The more “minor” results were Real Madrid (below) completing a 5-1 aggregate humiliation of Manchester City (six-times Premier League champions in the past eight years), as Liverpool and Arsenal went through and Sporting finally prevailed against Norwegian minnows Bodø/Glimt.

Altogether in the 16 games that comprised the eight two-legged ties of this season’s CL last-16, there were 68 goals scored, at an average of 4.25 goals per game.

This is astonishing stuff and today’s piece will tell you, in great detail, quite how astonishing, with statistical evidence since 1955-56 in Europe’s top club competition.

Today’s piece will:

• Give you the goals totals scored by all clubs collectively in the games at precisely the same last-16 knock-out phase applicable each season since 1955-56. How does this season compare?

• Detail some “highlights” and indeed lowlights from many of the individual seasons, including the many occasions when a “last 16” club has got into a double-digit tally in a two-legged tie at this stage.

• Explore how additionally astonishing it has been that some of this season’s last-16 thrashings have been meted out to some of the world’s richest clubs. When the European Cup (now the Champions League) was just for national champions, it perhaps wasn’t so surprising representatives from relatively undeveloped nations, in football terms across Europe, got walloped. But the world’s richest 20 clubs?

• Analyse some of the reasons why the above is possibly (probably) happening now.

Read more

Read more

A view of the Charles goal filmed from the away section on Tuesday is below.

It’s probably safe to say the result shocked Saints fans (of which I’m one) even more than it shocked Leicester, because of the numerous gutless displays the Saints have had in recent times (last season particularly, and this season), not least after going behind in a game.

To say that a win from 3-0 down at half-time is rare in a football match (in “normal” time, excluding extra time or two-legged ties) would be an understatement.

Southampton were formed 140 years ago and this is the first time in their approximately 5,587 competitive games (league and major cups) that they have won a match after trailing 3-0 at half-time.

It’s also fair to say that Leicester fan @tfzone2, who regularly posts on TikTok, was slightly miffed at Saints after the match, as he filmed himself venting at Saints in a clip (below) that quickly went viral.

@tfzone2Shit club #footballtiktok #saints #football #southampton

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

The remainder of this piece, which is for paying subscribers, without who this site would not exist, will include:

• Precise records of every time any of the 44 teams currently in the top two divisions of English football have ever been 3-0 down at half-time in any competitive match, and then gone on to win, in normal time. This is an extraordinarily rare occurrence and only eight of those 44 teams have ever done it.

• The one incident in the history of Germany’s Bundesliga where has happened (a team losing 3-0 at half time and then winning).

Read more

This article delves deeper into the context of that victory and how it compares, statistically, to some other famous FA Cup giant-killings. Find out below where your club’s biggest FA Cup shock rates, if you support a relative minnow that shocked a team from the top divisions in a memorable cupset.

I was chatting to a Bournemouth-supporting friend earlier this week, for example, and he was at the Cherries’ third-round FA Cup match against Manchester United in January 1984. Bournemouth were a third-tier team, then managed by a 36-year-old rookie boss, a bloke called Harry Redknapp.

Top-flight United, managed by Ron Atkinson, had a starting XI including Arnold Muhren, Bryan Robson, Ray Wilkins, Frank Stapleton and Norman Whiteside.

Bournemouth had a starting XI with no players you’d recognise, although there was a Robbie Savage in that team. (Not that one).

Anyway, Bournemouth won 2-0, which would have been a big deal even if United hadn’t been the FA Cup holders at the time. My friend was at that match and said he thought that giant-killing had perhaps never got the recognition it deserved. Well it’s on my new list, as you’ll see shortly.

How Macclesfield entered the record books

Macclesfield won 2-1 last weekend thanks to a first half header from Paul Dawson, bandaged below, alongside Isaac Buckley-Ricketts, who scored the second.

Palace currently sit 13th in the PL, with Macclesfield 117 places below them in the National League North, with 117 places being the biggest gap between any winner and loser in FA Cup history in any match after the “big” clubs from the top divisions have entered the competition at the third round.

This was just the third time that a non-league side had knocked out Premier League opposition since the formation of the PL in 1992-93, with Macclesfield following in the footsteps of Luton, who eliminated PL Norwich City in the fourth round in 2012-13, and Lincoln, who beat PL Burnley in the fifth round in 2016-17.

By quirk of fate Macclesfield became the first non-league team to eliminate the FA Cup holders since … Crystal Palace knocked out Wolves in the 1908-09 first round.

We will shortly move on to a list of the 14 biggest shocks in FA Cup history in which big clubs from the top divisions have been involved, but last Saturday’s win came loaded with emotional extras.

One of Macclesfield’s strikers, Ethan McLeod, 21, died in a car accident on the M1 in December on the way back from a game, and is still very much front and centre of his team-mates’ and fans’ thoughts as they look to build on the weekend’s historic win. Macclesfield will host Brentford in the fourth round.

The history-makers are managed by John Rooney, 35, the younger brother of former Manchester United and England striker, Wayne.

John started his own playing career with Macclesfield in 2008, and played for New York Red Bulls and Orlando City in MLS, as well as Chester, Wrexham Stockport and Oldham among others. He ended his playing career back at Macclesfield last July before being appointed as Robbie Savage’s successor as Macclesfield manager. He and Wayne shared emotional moments after the Palace win.

A weekend of a near-record FA Cup goal tally

There were 129 goals scored in the third round of this year’s FA Cup, which is more than any 3R total in the history of FA Cup in which 32 games have been played, aside from the 1926-27 season, where there were 138 third-round goals.

Manchester City scored more than their fair share of the third-round total by thrashing League One Exeter out of sight, 10-1, in a match in which Erling Haaland failed to score and Antoine Semenyo scored on his debut after his £64m move from Bournemouth. Semenyo became the first City player to both score a goal and provide an assist on his City debut since Sergio Agüero in August 2011.

Other big scoring third-round matches include Wolves scoring six against Shrewsbury, while Chelsea, Burnley, Bristol City, Burton Albion and Norwich all scored five as they progressed to the fourth round.

City’s 10 goals against Exeter seems a lot - and it is! But 35 teams have scored 11 or more goals in a single FA Cup match in the tournament’s history. The biggest ever number of goals in one game was Preston 26 Hyde 0 in 1887, and the 20 games with the highest number of goals for one team were all before 1900. Tottenham 13 Crewe 2 in 1960 was the first FA Cup game of the 20th century with one team scoring 13 goals in a match.

The rest of today’s piece, for paying subscribers, without whom this site would not exist, includes:

• The list of biggest FA Cup upsets, detailing the divisions in which each team played, and the number of places separating them in the pyramid.

• A second unrelated story, about the academies at clubs across the world that have produced the most number of players currently making a living at clubs in Europe’s “Big 5” elite divisions.

• A third story, about how the Premier League is on course to see the all-time biggest average top-flight attendances ever in the English game.

• A fourth story, about the cost that fans of each of the 48 nations competing at this summer’s World Cup will need to pay to attend each of their teams’ three group matches at the tournament, including tickets, transport and hotels.

Read more

A statistical model based on Sporting Intelligence data that calculates the “insurable value” of international football squads has been largely successful in predicting outcomes in major tournaments for the past 12 years.

Today, in this first piece of 2026 for the Scottish football periodical, Nutmeg, and as a World Cup looms this summer, I’ll be analysing the insurable values of the four nations in Scotland’s group (Group C) at this summer’s tournament in the USA, Canada and Mexico.

