Sporting Intelligence Newsletter

Football clubs in the English pyramid will contribute the most players to this summer’s World Cup in the USA, Canada and Mexico - for an eighth consecutive tournament. No fewer than 205 players will arrive in North America under contract to English clubs, which is almost double the number from any other country. The next biggest “contributor” country is Germany (109 players), followed by Spain and France (88 each) and then Italy (71).

Clearing out my house after 20 years ahead of a move this summer, I've chanced upon a treasure trove of childhood football memories. There was a point in the early 1980s when I had the autographs of every footballer at the 92 clubs in the four divisions of the Football League. Many of them - but far from all - were photocopied on A4 sheets of paper, and routinely sent out to fans who wrote to their clubs asking for things to be signed.

Sam Kunti's definitive book about Brazil in 1970 is now out in paperback: Carlos Alberto, Pelé, Gérson, Jairzinho, Rivellino, Tostão et al - a team like no other, before or since The 1970 World Cup still ranks as one of the greatest World Cups in history: football passed from sporting lore into pop culture: the Telstar ball, the cotton shirts, the grainy colour footage, the crackling TV commentary and the matches with a goal average of 2.97 − still a post-war record − culminated with Brazil...

With this summer’s men’s soccer World Cup just weeks away, and with the 48 squads for the competing nations being reveleaed thick and fast, I thought it was timely to re-publiish a piece from the oringinal Sporting Intellligence website from 2015, about the history of the “word” soccer, which is in fact quintessentially English.

One of the other jobs I’ve been doing since launching my “portfolio career” at the start of 2024 is working with Goalhanger, now by the far the most successful podcast company in the UK. Back in December I wrote a piece about the “sliding doors” moment in early 2020 when I nearly embarked on a path that could have made me a podcasting giant. Yes, my tongue is in my cheek, but that piece is here.

Last week this site republished an investigation conducted by www.sportingintelligence.com in 2013 about arguably the most extraordinary football story in decades - a literally unbelievable hoaxer called Rob Beal, whose current Twitter / X profile picture is below. If you didn’t read the original story or last week’s recap, Beal was 38 at the time of that first article and lived with his parents in Sheffield.

Dear subscribers, thanks for your patience these past few weeks as I’ve been working on a big investigation that I hope will come to fruition at some point this summer, legal considerations allowing. Without the support of those who pay to read everything on here, including all the stuff behind the paywall, this particular Substack could not exist at all.

I spent nine days behind the scenes at Brighton in September 2023 - in a week in which they played their first ever European match - and was given genuine access-all-areas to the club, from the CEO and players to all the senior executives, and to Roberto De Zerbi, then the manager. 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.

The piece below was commissioned by Play the Game and has also been published on their website, earlier today, and you can read that and access lots of ofther sports integrity content here.

The two-legged ties in the last 16 of this season’s Champions League concluded this week with some astonishing aggregate results, not least Bayern Munich putting 10 past Serie A’s Atalanta across two legs, as PSG completed a 8-2 thrashing of Chelsea (twice CL winners since 2012 and the reigning Club World Cup champions), as Barcelona humbled Premier League Newcastle, also 8-2, and Atlético Madrid trounced Tottenham 7-5.