010 to 2013 inclusive, he was initially offered €1.1m a year, only for the offer to shoot up a fortnight later?

“Dave Brailsford emailed,” Wiggins writes. “He wanted to up it to €1.3m [per year], but the extra two hundred grand wasn’t for me, it was for Shane [Sutton].”

“At that time, Shane was performance director at British Cycling. He was on public money, with a cap on his earnings. When Dave and Shane set up Team Sky, they came up with the idea of doubling his salary through me paying him for ‘coaching services’ for the next four years.

“From the off that was, in my opinion, a muddying of financial waters, a bending of the rules, that came from British Cycling and Team Sky being so intertwined.

“But that was nothing compared with the financial scandal surrounding the package.”

Blimey. Where to start?

Why would Dave Brailsford want to carve out a chunk of Wiggins’ salary to hand it to Sutton when Sutton would in any case be earning six figures from Team Sky? Did Sutton have some kind of hold on Brailsford? (Hold that thought).

As for “the package”, that’s a reference to the so-called “Jiffy bag” that was sent from Team Sky’s HQ in Manchester to La Toussuire in France, arriving to coincide with the end of the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2011.

“Jiffy-gate” would become, in 2016 and beyond, probably the biggest single controversy surrounding Team Sky, and certainly Wiggins, who writes in the book: “The package [episode] was the worst period of my life”.

In the run-up to the publication of The Chain, it was trailed that Wiggins had finally reconciled with himself and was at peace; that all his demons would now be laid bare. I assume that many cycling fans might have thought he’d finally concede that he, like the vast majority of Grand Tour cyclists of his generation, had taken banned drugs, not least EPO.

Do you really finish fourth in the 2009 Tour de France behind winner Alberto Contador (later given a two-year drug ban), and third-placed Lance Armstrong, while clean, as Wiggins did?

But there is no doping admission in The Chain. Not a bit of it. In the book Wiggins maintains he rode on “bread and water” and that all his anti-doping sentiments as a rider were genuine and honest.

Armstrong gets an affectionate mention in the book’s acknowledgements, which jars slightly. “You saw someone in pain and went out of your way to help them - thank you. I needed it, and it helped,” Wiggins writes to cycling’s most notorious doper ever.

Intriguingly, Wiggins has also kept reiterating, including to Polly Vernon of The Times in this interview, that Jiffy-gate really was nothing to do with him. “There was something greater going on,” he told Vernon. “They [Team Sky] chucked me under a bus.”

Vernon queries whether Wiggins means he got thrown under the bus “to protect someone else?”

“Yes,” said Wiggins, and when asked if he has suspicions about who was being protected, he replied: “Yes. It’ll come out.”

It doesn’t come out in this book, but nonetheless, the fallout from Jiffy-gate, he writes in The Chain, effectively ruined his reputation, his marriage and his mental health.

It was alleged - with no proof whatsoever, beyond one anonymous source (I’ll let you into a non-secret, it was Shane Sutton) - that the package had contained triamcinolone, for Wiggins.

In The Chain, Wiggins posits an entirely different theory about what was in the package, and it’s a stunning twist in an already convoluted and murky tale.

This piece today, which is extensive and contains huge amounts of new detail about the history of Team Sky and its major players, will tell you:

• What Wiggins believes was really in the package that he insists was never meant for him or to be administered to him, but was, he claims, an illegal drug for someone else, and he was just a fall guy, thrown “under the bus” by dark forces.

• How the original “Jiffy” story in the Daily Mail led to a 14-month inquiry by UK Anti-Doping, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money, that could find no evidence what was in that package; and my theory why it failed so spectacularly. I’ll also reveal how one figure in Jiffy-gate was offered, and turned down, a huge sum of money to say the package contained triamcinolone.

• How a multitude of senior and influential figures at Team Sky (and mostly also involved with British Cycling) have closed ranks over years to ensure that malpractice and irregularities around doping and doping products at both organisations were kept quiet. These figures include, among others, Dave Brailsford, Shane Sutton, psychiatrist Steve Peters, Dr Richard Freeman, various coaches and multiple household-name cyclists. Brailsford (left), Sutton and Peters are pictured together below at London 2012.