Scotland qualified for a first World Cup in 28 years in November, on a hugely emotional night (below), after a 4-2 win against Denmark that literally shook the earth.

Scotland’s last appearance at a World Cup, in 1998, saw them placed in the same group as Brazil and Morocco (and Norway), and by quirk of fate at the 2026 World Cup they will be in a group (again) with Brazil and Morocco, and Haiti.

Scotland will start this summer’s tournament by playing Haiti on 13 June in the Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. On 19 June they will face Morocco at the same venue, and then on 24 June they will end the group stage by playing Brazil at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami.

Scotland, infamously, have never progressed beyond the group stage of any major tournament (World Cup or Euros) and back in 1998, they finished bottom of Group A after losing to Brazil and Morocco and drawing with Norway for a total of one point from three games.

This summer’s World Cup will have a different dynamic. For the first time there will be 48 nations involved, and 32 of them will progress to the knockout phase, meaning that after 72 group matches (six games in each of 12 groups), only 16 teams will be eliminated. Which means that eight groups of 12 will see a third-placed team through to the knockouts. A single win might well be enough to get through to the last 32.

Before I get into the details of what I think will happen in Group C this summer, some background information about how the “insurable value” model came about, and the logic that underpins it.

In Spring 2014, I was contacted by an analyst at the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) in London, asking if Sporting Intelligence could provide some salary data for England footballers who might play at that summer’s World Cup in Brazil.

I’d just published the fifth edition of the Global Sports Salaries Survey (GSSS), which ESPN The Magazine also published, in a deal where they paid Sporting Intelligence an annual fee for, in effect, first rights to reproduce my GSSS research worldwide each year. We worked together in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 before I collaborated with other partners from 2016 onwards.

The CEBR wanted access to my data, the data that underpinned the GSSS, and they quickly went from wanting just the England data to data for all 32 competing countries in the 2014 World Cup. Sure, I said, I’ve got most of it already, for something like 70% of the 736 players who will be in Brazil, because they’re in my database. Give me time and I can pull together the rest.

My CEBR contact then revealed to me that his client was actually Lloyd’s of London, the global insurance underwriter. Lloyd’s wanted to try to predict the winner of the 2014 World Cup by the players’ insurable values as a publicity exercise. And the CEBR was building a model to try to do that, but didn’t have access to reliable salary data, the single most important input.

No problem, I said. On the basis that wages are a proxy for talent, and using a model where young and highly paid players are the most talented, the model adjusted that data to the ‘insurable value’ of each player.

Long story short: I supplied the data to the CEBR, and they fed it into the model. They then realised they wanted a lot of other metrics they didn’t readily have, including the players’ ages and contract lengths and football inflation, and I gave them that too.

The upshot: Lloyd’s were able to predict that Germany, then the fourth favourites to win the World Cup, would win the 2014 World Cup. And that prediction proved right, and Lloyd’s got lots of coverage afterwards, which was the point.

We did it all over again in 2018, and again Lloyd’s were able to predict that France, then the fourth favourites to win the World Cup, would triumph in Russia. And they did.

Not only did the 2018 Lloyd’s model predict the correct winners, but it came out top in an evaluation of selected predictions for the World Cup. This was collated by Prof Roger Pielke, then the director of the Sports Governance Centre at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA, on behalf of the Soccernomics agency.

The Lloyd’s model, underpinned by Sporting Intelligence data, beat others from organisations as eminent as Goldman Sachs, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, investment banking giant UBS and sports metadata firm Gracenote among others, as well as outperforming predictions based on the FIFA rankings, ELO rankings and transfer spending data.

Together we went for a hat-trick in 2022 for the Qatar World Cup, but England and Brazil, the model’s choice of finalists, both fell in the last eight, while the model’s third and fourth favourites, France and Argentina, ended up contesting the final.

By Euro 2024, Sporting Intelligence had moved to this platform, Substack, and while the model failed to predict the winners, a lot of the group predictions were accurate.

In Group A, we said Germany would top the section ahead of Switzerland in second, and that’s what happened. In Group B we predicted a Spain-Italy-Croatia-Albania 1-2-3-4 and it happened. In Group C we went for an England-Denmark 1-2 and it happened.

We got Group D wrong, saying France, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and in fact it was Austria, France, Netherlands, Poland, Football, eh? Bloody hell.

Group E was also a bust, Belgium not winning as expected while Romania topped a group where all four teams got four points.

By Group F, we were back on track with Portugal-Turkey forecast to be 1-2, which they were.

In the knockouts we thought England would be in the final - they were, but not against Portugal as predicted but Spain. We got six of the last eight correct.

Anyway, onto the 2026 World Cup and Scotland’s fate.

Today’s piece will tell you:

• The insurable values of the squads of Brazil, Morocco, Scotland and Haiti.

• The most valuable player in each squad, in terms of their insurable value.

• The number of players in each squad with insurable values of more than £100m, and of between £50m and £100m.

• The predicted ages of the squads that will go to the World Cup this summer, and what that might mean.

• Where we would realistically expect each team to finish in the group, based on their insurable values, which effectively reflect the quality of those squads.

• How this tallies with world rankings and bookmakers’ odds.

The rest of this piece is for paid subscribers, without whom this site would not exist. Thanks to everyone who has supported my work as the Sporting Intelligence Substack enters a third year.

Read more

To be specific, and as laid out in the “calendar year” PL table below for 2025, City have amassed 77 points from PL games this year so far, which is the same number of points as Arsenal but having played one game fewer.

City have played 36 PL games, winning 24, drawing five and losing seven to collect an average of 2.14 points per game. Arsenal have played 37 PL games, winning 22, drawing a lot more than City (11) and losing fewer (four), to pick up an average of 2.08 points per game (PPG).

What bearing will any of this have on the rest of the season? Who knows: football can be gloriously unpredictable. Just ask Arne Slot or any Liverpool fan.

But as last weekend’s games have shown, Arsenal are now sneaking wins by narrower margins while City are putting their foot on the gas, as their 3-0 victory over West Ham showed.

Read more

As I detailed early last month, the 20 clubs in England’s Premier League spent more than £3bn, gross, on transfers this summer, obliterating the previous record in a splurge where each club, on average, spent slightly more than £150m.

Liverpool alone spent £442m and at the other end of the scale, Fulham spent “only” £34.9m.

The 12 clubs in Scotland’s Premiership collectively spent £49.5m gross, for an average outlay of around £4m per club, but they also sold players for a total of £59.89m, meaning they made a profit, collectively, of £10.38m.

It will come as a surprise to nobody at all that the Old Firm - Celtic and Rangers - spent almost 75% of all the transfer money between them in the summer, or £37m, give or take, of the total gross spend of £49.5m.

Nine of the other 10 clubs spent £2m or less each, and the 10th club, Hearts, spent £3.27m gross, which became £1.27m net with the sale of left-back James Penrice, 26, to AEK Athens for £2m.

What does the massive difference in spending tell us about England’s top division (£3bn+) and Scotland’s (£49.5m)?

That there’s a chasm in terms of quality? (Maybe, or maybe not). Or that you tend to spend what you can afford, so the English clubs spend extreme amounts because they can, and the Scottish clubs spend not much at all, because they can’t afford to do otherwise.

Burnley are currently the lowest ranked team in the Premier League. According to OPTA’s Power Rankings they are ranked No61 in the world. We can quibble over different ranking methodologies but it says much about the Premier League that one of their smallest and poorest clubs is that high, and they spent £114.9m, gross, on new players this summer.

