"If you want some accessible but informative insight into football then I suggest you couldn't do better than the Political Economy of Football website, which is not only intelligible but comes with the added bonus of being written by Addicks fan Wyn Grant." Ben Hayes - Charlton Athletic programme
Total Dublin schoolboy side St. Kevin’s Boys are considering applying for a place for a senior side in the League of Ireland. It’s a response to being denied a place in the new national under-17 league. They were told that there were too many Dublin sides already.
A study by VisitBritain shows that 800,000 visitors a year come to football matches, providing income of £684m for the economy. This is a 15 per cent rise on the figure recorded when the research was last done in 2010.
Kickrs.Net is a new digital crowdfunding platform that allows fans to fund the acquistion of new young players at their club. Belgian Juliper Pro League club Sint-Truiden is the first to feature with a young Greek player being targeted.
€103,175 Euros has been raised so far from 289 investors. That’s an average of €357 Euros per investor or approximately £260.
There is still no clarity about the projected takeover of Northampton Town. A trilateral meeting yesterday between the current owners, the London-based Indian consortium interested in buying the club, and Northampton Borough Council was cancelled. A meeting between the owners and the purchasers will go ahead.
Fans running a #WeWantAnswers campaign plan to demonstrate at Saturday’s game.
A focus on the cost of transfer fees is understandable when some of them are so large and their negotiation is surrounded by so much last minute drama.
However, a study by the Fifa Transfer Matching System, the body that oversees all cross-border transfers, found that clubs committed to spending £4,5bn in wages in 2015 alone, far outstripping the £2.6bn spent on transfer fees. The amount of money committed to salaries this year is more than a third higher than the same figure for 2013.
The impressive Swiss Ramble blog has produced its latest forensic financial analysis on Manchester City. The focus is on how City have managed to spend big in the summer transfer window, yet remain compliant with financial fair play rules.
Next year the new £1.7 billion Premier League television contract kicks in, an increase of 70 per cent on the present contract. Even so, a few exceptions aside, Premier League clubs were relatively restrained in their spending in the summer transfer window.
The Premier League’s net spend over the last three seasons was £427.1m, £369.1m and £414.6m. They paid just £12.5m more than they did two summers ago. If the David De Gea deal had gone through, they would have spent less than in 2013.
It has been one of the longest drawn out takeover sagas in recent football history. The mystery ‘Indian consortium’ that wants to take over Northampton Town is yet to be identified. Now fans are launching a social media campaign to try and find out what is happening.
The Faroe Islands have the biggest regular attendances at football matches in terms of the proportion of the population that go, followed by Iceland, Cyprus, Scotland and England. The research was done three years ago, but the relative proportions have probably not changed all that much.
England had the biggest absolute attendances at just under 1.5 million, accounting for 2.79 per cent of the population.
The deal under which West Ham are moving into the Olympic Stadium is continuing to attract criticism and arguments that it is highly disadvantageous to taxpayers.