  

• How factions within the group above have made veiled threats against each over recent years, and indeed in recent weeks, threatening to “go public” and “let the truth come out.” It’s a personal opinion that these will likely remain “only” threats, for now at least, because of the mutually assured destruction if any of them fully broke ranks and went public.

• Details of the intimate knowledge that key people at British Cycling and Team Sky had about the darkest aspects of each other’s lives. Wiggins cites a few examples in The Chain, but there are many more.

• How Wiggins made an extraordinarily powerful documentary between late 2020 and early 2023 about how 2012 effectively ruined his life. It was filmed while he was in grip of cocaine addiction and will never see the light of day. Wiggins briefly explains why in his book, which I’ll cover. I’ll also take you inside that documentary: I was there as the project unfolded.

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That last paragraph was the intro to a piece published last week in the Telegraph, and written by Ed Willison, one of the best and most prolific investigators into doping in sport in recent times.

I have worked closely with Ed on many doping-related projects for almost a decade, both for Sporting Intelligence (such as his 2017 piece exploring Pep Guardiola’s doping when a player), and for the Mail on Sunday, and also for this site since we moved to Substack at the start of last year.

Ed also wrote last week about his experiences of uncovering doping and his belief how widely it spreads, across all of sport, and how easy it is for athletes to avoid getting caught, and not for the first time I can recommend Ed’s own “Honest Sport” Substack.

For those of us who’ve spent years or even decades trying to investigate doping, the revelation about the amount of athletes at the 2022 Commonwealth Games who admitted to doping is both welcome and unsurprising.

There are drug cheats in all sports, lots of them, and probably hugely more than the average sports fan realises.

I’ll often be asked about a particular sportsperson and be asked if I think they ever took banned drugs, from Brad Wiggins to Mo Farah, to the best of tennis’s greatest players of the past two decades. “Well,” I always start, before detailing what we know for sure.

In recent years, for the last decade or so, some forward-thinking people in sports administration and within (a few) anti-doping organisations, not least WADA, have realised that you can’t begin to properly prevent or deter doping before you have a much clearer understanding of the prevalence of doping.

So as Ed reported last week, as part of a wider project of assessing doping prevalence, there was a survey involving 915 of the 4,822 sportspeople at the 2022 Commonwealth Games.

Some 21 per cent of the athletes taking the survey answered “yes” to the question: “I have intentionally used a prohibited substance or method without a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) in the last 12 months”.

The nature of the survey gave confidence to those taking part that they would remain anonymous, and hence provoke an honest response. Such “randomised response” methods, including the Unrelated Question Model (UQM), have been used across a range of surveys about doping.

Typically such surveys will generate a headline figure of “admissions” of doping, or the 21% figure at the 2022 Commonwealth Games. This will be a figure in which the surveyors have a high degree of confidence. But there will also be “low” and ”high” estimates which the surveyors think represent the range from the smallest possible number of genuine admissions to the highest number. For the Birmingham Commonwealth Games the range was a low estimate of 15% of cheats and a high estimate of 27%.

Whichever number it is, that’s a lot of dopers, and the vast, vast majority get away with it either because they are rarely tested or because, even more likely, testing is a massively unsuccessful way to catch cheats. If a cheating athlete is even mildly careful, not least in the timings and volume of banned drug use, they can test clean even while using drugs.

Today’s piece will delve not just into the results of the Commonwealth Games study, but a dozen cases where surveys or investigative methods have been used to quantify the number of cheats at different events and in different sports, including:

• A UK Anti-Doping survey in 2022 of 813 British sportspeople that found almost one-fifth of them (the high estimate) admitted to doping.

• A survey at Spain’s national athletic championships where the likely doping rate was almost double that, and maybe more.

• A review of Spanish athletes with the nation’s elite testing pool that also showed many cheats.

• A survey of rugby union players from 2014, showing cheat levels of between a quarter and more than half of players.

• A survey of footballers in Germany, Spain and Sweden showing shocking levels of admitted doping, often by players who had no idea what the anti-doping rules allowed them to do or not.