That is twice as much - and more - than all 12 of Scottish Premiership clubs combined.

By contrast, Scotland’s reigning champions, Celtic, spent £13.45m on new players while selling £26.3m of talent, including Nicolas Kühn to Como, Adam Idah to Swansea and Gustaf Lagerbielke to Braga.

Celtic made a profit of £12.85m on their summer trading and it’s easy to see why certain sections of their fanbase think their club’s board lack ambition and a cohesive transfer policy.

They actually banked money in the same summer they burned their chances of lucrative Champions League group-stage football by losing to the mighty FC Kairat of Kazakhstan in the CL play-off round.

Celtic are not ranked far behind Burnley by OPTA’s logic: they are currently No78 in the world (with a “score” of 84.1 out of 100), to Burnley’s No61 (on 85 out of 100).

So what precisely does the spending, or lack thereof, by Scotland’s elite clubs this summer tell us about the state of the game, north and south of the border?

Today’s piece will tell you:

• The precise sums spent and received by each of the Scottish Premiership’s 12 clubs this summer, and also the net spend by club.

• The total number of new players arriving at Scotland’s top-flight clubs, and how more than half of them have arrived for free, either on free transfers or as loans.

• How Hearts and Hibs signed players (below) who both broke their clubs’ all-time transfer records, Hearts beating their previous record set in 2006 and Hibs breaking their previous record set in 2001.

  

• The clubs that have actually utilised their new players most in the early stages of this season (Dundee United), and least (Celtic).

• How the relationship between transfer spending and performance at this early stage of the season is negligible. A club’s wage bill will generally be the best single indicator of how they will perform across a season.

Read more

The CIES Football Observatory published a list of the 100 most expensively assembled first-team squads in current world football, or in other words, the 100 clubs who have spent the most on transfer fees to assemble their current first-team squads.

UEFA meanwhile have published their latest ‘landscaping’ report that looks at various activities of the 700-plus clubs in the top-flight divisions across the continent. Managerial ‘life expectancy’ is just one fascinating part of that.

Chelsea have the most expensive squad in the world right now, costing a staggering €1.314 billion (£1.143bn) in fees, with Moisés Caicedo (below) costing 10% of that figure by himself.

The six most expensive squads in the world are all in the Premier League, with Manchester City second behind Chelsea, followed by Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Tottenham.

Chelsea, City, United, Liverpool and Arsenal have all spent more than €1bn in fees for their current first-team players, with Spurs not far behind.

All the figures for all 100 clubs follow below, as do the average prices paid per player. Chelsea have spent an average of €54.7m per player (£47.6m), for example.

Today’s piece takes the CIES Observatory data and then analyses what it tells us about the clubs in this list, including:

• A breakdown of the countries of origin of the 100 clubs on the list.

• The precise total sums, in euros and pounds, paid in fees for each club’s current first-team players, plus the average fees paid per player by each club, in euros and pounds.

• How the ranking in the spending list (Chelsea at No1, Man City at No2 and so on) compares to each club’s current world ranking.

• Which clubs are performing as money dictates they should, and which ones are punching way below their weight, or way above.

Today’s piece, the rest of which is available below to paying subscribers, also contains a downloadable PDF of the UEFA landscaping report, and some pointers to some of the most interesting data therein, including the average “lifespan” of a coach / manager at the 700-plus clubs in Europe’s top-flight divisions. These lifespans vary hugely from league to league.

Read more

Among the most eye-catching deals after a summer saga over his future was Liverpool’s £125m capture of Alex Isak from Newcastle, which set a new British transfer record for a single player.

Today’s deep dive into the summer window includes:

• A table of club-by-club spending, including gross spend per club, net spend per club, and each club’s biggest signing (with fee) and biggest sale (with fee).

• A table ranking the 20 clubs by gross spend, plus analysis.

• A table ranking the 20 clubs by net spend, plus analysis.

• The amounts spent collectively by each of the clubs in Europe’s other ‘Big 5’ leagues: Serie A, Bundesliga, La Liga and Ligue 1.

Read more

The 2025-26 football season represents the 117th league campaign in the history of Falkirk since 1902-03 and Nutmeg commemorates that both on the digital site today and then, next Tuesday, in a Bairns match programme takeover, by using a statistical crystal ball to see what might be in store for them in this top-flight season.

I remember covering Falkirk in 2006-07 when I was the Scottish football correspondent at The Independent; one of the standout players was the Trinidad midfielder Russell Latapy. He was a Trinidad & Tobago veteran and played for them at the 2006 World Cup.

I knew quite a few members of that team and got on with them well. They had the misfortune that their nation’s most senior football official was Jack Warner, one of the most notorious of the Blatter-era FIFA villains.

Warner ripped off his own players often and ripped off his nation’s fans, and took bribes for everything and hawked matched tickets on the black market. He did lots of really bad other stuff, from stealing charity money raised to help earthquake victims to embezzling pretty much whatever development funding he could get his hands on.

I loved Latapy as a player, and his attitude. One of the other players in that 2006-07 campaign was Anthony Stokes, then a firecracker young Irishman on loan from Arsenal with the world at his feet. They were exciting days for Falkirk.

Last season was a triumph too, of course, a modern triumph of getting promoted under John McGlynn as Championship champions, and that just a year after getting promoted as a League One champions after five years kicking around in League One.

We all know that teams that get promoted to top divisions in many countries struggle in their first seasons back, let alone if they’ve just come up via back-to-back elevations.

So bear with me while I furnish you with a few statistics from other major leagues in Europe - outside Scotland - before we see what the really important data tells us.

In the past five seasons in England’s Premier League, 15 teams have been promoted from the Championship and no fewer than 10 of them, or 66.6%, have been immediately relegated after one season. That included all six teams in the past two seasons - Leicester, Ipswich, Southampton, Burnley, Sheffield United and Luton - plus Norwich and Watford in 2021-22 and West Brom and Fulham in 2020-21.

Why do clubs struggle upon going up? It’s a fairly obvious blend of the promoted teams needing to play catch-up on experience, squad quality, confidence and financial stability to make choices that can mitigate all that.

Over in Spain’s La Liga, five the 15 promoted teams in the last five seasons, or 33.3%, have gone straight back down while in Italy’s Serie A, it’s been six of 15, or 40%. In Germany’s Bundesliga, only 10 teams have gone up in the last five years and four of them (40%) have gone straight back down. And in France’s Ligue 1, it’s been four going straight back down from 12 over five years, or 33%.

So what do the Scottish numbers tell us, and how can we explain what has happened, and indeed might what happen to Falkirk in 2025-26 based on this experience?

I’ve gone back and considered the entire Scottish Premiership era since 2013-14, the first season of the revamped top division with the competition part of the newly formed SPFL following the merger of the SPL and the SFL.

In the intervening 12 seasons, no fewer than 15 clubs have been promoted to Scotland’s top flight, either directly as Championship winners or as a result of the end-of-season play-offs between the 11th place in the top division and those 2nd to 4th in the Championship.

The amount of them who have survived at least for their first season is surprising set against the context of most other leagues. In the table below I’ll list the 15 clubs, and their managers when they went up (and how long they lasted in their jobs), and the fate of the club in the season they went up.

I have also added where each of the clubs ranked in terms of attendance in the top-flight seasons in question, as a proxy for the “size” of each club more than anything.

