Welcome to Sporting Intelligence

It’s the right of any reader to say, ‘Prove it.' Let’s do it together

SHEARER, LINEKER … HARRIS. QUITE THE FRONT THREE

That’s me on the right, managing to get a laugh out of two of England’s greatest strikers, Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker, despite the seriousness of the subject matter: Everton’s 10-point penalty for financial irregularity.

That conversation took place in November 2023 on ‘The Rest is Football’, a podcast already attracting millions of listeners per month. A decade ago, most people probably hadn’t listened to a single podcast. Now they’re mainstream.

In a media landscape that will continue to evolve in ways and at speeds few of us can predict, I’m also branching out, reviving Sporting Intelligence – which launched in 2009 and has largely been on hiatus since 2016 – on this platform.

I spent 28 years writing for national newspapers before liberation in November. I spent those 28 years doing all kinds of nerdy stats work and investigative journalism. I’ve had my phone and emails hacked by Russia and been threatened by the Kremlin. I’ve been told that a Bahraini Sheikh wanted me dead. I’ve exposed dopers and liars and corrupt FIFA executives. I’ve had piles of legal threats this high (*raises hand above head*). And hopefully all that fun can continue on here.

My journalism since the mid-1990s has won awards, and led me into some fascinating spin-off projects and consultancy. It’s taken me to America and India, South Korea, Liechtenstein and Iceland. To Zurich and Southport and Blackpool and The Somme. To multiple Olympics, and to the end of my tether.

I’ve done lots of radio (I have a face for radio) and podcasts, and Newsnight and Channel 4 News and TV shows in Turkey and Australia and Ghana. I did say no to Piers Morgan though.

When Gary asked me to talk on ‘The Rest Is Football’ in November, it was a no-brainer. We recorded on a Sunday morning and the episode came out on the Monday. As soon as it dropped, my phone, as they say, blew up. There were so many tweets, and WhatsApps, and emails. Two months later, in January this year, a bloke stopped me in the street to say he had heard it and was that me? Crazy, really, and just because I’d spent a short while talking listeners through some of the murky ethical and financial waters that surround football, a game so many of us love.

I’m not going to pretend that one appearance on TRIF made me realise that Substack is the future. I’ve been thinking about ways to take control of my own work for a long time. But just as Gary and Alan Shearer and Micah Richards have set their own tone, and boundaries - and F-bomb limits - on TRIF, I think it’s worth trying to produce my own journalism on this platform, unfettered.

I wrote about my years at The Independent in this piece. My first piece for the Mail on Sunday, in November 2010, said a tiny Gulf state, with no football culture, was about to win the right to stage the 2022 World Cup. I exposed dodgy agents at Blackburn, and Blackpool’s owner paying himself £11m in a relegation season. I revealed there was a state-sponsored doping programme in Russia, seven months before that plot corrupted Sochi 2014.

I interviewed Ben Johnson in 2013 about his “journey into hell,” and broke stories about a match-fixing organisation and Chris Froome’s miraculous medically-assisted rise. Did you know Qatar paid £17BILLION to stage the 2022 World Cup? Or that key Team Sky personnel were 100% dopers? That Sepp Blatter’s No.2 was an industrial-scale ticket tout? That Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s state doping and that Russia’s 2014 World Cup squad were part of the same plot?

What about Mo Farah and illegal drugs? Or UK Sport using Olympic athletes as drug guinea pigs at London 2012? What was the true death toll of migrant workers before Qatar 2022? Why hasn’t any of the money from the sale of Chelsea reached Ukraine yet? And what’s it really like behind the scenes at a Premier League football club in 2023-24?

The kind of work I do has been increasingly difficult within the constraints of traditional media. So, I’m going direct. Substack allows me to report on the stories that matter to me and you; it allows you to inform the direction that my journalism takes.

This is where I will tell you interesting, revelatory and important stories about sport. I’ll use data and detail to let you know what’s really going on.

I believe in evidence-based journalism. It’s the right of any reader to say, ‘Prove it.'

Let’s do it together.

Nick Harris