• A deep-dive into the number of drug cheats taking part in the athletics (track and field) at the London 2012 Olympic Games, in which Ed and I, in 2017, minutely catalogued every drug cheat known at the time, or exposed since. Again, those figures will be shockingly high to any sports fan who watched “Super Saturday” and believed they were watching clean sport. How gullible do cheats think we all are? Erm, really gullible.

• WADA-commissioned studies at the 2011 athletics world championships in Daegu, South Korea and the Pan Arab Games in Doha, Qatar, where the findings were so shocking they were suppressed for years.

• A Sporting Intelligence deep dive into the reality of most Tour de France riders doping from the late 1990s.

• A review of arguably the biggest state-sponsored doping programmes in Olympic history, by East Germany from 1968 to 1988, and by Russia from at least 2010 until at least 2014.

The remainder of today’s post is for paying subscribers.

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Ghana face the Central African Republic in their penultimate World Cup qualifier today (Wednesday) before concluding their campaign at home against Comoros in Accra on Sunday.

Three points across those two fixtures will almost certainly see them qualify directly for next year’s World Cup in the USA, Mexico and Canada, a group winners of CAF’s Group I.

After the humiliation of finishing rock bottom of their AFCON qualifying group – losing at home to Angola, drawing with Niger, defeated by a Sudan team cobbled together from YouTube discoveries – it would offer something approaching redemption. The Black Stars won’t play in the forthcoming tournament in December and January in Morocco, but they should make football’s biggest stage for the fifth time.

They have previously played in the World Cups of 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2022.

Yet whatever the relative success of reaching the World Cup finals, that’s all it will ever be: relative. Because Ghana, like every African nation, plays a sport that is rigged against them.

In 1977, Pelé made a prophecy: an African country would win the World Cup before the year 2000. It was a bold claim from the game’s greatest player, one that reflected the explosion of African talent entering European football.

Nearly half a century later, no African team has really come near. Morocco came closest in 2022, reaching the semi-finals before losing to France – a team built substantially on African talent, including Kylian Mbappé, whose father Wilfried is from Cameroon.

Pelé’s prophecy won’t come true by 2050 either. Not because African nations lack talent – they produce it in abundance. But because the economic fundamentals, the institutional structures, and the extractive systems that govern global football make African success at the highest level virtually impossible. This isn’t pessimism. It’s mathematics.

Ghana’s football struggle is West Africa’s struggle. Across the region, the same patterns repeat: extraordinary talent haemorrhaging to Europe, domestic leagues starved of resources, youth players treated as commodities, national teams that never quite fulfil their potential.

Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast – they all face versions of the same malaise. Understanding Ghana means understanding the forces shaping football across an entire continent.

But for me (Howard), understanding this struggle is also personal.

My father emigrated from Ghana to the United States in the 1970s to study at Harvard. There he met my mother, also Ghanaian. I grew up as a first-generation American with expat family scattered between the US and London. The Black Stars are the ribbon that connects us all – the one thing that brings uncles and cousins and aunts together, whether they’re in Accra or New Jersey or Bermondsey. When the Black Stars play, we all watch. When they disappoint, we all feel it.

Last year, a conversation with my uncle about yet another disappointing Black Stars performance left us with a question neither of us could properly answer: Why are Ghana’s national team, individually so talented and successful at their clubs, so often unsuccessful when they come together?

We spitballed theories over the phone. Corruption. Poor coaching. Bad luck. But none of it felt sufficient. My uncle, who’d followed the Black Stars since the glory days of the early 1980s, encouraged me to look deeper. And I thought: why not commission a proper investigation?

That decision became the first project of my production company, Divicage.

Over the following year, we sent a team of journalists to Ghana, Scandinavia, the United States and beyond. My team, including my co-author of this piece, James Corbett, interviewed the former president of Ghana, John Kufuor, national team legends like Stephen Appiah and Sammy Kuffour, the masked investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas who brought down Ghana’s football association, European scouts working the academies, and economists who study African development. The result is a six-part documentary podcast series produced in partnership with Goal.com.

What we discovered wasn’t a simple story of underperformance. It was something far more uncomfortable: a tale of extraction and exploitation, of economics and neo-colonialism, of a system designed to benefit everyone except Ghana itself.