In a second graphic lower down in this piece, I consider the top league scorer for each relevant team, to assess whether you need, for example, to have at least one 10-goal striker to give you the firepower to underpin a survival tilt.

First all of all, however, the headline findings. And then I’ll run through all the detail and the minutiae.

Read more

In the summer before the Premier League kicked off, more than half the games played by the competition’s inaugural members were in England against other English sides. Visits to the UK by European clubs are now ubiquitous as the next season looms, but in 1992, only four clubs – Everton, Leeds, Norwich and Nottingham Forest – played games at home against overseas sides and only Crystal Palace and Sheffield Wednesday travelled outside Europe, both visiting South Africa.

Since then, the commercial juggernaut that is the Premier League has been travelling all over the world in pre-season. Over the last decade, Premier League clubs have visited 13 countries outside Europe in pre-season, from Australia to Japan and Thailand and other locations, but the focus is strongest on one country.

With next year’s World Cup taking place mainly in the USA, half the Premier League clubs visited the country in the 2024 pre-season. This summer, five Premier League sides – Aston Villa, AFC Bournemouth, Everton, Manchester United and West Ham - are visiting the USA and that number could have been higher had Chelsea and Manchester City Premier not been playing in the country anyway in FIFA’s new Club World Cup.

Other clubs such as Arsenal, Newcastle and Liverpool are jetting off in the opposite direction on tours driven by commercial departments looking for more fans and sponsorship deals in a drive that must exasperate their fellow employees often making valiant efforts to reduce their club’s carbon footprints.

Freddie Daley of Cool Down - the sport for climate action network - says: "Pre-season tours in distant locations are a growing problem — for both the planet and exhausted players - and it is Premier League clubs leading the charge.

“The long-haul flights required are among the most polluting forms of travel, and these games pile pressure on top of already packed fixture schedules. For clubs claiming to care about sustainability, these tours are a glaring contradiction. It’s time for football’s leaders to stop talking and start acting - governing bodies need to intervene before player welfare and the climate pay the price."

Regional differences

A new TV deal is taking Premier League action to 48 countries in Africa, yet over the last decade, only one club has visited the continent with Everton’s visits to Tanzania in 2017 and Kenya two years later coinciding with a major sponsorship deal with African bookmaker Sportpesa, which had operations in both countries.

Research for Sporting Intelligence shows that 21% of all Premier League pre-season games over the last decade are outside of Europe, which is more than double the proportion of non-European games at the next biggest travelling league, Spain’s La Liga.

The figures in the table below are the cumulative totals of friendlies by clubs in those leagues in the 10 years to summer 2024.

While the Premier League’s long-haul travelling increases, matches played outside Europe by Serie A clubs have tailed off with as many games – 13 – in the last five years as in the final season before the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020.

French clubs often stage training camps in other parts of their own country. Even when venturing abroad in pre-season, Ligue 1 clubs typically stay in Europe with one exception. Last summer, only Rennes ventured outside of Europe, playing four games in Japan, but PSG is typically the only French club to jet off to destinations outside Europe, visiting Japan, South Korea and the USA since 2015.

Research for Sporting Intelligence shows that over the last decade 60% of all pre-season games played by Ligue 1 clubs outside of Europe involved PSG.

In Germany, more Bundesliga sides venture outside of Europe but 38% of all pre-season games played outside of Europe over the last decade have been by Bayern Munich, whose destinations have included China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and regular trips to the USA.

German clubs often travel the short distance across the border to Austria, where clubs from across Europe often congregate. Austria offers clubs myriad different opponents without the travelling and is increasingly an opportunity for Middle Eastern clubs from Qatar and particularly Saudi Arabia to engage with European clubs.

Austrian clubs also benefit from the country’s huge training camp industry, but when Europe’s elite travel overseas this is rarely to play local clubs. These are often money-spinning games against sides from their own leagues or other major European leagues in tournaments packaged around a sponsor. The matches are often notable for high ticket prices, regular substitutions and a dearth of yellow and red cards.

Some pre-season tournaments have cultural importance such as the annual Euskal Txapela between Spanish sides from the Basque Country, or Seville’s Antonio Puerta Trophy staged every summer since 2008 in the name of the Spanish player of the same name who died aged 22 of a heart problem in the club’s first fixture of the 2007/08 season.

Others are simply friendlies packaged up under the name of a sponsor to try and generate some legitimacy for matches marked by multiple substitutions and a dearth of yellow and red cards.

Who remembers the Audi Football Summit, the Casinò Lugano Cup, the Telekom Cup or the Visit Malta Cup, which is staged not on the Mediterranean Island but in London?

Top 10 Offenders

Manchester City has won many titles over the last decades but may not want the one for playing the least games at home over that period. City have only played full pre-season games at home in two of the last 10 seasons and not since 2021.

The figures in the table below are the cumulative totals by the clubs included in the 10 years to summer 2024.

City are far from alone in deserting their domestic fans in pre-season. Only once in the last 10 pre-seasons have Chelsea played more than a single game at home. Just six of 43 pre-season games played by Real Madrid over the last decade have been in Spain and just four against other Spanish sides.

In contrast, Inter Milan have not journeyed outside Europe in preseason since 2019, with Italian clubs preferring mid-season to jet across the world.

With commercial battles for fans and sponsors across the world only likely to hot up, these figures, which would all have been worse because clubs barely went anywhere during the 2020 and 2021 preseason due to the Covid-19 pandemic, are set to get worse.

Steve Menary is the author of A Friendly Business? A critical evaluation of the globalisation and commercialisaton of the preseason friendly (CIES, 2019).

A report last month from the CIES Football Observatory catalogued the 100 nations who had exported the most professional footballers to other nations between 2020 and 2025 (full report below, and also available via the CIES website).

Cies Football Expatriates

8.41MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

And at No1? Brazil with 3,020 individual expat footballers in the period under review, making a living outside Brazil, followed by France (2,293 French expats working outside France), Argentina (2,171), England (1,510, with a large caveat) and Spain (1,106).

The caveat for England is that the figure includes players making a living in the same United Kingdom of which England is a part, mostly in Scotland but also Wales and Northern Ireland. The Brazilian expats, and the French, Argentineans and Spanish tend to be dispersed widely across the world, and particularly across Europe.

The top 50 exporting nations are in the graphic below, and below that I’ll explore how the ongoing Club World Cup (CWC) emphatically supports the case that Brazilians remain the “must-have” nationality of player in global club football.

The Club World Cup as a “nationality barometer”

The most represented player nationality at the ongoing Club World Cup in the USA, by far, is Brazilian.

At the start of the tournament, no fewer than 141 Brazilians were included in the 32 squads of the clubs involved. And while Brazil contributed more clubs than any other nation - the quartet of Palmeiras, Botafogo, Flamengo and Fluminense - a significant majority of the 32 participating clubs (or 23 of 32, or 72%) had at least one Brazilian in their squads.

Sporting Intelligence readers are knowledgeable folk, so you’ll probably know that Al Ain of the UAE have Erik as a left-back, while Malcom is among four Brazilians at Al-Hilal. Atletico Madrid’s squad went home early but had a Brazilian, while Chelsea reached the knockouts with one: Andrey Santos.

Dortmund have former Man City winger Yan Couto. ES Tunis had two Brazilians and Inter Miami have one, and Inter Milan two, and Juventus two, including former Man City player Douglas Luiz. Los Angeles FC started the tournament with a pair of Brazilians, as did Mamelodi Sundowns, while Manchester City arrived with three: Ederson, Savinho and Vitor Reis.