Ghana shouldn’t be a footballing minnow. Millions play every weekend across dusty pitches and cracked concrete courts. The country has produced Abedi Pele, Michael Essien, Asamoah Gyan, Mohammed Kudus. The talent keeps coming, generation after generation, an apparently inexhaustible supply.

Yet the Black Stars haven’t won the Africa Cup of Nations since 1982. They’ve qualified for four World Cups but never progressed beyond the quarter-finals. In 2024, they finished rock bottom of their AFCON qualifying group in humiliating circumstances.

Everyone in Ghana knows something is wrong. They just can’t agree on what, or why, or how to fix it. But after examining the social and economic fundamentals and following the money through Ghana’s academy system, a pattern emerges that suggests the Black Stars were never really underperforming at all. Perhaps expecting more was itself the problem.

The disaster that changed everything

On 9 May 2001, Hearts of Oak met Asante Kotoko at Accra Sports Stadium. Hearts scored twice in the dying minutes. Kotoko fans erupted. Police fired tear gas into packed terraces. Thousands surged toward exits. Many gates were locked. In the crush, 126 people died.

President John Kufuor rushed to the hospital that night. “I saw stacks upon stacks of dead bodies,” he recalled to us. “I didn’t see anything like it. Very shocking. It traumatized me.”

A commission of inquiry followed. Six officers faced manslaughter charges. None were convicted. Promised police training never materialised. Structural reforms came slowly, if at all.

More than 20 years later, Kufuor offered a stunning piece of revisionism: he blamed the referee. Not the police who fired tear gas. Not officials who locked gates. Not administrators who allowed dangerous overcrowding. The referee who made bad calls.

The disaster killed more than 126 people. It killed the culture of stadium-going that had sustained Ghanaian football for generations.

“People were just scared of the stadium,” says Gary Al-Smith, one of Ghana’s leading sports journalists. “There were no guarantees that they were safe. The culture of stadium attendance died with May 9, 2001 and has not fully resurrected.”

Empty terraces meant less revenue. Less revenue meant lower wages and poorer infrastructure. Into that void, other problems metastasised.

The exodus

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Just as domestic football haemorrhaged fans and revenue, Ghana’s best players began their mass exodus to Europe.

In 1984, only two Black Stars squad members played overseas. By 2002, thirteen were based abroad. By 2010, only two players in Ghana’s AFCON squad played domestic football.

The Ghana Premier League became a footnote. Quality plummeted. Wages collapsed to between 200 and 500 dollars per month. The best players weren’t even leaving for Europe’s elite competitions anymore. Ethiopia, Nepal, Burkina Faso, Libya, Sudan became destinations for desperate escapes.

“It’s become a conveyor belt of talent for outside,” Al-Smith observes. “The people whose eyes they attract come from North Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, the Gulf, Asia.”

Stephen Appiah, who joined the Hearts of Oak junior side in the mid-1990s, remembers when domestic football still functioned. “They had all their best players. They had Laryea Kingston, they had Gordon Duah, they had Dan Quaye and the rest. These are guys who played for the national team.”

By the 2000s, that system had collapsed. “Even the young ones were being discovered at say under-17 level and they were being shipped off to Europe,” explains football historian Fiifi Amanam. “So they never get to play in a local league. So you wouldn’t have the best talent playing in a local league.”

The model that works elsewhere – develop young talent, showcase them domestically, sell at a premium, reinvest – broke completely. Instead, Ghana gave away its future for free, one desperate teenager at a time.

Venture capital in human form

The academy system that emerged into this void didn’t fix the problem. It institutionalised extraction.

First, understand what these academies are. They’re privately-run football training centres, often funded by European clubs or wealthy individuals, that operate outside Ghana’s traditional club structure.

Unlike youth systems in Europe – where clubs develop players as part of their league operations – Ghanaian academies exist primarily to identify talent, provide basic training and sell players abroad. They’re businesses first, football clubs second.

The model is simple: scout talented children as young as twelve or thirteen, house them at the academy, provide education and coaching, then broker moves to European clubs when they turn eighteen. Revenue comes from transfer fees (although these are usually nominal), solidarity payments (up to 10 percent of future transfers distributed to clubs who developed players), and sell-on percentages. It’s talent arbitrage – buy speculatively and low in Ghana, sell high in Europe.

Ghana’s best known academy is Right To Dream, and its alumni includes Atalanta’s Kamaldeen Sulemana, Lyon’s Ernest Nuamah and Tottenham’s Muhmmed Kudus.

Yet when Manchester City, freshly backed by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, signed a ten-year deal with Right to Dream academy in 2010, the terms were stark: £850,000 per year, rising with inflation. In return, City got the right to acquire any Right to Dream player for free once they turned eighteen. According to leaked documents, City referred to money invested in these young players as “venture capital.”

None of the eleven players who went from Right to Dream to Manchester City made a first-team appearance. The pattern repeated: Ghana to City, immediate loan elsewhere in Europe, often multiple times, then release. The most any achieved was itinerant careers in Finland, Cyprus, Romania, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia.

Collins Tanor was the great hope of Ghanaian football. Captain of the Black Starlets. At fourteen, he joined Tom Vernon, Right to Dream’s founder, at Downing Street to meet Prime Minister David Cameron. Three years later, he joined Manchester City. By 2020, aged twenty-two, the brightest young Ghanaian player of his generation was without a club. In August 2024, he signed for Hinckley in the ninth tier of English football. His last appearance was as a fifty-eighth-minute substitute in a 2-1 defeat. Seventy-one spectators attended.

The Manchester City partnership’s failures didn’t deter Right to Dream. In late 2015, Vernon bought Danish club FC Nordsjælland for €10 million and immediately signed a new agreement with City. This one was even more brazen: City could sign any Nordsjælland player up to age twenty-one, with buyback clauses on any the Danish club sold elsewhere. Control of Nordsjælland’s transfer policy had effectively been ceded to Manchester City – a deal that appeared to breach FIFA rules prohibiting third-party ownership or control of players.

The arrangement was secret until Danish journalist Jeppe Laursen exposed it through the Football Leaks investigation in 2018. Vernon claimed the agreement had changed by late 2018 but never elaborated. Crucially, City and Nordsjælland never acted on it. Whether shame, legal concerns, or simple dysfunction prevented them remains unclear.

What is clear: since Nordsjælland replaced Manchester City as Right to Dream’s primary partner, outcomes have improved. Kudus, Sulemana and Nuamah – all developed well in Denmark before moving to bigger clubs. The model can work when the intermediary club actually plays the players rather than treating them as speculative assets to be warehoused on loan.

Peter Alegi, a football historian at Michigan State University, connects this pattern to Ghana’s colonial past. “With colonialism also came economic exploitation, very clearly. I mean, one can look at the history of cocoa, among other things. But I think it’s important to remember that the British did not foster the growth of an internal market economy in Ghana. Everything was externally oriented, right? Through export and then consumption of British manufactured goods. And so that went with football too.”

The academy system perpetuates that extractive logic. Of the nearly €10 billion spent globally on transfers in 2023, just 76 cents of every $1,000 made its way back to African clubs. Of the €162 million spent on 607 Ghanaian player transfers in 2023, perhaps €20 million filtered back to Ghanaian clubs and academies via FIFA solidarity mechanisms.

“The proliferation of academies is also a sign of things not getting done properly within the soccer system,” Alegi argues. “Because if you look around the world, who runs the youth systems? It’s the clubs. But it’s something that private individuals are running as a business more often than not.”

Most importantly, academies operating outside league competitions undermine domestic football, which should generate local interest, provide an economic base, and give players a platform to develop cohesion before supporting the national team.

“If you want to win a World Cup, you’ve got to have a real domestic league,” Alegi says.

The vicious cycle

The Black Stars’ success – qualification for three consecutive World Cups, the 2010 quarter-final near-miss – came at the expense of domestic football. And that ultimately undermined the national team itself.

“If you have a vibrant local league, you have a lot of attention on your country,” Amanam explains. “You’re able to create premium entertainment for your own people. You’re able to create talent for the national team. And it works because once they all play locally, they know each other, they know their style of play.”

When Ghana won AFCON in 1963, 1965, 1978 and 1982, squads were built on domestic football’s foundation. Players who trained together, understood each other’s movements, shared tactical languages developed in the same system.