Pachuca of Mexico had three too, including John Kennedy, not to be confused with his team-mate Kenedy. Porto arrived at the CWC with four Brazilians and so did Real Madrid, while PSG “only” had three.

Seattle had a Brazilian, and Ulsan had two, and Urawa Red Diamonds three, the same as Wydad of Morocco.

There will, almost inevitably, be at least one Brazilian in the team that wins this competition, from wherever in the world that team hails.

As FIFA reported at the end of the group stage: “Brazil had the most goalscorers of any country with 18, just ahead of South American neighbours Argentina (17), with France (11) next among the 38 different nationalities that found the net…

“In total, 72 nationalities were represented on the pitch, with Brazil and Argentina again leading the way with the most players (91 and 73 respectively). Portugal (32) were third-highest overall and the best-represented European country…

“There are also a competition-high 117 Brazilian players in the squads of the Round of 16 clubs with Italy (35) and Germany (34) the next-most represented, while 49 different countries will have at least one player involved.”

Subscribe now

What is likely, indeed close to certain, is that the business end of Euro 2025, and especially the final, will attract a bigger live global audience than any match at the ongoing men’s Club World Cup (CWC), which FIFA plonked into this summer’s schedule to clash with the Euros and other international events.

The last iteration of the women’s Euros, in 2022, attracted a cumulative global audience of 365m people, with 50m watching as England beat Germany in the final.

According to UEFA: “This means there were more than double the number of live viewers compared to the 2017 edition (178 million) and 214% more live viewers than in 2013 (116 million).”

It’s not clear at this stage whether FIFA, via their global broadcast partner DAZN (funded by Saudi Arabia) or any of the sub-licensed channels, will publish detailed viewing figures for the 2025 CWC.

One Chelsea match got as many as 1.5m people watching in the UK on Channel 5. In many countries, including in the CWC’s host country, the USA, the most-watched CWC games so far have attracted “TV” audiences of fewer than 1m people.

Today’s piece, by way of a preview to Euro 2025, is split into two sections, starting with a view from inside Switzerland about how it’s catching local attention (or not), plus some of the other pre-event talking points.

Then we’ll move onto a breakdown of the four groups, looking at their make-ups and predicting how the tournament will unfold. And then we’ll have a brief look at the evolution of the women’s Euros since the Millennium as the tournament has moved from being essentially fringe to a mainstream major event.

The view from Switzerland

By Sally Freedman

The final countdown!

I live in Nyon, Switzerland, and when I tell people, I’m often met with “Huh, where’s that?”. I reply that Nyon is a small town with a population of around 25,000 and it sits on the shores of Lake Geneva, 20km from Geneva itself. It’s the location of the HQ of UEFA, which is how I came to be here, although it’s been a while since I worked for the governing body.

I think most people across Europe, if asked where Euro 2025 is taking place, would be as likely to know as are familiar with Nyon. The build-up has been, frankly, slow, and indeed almost invisible. There’s been very little noticeable hype here, or colour or any building of atmosphere.

Yet from Tuesday the 14th edition of UEFA Women’s Euro (its official title) will start, with matches to be staged in Basel, Bern, Geneva, Zurich, St Gallen, Lucerne, Thon and Sion.

As a football fan, I’ve been talking about the tournament a lot recently to friends and family. Their response has been underwhelming, even for those who live in the host cities.

Just last week, a friend sent me a couple of pictures of giant footballs she’d spotted in Geneva (photo of one below), with the caption: “Finally”.

FC Luzern (U-15 Boys) 7 Switzerland Women 1

As the tournament approaches, there has been an increase in media coverage. But on 25 June, Switzerland were stealing the headlines for the wrong reasons after they were defeated 7-1 by an Under-15 boys’ team.

For those that missed it, Switzerland's women's national team conceded seven goals in a behind-closed-doors friendly against FC Luzern's U-15s - a result initially intended to remain under wraps according to Swiss reports.

Swiss outlet Blick noted that the match saw Switzerland's women's team use 28 players, with their third-choice goalkeeper playing for the U-15 side in one half. Four players were absent, including the Swiss captain and Arsenal star, Lia Wälti.

The result, therefore, was clearly far less important than the preparation for the upcoming tournament, with midfielder Leila Wandeler telling Blick: "The result didn't matter. For us, it was about testing our game principles.”

But it wasn’t perhaps the best look.

What’s the cost as Switzerland play hosts?

The country where I live is not cheap, obviously. Zurich, Lausanne and Geneva are the three most expensive cities in the world for cost of living, with Switzerland having five of the top 10 most expensive cities.

A cappuccino costs around 6 CHF which at the current exchange rate is around £5.45. Ouch! For those budding economists out there, who often use the Big Mac Meal as a price indictor, a Big Mac Meal in Switzerland is around 18 CHF – about £16.50. Ouch again. An average dinner at an average restaurant (think a simple pizza or pasta) will cost around 30 CHF (£28).

So, for any travelling fans not earning Swiss Francs, they will very likely get a fright when they pay their bill for their morning coffee or pre-match meal. It’s therefore not that surprising to read that some of the England women players have dug into their own pockets to support their families with their travel and accommodation costs.

Free match-day travel

On the positive side, anyone with a match ticket can travel for free on public transport across Switzerland on the day of their game. So, despite Switzerland being one of the most expensive countries in the world, I can attest that Switzerland is also one of the most beautiful and that the trains are sublime.

To any travelling fans, if you’ve got time to kill before your match, I recommend you take advantage of the free transport and sit back, relax and enjoy the punctual, comfortable, clean trains whilst you gaze at spectacular snow-capped mountains and stunningly clear, freshwater lakes.

And last but not least… did you know?

The official mascot for the UEFA Women's EURO 2025 is Maddli (below), a Saint Bernard puppy. The name "Maddli" is inspired by Madeleine Boll, the first licensed female football player in Switzerland.

Sally Freedman is an award-nominated author with her memoir about sexism - Get Your Tits Out For The Lads. Sally took a Masters in business (sport management) at Griffith University in Australia and has since worked at Melbourne City Football Club, Wellington Phoenix Football Club, the 2015 Asian Cup, the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, and UEFA. Sally has worked in marketing, communications, fan engagement, protocol, ticketing, and spectator services.

Next up, a breakdown of the four groups and how the tournament will likely pan out.

Read more

Bringing the new tournament to realisation has become a personal mission of FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, who has insisted it will help develop football and provide new opportunities for a greater diversity of clubs from around the world.

Critics - this site included - believe the motivation is more political (FIFA chipping away at UEFA), and financial, adding a major club event to an already crowded calendar, in a dash for cash to tempt big clubs to take part - using someone else’s money rather than FIFA’s.

Hence a $1bn TV deal for DAZN to show all the games live (and provide a $1bn prize fund) was actually in effect funded by Saudi Arabia, on the face of it a quid pro quo for Saudi Arabia being handed hosting rights for the 2034 men’s World Cup in a manner that remains oblique.

Last week it was also announced that FIFA had entered a new commercial partnership with the Public Investment Fund, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund chaired by Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia and accused of heading a regime responsible for human rights abuses, murder and policies that discriminate against women and the gay community.

And yet: FIFA want money, Saudi Arabia have money and the show goes on.

The CWC kicks off on Saturday evening in Miami when Inter Miami, and their star man Lionel Messi (below) play Al Ahly of Egypt at the Hard Rock Stadium.