“But if you just plug players from Germany, Belgium, Cyprus, South Africa, here and there, you put them together. You expect them to play together from different footballing cultures. It never really works.”

The mathematics are brutal. Ghana produces enormous talent, but obstacles to developing that talent are so great that fewer players reach the top level. Selection pools remain small. When Thomas Partey was Arsenal’s midfield mainstay, his understudies played for lower Turkish or MLS teams. Compare that with the depth England or France possess in every position.

Fighting with one hand tied

The uncomfortable truth: Ghana is fighting an economic battle it cannot win.

During my team’s ten-day visit to Accra in 2024, the Cedi dropped 8 percent. The currency now sits at roughly 6 percent of its pre-2008 financial crisis value. Since the turn of the century, Ghana’s per capita GDP has also grown by a factor of six. Yet amidst this instability the gap with the rest of the world keeps widening.

Dr. Erlend Berg, a development economist at the University of Bristol, conducted modelling that plotted GDP per capita against FIFA rankings. The relationship exists but it’s weak. What matters more is how resources are deployed.

Morocco, with similar GDP per capita and population to Ghana, reached the 2022 World Cup semi-finals and will co-host the 2030 tournament. The difference isn’t money. It’s institutional commitment, sustained investment in academies and coaching, aggressive diaspora recruitment, and royal family backing that never wavered.

Ghana made different choices. Or rather, Ghana chose not to choose at all.

Professional football operates like an arms race. The more you spend, the more successful you become. Better facilities, logistics, nutrition, trained players, managers, coaches. Even when Argentina – economically a mid-ranking nation – won the 2022 World Cup, its GDP per capita still outstripped Ghana’s by five to one. The countries succeeding on the world stage have economic resources that dwarf Ghana’s.

Even on a most basic level, being a poor country impacts players in many different ways. Rory O’Ferrall, head of the Africa Department at Berlin Sports-Bridge For Talents, is blunt about physical disadvantages rooted in economic inequality. “The general population is shorter and thinner than we have over here. And there are a lot of malnourished people and that translates onto the pitch as well. A lot of young players don’t reach their full physical capacity because they’ve not had the right nutrition growing up.”

The unanswerable question

Perhaps there isn’t one single answer to why the Black Stars underperform. Perhaps it’s all of these things, layered and reinforcing and impossible to disentangle.

It’s 126 people dying in a stampede and the culture of stadium-going dying with them. It’s domestic league players earning 200 dollars monthly and leaving for Nepal or Ethiopia. It’s promising teenagers vanishing to European academies, treated as venture capital, never playing together long enough to develop understanding. It’s a currency losing 94 percent of its value in less than two decades while football infrastructure crumbles.

Ghana isn’t unique in this. Across West Africa, the same patterns repeat. Talent haemorrhaging to Europe. Domestic leagues starved of resources. Youth players treated as commodities. The England and France squads that performed so strongly in recent tournaments were built substantially on African talent – Saka, Eze, Pogba, Mbappé – players whose parents or grandparents fled the very conditions that make it impossible to build sustainable football at home.

The Black Stars are, in a very real sense, fighting above their weight just by qualifying for tournaments. Expecting them to win when fundamental economics and infrastructure are so stacked against them may be unrealistic.

If global football wants to benefit from African talent – and it does, desperately – then it has an obligation to invest in the systems that produce that talent, rather than simply extracting it and leaving behind wreckage. Until then, Ghana – like other African countries – will keep producing extraordinary players who make other nations great, while the Black Stars remain trapped in a cycle of malaise that no amount of talent alone can break.

Pelé’s prophecy won’t come true until the sport itself changes. An African nation won’t win the World Cup while academies treat children as venture capital, while domestic leagues collapse under economic pressure, while European clubs extract talent for pennies and sell it for millions, while the best African players build their understanding of the game in Madrid and Manchester rather than Accra and Abidjan.

The talent is there. It’s always been there. But talent without systems, without investment, without honest governance, is just potential waiting to be exploited. And exploitation, as Ghana knows too well, never leads to glory.

The Black Stars Podcast, a six part documentary series on the state of Ghanaian football co-produced by Divicage Productions and Goal.com, is available on all major platforms.

It never happened, which is a good thing for both parties, but the story of how it might have done is both illuminating and startling.

I covered the Rovers story in detail on Sporting Intelligence from 2010-11. Among innumerable examples of woeful governance failures in English football, I still believe Blackburn’s case is right up there, alongside Portsmouth’s from 2006, when dodgy and sometimes demonstrably corrupt people became custodians of a top-flight England club.

NB: I am not saying Blackburn’s current owners are, or ever were, dodgy or corrupt, but they were definitely naive, and horrifically badly advised, and misled.

And yes, I am saying that some of Portsmouth’s owners from 2006 were dodgy and sometimes demonstrably corrupt, but let’s come back to that another day.

I’ve reported on the Rovers story numerous times before, as any fan of the club will attest, and I’ve previously shared the story of the remarkable closeness I had with the billionaire owners, the Rao family of India, after their £23m takeover of the club, 15 years ago next month, in November 2010.

Much of this was detailed in an episode of the 2020 podcast series, Football Uncovered. and, in my reporting over several years via Sporting Intelligence and the Mail on Sunday, I detailed what actually happened during that takeover.

“They [the new owners] would sort of ask me for advice on stuff,” I said on the Football Uncovered podcast. “I would constantly say to them, ‘Look, I don’t run football clubs. I’m not a chief executive. I’m not a chief financial officer.”

The Blackburn matriarch, Mrs Desai (second left in the picture below) led the takeover, along with her husband (left of her in the photo) while her younger brothers, Venkatesh [Venky], far right, and Balaji, were peripheral.

I offered to introduce the Rao family to a number of prominent football chief executives and football folk in the UK who had worked at big clubs, after their takeover, and I introduced them to a headhunter in London who was a major player in the football industry.

Through that latter route they hired a new chief financial officer. I said: ’’Really, you need a football manager who knows what he’s doing, not Steve Kean.’’

They had replaced the Rovers incumbent manager at the time of their takeover, Sam Allardyce, with an untried manager, Steve Kean, a client of the agent who had orchestrated their takeover, Jerome Anderson.

By this point, Kean was virtually un-sackable. I think the Rao family partly felt honour-bound to stick with Kean for so long.

Kean’s dodgy agent, working separately for both the Trust that owned Rovers, and as a “sports investment” advisor to the Rao family, had engineered a takeover where he would be at the heart of that deal, and getting paid by both sides, unbeknown to the other side. That was Anderson.

Anderson had a contract to effectively take control of Rovers after the takeover, sacking Allardyce and putting his client, untried manager Kean, in charge.

That same agent, Anderson, signed a bunch of players for Rovers who were either already his clients as players, or who were clients of agents who were his friends and acquaintances, in deals that made both agent parties a load of cash.

Conflict of interest: KLAXON!

Did the FA or any regulatory body really care? Nope.

The takeover by Blackburn by an Indian family, with a tiny footprint in sport and no previous involvement in football, led to largely hostile and borderline racist coverage in the British media, along the lines that they were “chicken farming idiots”.

The Rao family’s massive poultry conglomerate then controlled about 90%-plus of the Indian chicken market, and they had family wealth of £2bn or more.

Blackburn Rovers in early October 2025, almost 15 years after their Indian takeover, are, at the time of writing, 22nd of the 24 clubs in the English Championship. Their manager, for now, is Frenchman Valérien Ismaël, formerly of Watford, Besiktas, West Brom and others.

His “permanent” predecessors in the period since I covered the 2010 takeover were, in reverse order, John Eustace, Jon Dahl Tomasson. Tony Mowbray, Owen Coyle, Paul Lambert, Gary Bowyer, Michael Appleton, Henning Berg, Kean and Allardyce.

I went to school with one of those managers and in one of the maddest periods of Blackburn’s crisis years (which continue), he called me on a Sunday morning on my mobile, when he was the manager of the club, to ask me: “Nick, what the fuck is happening at my club?”

The rest of today’s piece, for paying subscribers, will provide other insights into what has been happening at Blackburn since 2010, and how, in fact, the owners remain committed to the club, for all their failures since 2012, to get them back to the Premier League, and have spent hundreds of millions of pounds trying to do that.

It’s been a wild ride.

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