Fixtures on Sunday include Palmeiras versus Porto, Paris Saint-German against Atletico Madrid, and Botafogo of Brazil versus Seattle Sounders of MLS. As we detailed in April, the tournament winners could pocket more than $125m in prize money.

Another game on Sunday sees Bayern Munich, ranked between No2 and No8 in the world depending on the system used - whether you use OPTA, the EuroClubIndex ranking from Gracenote, the Football Database rankings, or the Football Club ELO rankings - play Auckland City of New Zealand, ranked No4951 in the world.

This is a colossal mismatch, with Bayern Munich priced at 1-50 to win the game, and that will likely be closer to 1-100 by kick-off, with Auckland priced at almost 100-1.

Auckland’s players are amateurs, most of them with nine-to-five day jobs, such as centre-half Adam Mitchell, an estate agent. Auckland’s other players include a window cleaner, a truck driver, a PE teacher, a lawyer, and a brewery worker, while their manager, Paul Posa, is a dentist.

The warning report about lack of quality and jeopardy at this summer’s CWC came in a report from the sports intelligence agency, Twenty First Group, which supports sporting organisations in strategic decision-making and storytelling. You can subscribe to regular short insights from them here.

The firm has worked with football clubs to help them punch above their weight in the transfer market, and with event organisers to boost profile and competitive balance, and their sister company assisted the European Ryder Cup team to victory via analytics support in 2018. You can read about that on pages 36-39 of the GSSS 2018 report.

Omar Chaudhuri, who will be familiar to many Sporting Intelligence readers as a contributor to various GSSS reports and to this site, is 21st Group’s chief intelligence officer, and he says the CWC has a number of “product problems”, namely quality, jeopardy and emotional connection.

“Just 50 of the world's top 100 players will feature in the tournament,’ he says. “That’s compared to a benchmark of 72 at the 2022 World Cup. Moreover, three of the world's four best teams currently did not qualify.”

This is a reference to the trio of Liverpool, Arsenal and Barcelona, who all ride high within all the ranking systems.

In terms of jeopardy, Chaudhuri says that one in four of the group matches at this CWC “will have a favourite with an 80% chance of winning, something which doesn't happen at the World Cup. Meanwhile, there is more than a 95% chance of a European winner.”

He added: “Growing and professionalising football globally - thereby reducing the sport's Euro-centrism - would in the long term improve the event in these areas, though the prize money distributions may hinder rather than advance this ambition.”

The 2025 CWC prize money is skewed so that European teams get the most, as we detailed back in April in the piece linked above.

Chaudhuri’s third concern is that some of the world’s most popular - and indeed best - clubs will be absent, including three of the world's seven most followed clubs on social media: Barcelona, Manchester United and Liverpool.

We’ll return to this in a moment but another report this week, from the CIES Football Observatory, produced a new list of the world’s 100 most popular football clubs by social media followings. Here are the top seven:

Neutrals are more likely to tune in when “big clubs” are playing but there are underwhelming matches for a general fan across all the groups, whether that’s Botafogo v Seattle, or Los Angeles FC v ES Tunis, or Urawa Red Diamonds v Monterrey, or Al-Ahli v Colo-Colo, or Ulsan HD v Mamelodi Sundowns, or Al Ain v Wydad AC. And on and on.

Actually one of those fixtures is entirely made up, featuring two teams who aren’t even competing. Do you know or even care which one it is?

That CIES report is interesting because it shows not just the extraordinary reach of the biggest clubs in the world - and it’s no coincidence they are also the richest - but how important social media has become to club-fan engagement.

The rest of today’s piece will take a time machine back to 2010 and look at what global sport’s social media landscape looked like in its infancy; and then to 2019 to show how football had really taken control of the genre, relatively speaking; and I’ll also look at the social media numbers for other major (non-football) leagues around the world, from cricket to the NBA, NFL and more.

Read more

Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, aka Union SG, were once the most successful football club in Belgium. Founded in 1897, they won the first of their 11 league titles in 1904, and their 11th in 1935, and ever since then it’s been one long wait for more title glory.

That wait is now over, however, after they bagged the win they needed to seal the Belgian title on Sunday evening, beating Gent 3-1.

Their fortunes have been transformed since May 2018, when Tony Bloom, (now 55, and pictured below) became the majority shareholder at Union SG.

His friend and business partner, Alex Muzio, 41, who spent years working at Bloom’s StarLizard data business, has been majority owner since 2023, and chairman before that. That restructuring had to happen because Bloom could no longer own majority shares into two clubs, Brighton and Union SG, who might have come up against each other in the 2023-24 Europa League.

We’ll move on shortly to the youthful and innovative executive set-up that Bloom put into place after arriving in Brussels in 2018. Suffice to say they have had roaring success, on and off the pitch.

That is now especially relevant to Scottish football as Bloom waits for an imminent decision on whether Heart of Midlothian will accept his offer of an investment of £9.86m for 29% of Hearts.

A consultation period with the club’s majority shareholders – the Foundation of Hearts – has been underway for weeks and a landslide in excess of 98% voter approval was announced yesterday. A club AGM will confirm this before a rubber-stamping by the SFA of Bloom’s investment.

As we reported on this site back in October, the almost £10m in funds will clearly be important for Hearts but arguably more exciting for Jambos fans and the wider Scottish game is seeing whether Bloom can do with data what he was already done at Brighton and Union SG.

It’s the top secret talent-spotting algorithm and best-in-class data that has underpinned the transformations at both clubs.

Player acquisition and trading have been central to both and today we'll dig into particulars of how Union SG have operated over the past seven years.

As recently as 1997-98, Brighton finished 23rd in the fourth tier of the English football pyramid, just one place above Doncaster Rovers, who were relegated to the non-league.

Some rollercoaster years in the Noughties saw the Seagulls rise and fall from the fourth tier to the second-tier Championship and back to the third-tier League One.

Union SG have also had their own trip down the fourth tier of their game before the remarkable re-shaping of the club under Bloom and Muzio, and before we get into the strategies that have worked for Union - and might indeed work at Tynecastle, I’m going to …

• Recap Union SG’s sorry fall from grace after 1935.

• Detail the key five-man executive team who have transformer Union SG, including the “hands off” Bloom and the hands-on Muzio, who commutes to his club match days via the Eurostar from his home in London.

• Explore how taking some punts on players that other clubs wouldn’t risk have, in some cases, paid off spectacularly.

• Detail how the Union SG transfer policy in the last three years in particular has had considerably more hits than misses, with many players fitting straight into the system, and increasing their values accordingly.

Subscribe now

Read more

The world’s best club football tournament - the UEFA Champions League - climaxes at the end of this month when PSG of France meet Internazionale of Italy in Munich, but French football has had something else to celebrate in recent days: a domestic season with the highest average attendances per game since the French league began in 1893.

Spain’s La Liga could also yet have its best season ever in attendance terms, or at worst come very close to that record, while English football’s top division, the Premier League, has reached a Holy Grail moment in a decades-long attendance battle with its German equivalent, the Bundesliga. More of which shortly.

Other big sports around the world are thriving in attendance terms. Japanese baseball’s elite competition, the NPB, hit a record high in its most recently completed season (2024) and now has higher average attendances per game than Major League Baseball in North America.

The world’s most popular ice hockey league, the NHL, had its best ever season in 2024-25 in attendance terms. Aussie Rules football in 2024 had its second best season ever when measuring paying fans.

Oh, and America’s NFL, for so long the best attended domestic sports league in the world, has not only retained that position but enhanced it, with one game in 2025 that became the most-watched live event inside the USA, of any genre, ever.

Today’s piece will give you the details of the 26 sports leagues around the world that have been the best attended in their most recently completed seasons. We’ll rank them both in terms of average number of fans per game and also the total number of fans per most recently completed season.

It’s long been a personal fascination which events - sporting or otherwise - draw mass audiences together to share a communal experience, whether on TV or in venues.

In fact Sporting Intelligence’s original full launch in March 2010 began with the findings of our first major piece of sports finance research: which sports teams had the highest average pay per player, and what that might tell us about the relationship between money and success in different sports. The best paid team per player on that occasion was the New York Yankees of MLB.

That inaugural review of global sports salaries in 2010 became a 10-year series of surveys of global sports salaries (see the covers below), with the last edition, the GSSS 2019 which is downloadable free here, being in Autumn 2019 before the Covid pandemic turned the world upside down.

The salient point relating to today’s piece is that the first report considered salaries in the 10 leagues in 2010 that just happened to be the best attended (and de facto the most popular) sports leagues in the world at the time.

The make-up of those leagues has changed over time, and indeed expanded.

Anyway, onto the current 26 most popular sports leagues in attendance terms and multiple records being broken across lots of sports in many parts of the world.

Read more

Manager Arne Slot is being celebrated as a hero on Merseyside after his first season in charge at Anfield.

The win over Spurs also means Liverpool have extended their lead over United in the all-time tally of major trophies. That pair, still the most popular two English clubs globally, whichever metrics you use, remain head and shoulders above all the other English clubs in terms of total major trophies.

Arsenal are third in that list, with Manchester City fourth, albeit under a cloud due to two UEFA sanctions for cheating and / or non-compliance with financial regulations, and with the result of their “115 case”, or “130 case”, still pending. (See here and here for more on that).

For a decade or more, I’ve been keeping a tally of major trophies won by English clubs, usually on the day that each new trophy is confirmed in either the Premier League, FA Cup, League Cup or one of Europe’s club competitions.

Liverpool prevailed at a romp yesterday, with Mo Salah (below, involved in a selfie mid-game after his goal) hugely important, yet again.

This is how my table looked at the end of yesterday’s match, with my methodology and justification for that methodology below:

There will always be critics of any table of this kind - it’s a game of opinions, after all, and more than that, a game of biases and agendas by fans of every club. (I say this as a Southampton fan, and you won’t find many Saints fans more biased against their own useless club with flawed owners than me).

Anyway, one criticism of my counting method is that the only “major” trophies I consider are top-flight titles in England, the FA Cup, the League Cup, and “season long” European trophies (the European Cup aka the Champions League since 1992-93), the Europa League (formerly the UEFA Cup), plus the now-defunct Cup-Winners’ Cup and Fairs Cup.

I don’t include any “one-off” cups such as the Charity Shield (aka the Community Shield now) or the Super Cup, which have always felt ceremonial to me, and have long been treated (by many managers and fans) as glorified friendlies; and nor do I include any tournaments or iterations of those tournaments (hello Intercontinental Cup, now morphed into the Club World Cup), that were ever one-offs, for the same reason.

You are absolutely entitled to disagree.

Another criticism of my system is that it doesn’t include clubs such as West Ham, who have won several European trophies of various significance. But my minimum requirement for the table is that any club must have won at least one English top-flight league title to be included. And West Ham have never done that, even though they did win the 1966 World Cup. (This is a joke for English people, at West Ham’s expense unless you’re a West Ham fan and believe it).

The league title is the bread and butter baseline of consistent dominance over your peers in any given football season in any given country. (Unless you’re awarding your top league title after play-offs, in which case you’re doing football wrong).

Anyway, only 24 clubs have won the English top-flight title since it was first contested in 1888-89 and won by Preston, and thus they are the 24 clubs in my table.

Again, feel free to disagree. Make your own table and tweet it to me (or Blue Sky it to me) with a pithy reason why it should be considered as the best measure, and if I like it, I’ll share it. Or share your thoughts in the comments.

The third criticism I get most often is that I absolutely shouldn’t count each of the “major trophies” as equal because the league title or indeed the Champions League are worth so much more than, say, the Carabao Cup.

I take this point as valid, obviously, but in my defence I’ve tried a number of times to “weight” the trophies to see what difference that makes and for the vast majority of clubs, it makes no difference to where they stand in the rankings, however I rate the trophies, within reason.

Liverpool and United remain No1 and No2 with Arsenal in No3, and Manchester City, however dubiously, in No4.

These are on the basis that a Premier League title is worth 10 points, as is a European Cup / CL win, while a smaller European trophy is worth 6.5 points and an FA Cup 5.5 points and a League Cup 4.5 points. You can tinker forever with this stuff and you’ll never find agreement.

Using the points basis above the only significant changes to my current order would see A: Everton move ahead of Tottenham due to so many more league titles; and B: Sunderland move ahead of Forest for the same reason.

And yet. All of Sunderland’s league titles are now available only in sepia and they haven’t won the European Cup twice. So it’s swings and roundabouts. Feel free to vehemently (or indeed agreeably) disagree.

Which clubs have the most top-flight titles in the world?

I know it’s the question on everyone’s lips, not least because Celtic confirmed a 55th Scottish top-division title over the weekend, drawing them level with Rangers’ 55 titles.

The two Scottish giants are now joint-second in the table of clubs in world football with the most domestic league top-flight titles.

But one club in the world has even more domestic top-flight titles, and that is Linfield, currently of the NIFL Premiership.

Here are the clubs with the most top-flight titles in the world:

He eventually prevailed at the first hole of the sudden death play-off against Justin Rose to win his first green jacket, handed to him (below) by last year’s Masters winner, Scottie Scheffler.

Today we’ll get into all of that and how historic it is that McIlroy has finally completed the career Slam, with analysis of some potential repercussions of his victory.

But in a change to Sporting Intelligence’s normal format of doing one story comprehensively per post, today I’m going to look at three.

Two other significant money-related tales from the past week have piqued my interest. First, Mo Salah’s new contract at Liverpool. Second, the publication of agents’ fees paid by English football clubs between February last year and February this year, a period including the transfer windows of summer 2024 and January 2025. The sums are eye-watering.

One of SI’s founding aims was to try to make sense of sport's relationship with money. Today’s stories each tell us something about that, with original data to accompany each.

Looking at McIlroy’s landmark win, I’ll consider:

• Where it places him in golf’s pantheon of all-time greats.

• What the numbers from the full history of all four Majors tells us about the likelihood of him going on to add more Majors at his age.

• Whether McIlroy should now enter the conversation as a legitimate contender to be considered among Britain’s greatest sportsmen, and if so why.

• The finances of his win, and where it places him in the all-time earnings lists in golf; and how his hero Tiger Woods rocket-boosted earnings for everyone in golf when he became the game’s greatest star.

On Salah’s new contract, I’ll ask whether it’s likely to be good value, or a costly mistake, and use two specific measurements to make the case.

On the payments to agents, I’ve gone back 10 years to find the agent spending of a collection of major clubs over the past decade in that time, and will explore what they’re spending it on.

Read more

What followed was an astonishing result, with mind-blowing goals, not least the brace scored from free-kicks by Declan Rice. This piece will recap what happened, and briefly consider Arsenal’s chances of making the semi-finals from 3-0 up.

But Tuesday’s landmark win is a good time to consider Arteta’s managerial performance since taking over in 2019, using a specific metric of what bang he’s been getting for his buck. To be more specific, is his Arsenal team outperforming what we might expect of them, given the club’s wage bill?

As most of you will know, there is a strong correlation between wage spend and long-term performance outcomes in elite European football, not least the Premier League.

When Arsene Wenger was the Gunners’ manager for almost 22 years between 1996 and 2018, he mostly produced Premier League finishing positions that at least met expectations against spending, and more often outstripped them.

There were only three seasons in his entire reign when Arsenal finished lower in the table than their wage spend merited.

In 2005-06 and in 2006-07 Arsenal finished fourth when they were the third-highest wage spenders in England’s top division. And in Wenger’s final season, 2017-18, they were the fifth biggest wage spenders behind Manchester United, Liverpool, Manchester City and Chelsea, but finished sixth in the table.

Back in 2013, at the behest of the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust, I wrote a deep-dive analysis of Wenger’s performance against resources from the time he arrived at Highbury in 1996 until 2013. A downloadable PDF of that 35-page analysis, “Arsene Wenger: What is he good for?” is here:

Arsene Wenger What Is He Good For?

1.53MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

It includes season-by-season breakdowns of expenditure on players and wages and comparisons with spending by the other ‘Big 6’ clubs.

Trivia sidebar: the 11 players who played most often in the ‘Invincibles’ season of 2003-04 cost £44.35m. Combined!

Anyway, we’ll come back to Arteta and what kind of job he’s doing, compared to Wenger, in terms of “performing above budget”, but first some stats from Tuesday’s game.

Declan Rice had played 338 senior club matches for West Ham and Arsenal before Tuesday and had never scored from a direct free-kick before. Then he got two in 12 minutes.

According to OPTA, Rice's first free-kick had an xG of 0.037 (3.7%) and his second an xG of 0.063 (6.3%).

(If you need an xG explainer, go here).

The chances of Rice scoring both of those goals was 0.23%, equivalent to odds of 435-1.

His strikes were wondrous, the first with bend that Roberto Carlos would be proud of. Incidentally, the former Brazilian international was present at The Emirates to see Rice’s double.

Both free-kicks are in these highlights … (an earlier version of this piece was set to include just those goals but it didn’t work). You can also see both goals in a 1min 16sec clip here.

And while we’re on a highlights binge, I think Myles Lewis-Skelly’s contribution to the win was immense.

Two other stats jumped out from Tuesday, with both of these again courtesy of OPTA.

• This was Real Madrid’s joint-heaviest defeat in the first leg of a UEFA Champions League knockout stage tie, along with a 4-1 loss at Borussia Dortmund in the semi-finals in 2012-13.

• Arsenal’s victory was the 12^th time an English side have won by 3+ goals in the first leg of a UEFA Champions League knockout stage tie, while each of the 11 previous instances have seen that team progress to the next round.

So what chance do Arsenal have of completing the job next week and sealing an aggregate win to take them to a Champions League semi-final for the first time since 2008-09?

Real Madrid are famous for their European comebacks, not least within individual games, clawing back deficits to get through.

But since the Champions League was rebranded as such in 1992-93, they have only had comebacks to advance on five occasions where they have lost the first leg of a two-legged tie in the CL knockout stages. And they have never come back from more than two goals down following a first-leg defeat. Four of the five times they were only a goal down.

Here are those five occasions.

But getting back to the main point of this piece: how good has Arteta been as a manager in performance terms set against (wage) resources? The numbers are below and paint a clear picture.

Read more

Players (here and here), coaches (here, here and here), welfare unions, fan organisations and human rights groups are among those who have already been critical but we’ll come back to that.

The headline figures from the FIFA press release on the cash available to the 32 clubs are:

• A $1 billion prize fund (£773m/€924m) to be split between the participating clubs, although far from equally.

• Top potential earnings per club (for a maximum of a month’s work) of $125m (£97m/€116m). The lowest potential earnings are $3.58m.

• A nebulous “target of an additional $250m being provided to club football across the world. This solidarity will undoubtedly provide a significant boost in our ongoing efforts in making football truly global.” Why only a target? Who will get this money? There are no answers yet.

The $1bn prize fund is broken down into $525m for the 32 clubs merely for participating, plus $475m depending or “sporting performance.” But the disparity between which clubs will get what - depending on what part of the world they come from - is shocking.

The full numbers per club, in detail, will follow later in the piece.

Although 12 of the 32 competing clubs (38% of them) come from Europe, they will receive 58% of the participation cash between them, and in all likelihood just over 70% of the total cash available.

It’s almost as if FIFA has had to bribe some of the biggest names in European club football, and some of the smaller names, to attend an extra event that will make demands on already overworked players, probably in half-empty stadiums.

Eleven of the 32 clubs (34%) will come from South America and the Concacaf region combined, but will receive 27% of the participation cash between them and probably around 20% of all the total cash available.

Nine of the 32 clubs (28%) will come from Africa, Asia or Oceania combined but will receive 15% of the participation cash between them and around 10% of the total cash on offer.

Is FIFA racist? Regionalist? Pragmatic? Driven by ulterior motives aside from genuine growth of the game globally?

When FIFA first announced this summer’s tournament - in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in December 2023, as FIFA president Gianni Infantino intensified his love-in with the Saudi regime - Infantino talked about giving clubs around the world an equal opportunity to play at this level. And last week Infantino said “the distribution model of the FIFA Club World Cup reflects the pinnacle of club football.”

The problem with those statements is that some clubs are getting a lot more than others simply for showing up. Your pinnacle is much lower if you’re from Oceania, or Africa, or Asia.

The 12 European clubs, for example, are getting between $12.81m and $38.19m each just for attending - “Determined by an [undeclared] ranking based on sporting and commercial criteria,” said FIFA - while at the other end of the scale, Auckland City are getting $3.58m.

As for the wider effects of giving away $1bn at one tournament to 32 clubs from the world’s 4,400 professional clubs, the consequences will only be seen in the years after this event.

Mamelodi Sundowns of South Africa will be at the Club World Cup this summer, for example. They currently have a 15-point lead at the top of South Africa’s top division. They won their nation’s top-tier title last season. And the season before. And the season before. And the season before. And the season before. And the season before. And the season before.

Their annual revenue according to their latest accounts was $6.9m. FIFA will pay them $9.55m just for turning up in the USA for the CWC, helping massively to skew the football economics in the Sundowns’ favour in their country. If the Sundowns get through the group stage - which OPTA world rankings suggest they might - they could make the thick end of $23m from the CWC.

To varying degrees, from Auckland to Riyadh to Salzburg to Munich to Madrid to Paris and many other cities who will send clubs to the CWC this summer, FIFA’s wads of cash will help distort national leagues, hugely, for years.

UEFA’s revamped Champions League is doing the same across Europe as I detailed last month in a piece using UEFA’s own figures.

Anyway, here is the FIFA breakdown of the participation cash available this summer at the CWC. We’ll get to team-by-team cash shortly.

And below is the breakdown of extra money depending on sporting performance. The sums for each round are in addition to the money earned in earlier rounds, so there is $87.625m available in sporting performance pay alone for the winner; and just $10m less for the runner-up; and so on.

Before we move onto the calculations that show precisely how much each club could earn this summer, depending on how deep they progress, I’ll recap a few of the controversies that have already flared since FIFA announced their Make-It-Up-As-You-Go-Along CWC.

Read more