North London derby: Tactical puzzle awaits in £50m clash between Tottenham and Arsenal May 12, 2022 There is no love lost between the two sides tethered by the Seven Sisters Road but tonight’s north London derby between Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal promises to be especially combustible. The stakes are higher than they have been for any north London derby in several years, with both teams hunting a return to the Champions [...]
Premier League talking points: Everton win nudges Leeds into relegation zone May 8, 2022 If Everton escape their first relegation for more than 70 years, they may well look back on this weekend, and a 2-1 Premier League win at Leicester, as the turning point. Goals from Vitaliy Mykolenko and Mason Holgate earned the Toffees back-to-back victories for the first time since September and lifted them out of the [...]
Arsenal have reconnected with fans this season but on-field slump threatens to undo good work April 20, 2022 Since the dark days of lockdown, Arsenal have been engaged in a major branding exercise aimed at reconnecting with supporters. Club staff have conducted thousands of interviews with fans in the UK and overseas, particularly in Los Angeles and Shanghai, in an attempt to gauge what they had been doing right and where they had [...]
Arsenal set goal of selling out 60,000-seater Emirates Stadium for women’s game March 23, 2022 Arsenal’s new commercial chief Juliet Slot believes their women’s team can attract sell-out crowds to the 60,000-capacity Emirates Stadium as the club embarks on a wider push behind the Women’s Super League leaders. Arsenal Women switch big games from Boreham Wood FC to Emirates Stadium to allow for bigger attendances and are due to play [...]
World’s richest football clubs: Manchester City top Deloitte Money League for the first time March 21, 2022 Manchester City have been named the world’s richest football club in the latest edition of Deloitte’s Football Money League. City topped the list, which is based on revenue, for the first time after increasing their income to €645m (£571m) in 2020-21 – despite the effects of the pandemic. The Premier League champions climbed five places, [...]
Premier League talking points: De Bruyne, Saka and the top four March 7, 2022 It was a Sunday afternoon of football which proved the worth of individual performances in high-pressure matches, and a Sunday which piled pressure on a Watford side down in the dreaded relegation places as the number of games remaining slowly dwindled. Here are the talking points from yesterday’s Premier League action. Manchester is blue For [...]
Everton backer Usmanov has assets frozen by EU over Putin links March 1, 2022 Everton backer Alisher Usmanov has had his assets frozen by the European Union on the grounds that he is close to Russian president Vladimir Putin. Usmanov’s company USM Holdings sponsors Everton’s training ground and has bought the naming rights to the Premier League club’s yet-to-be constructed stadium. The billionaire is also a close associate of [...]
Premier League tightens rules on Covid match postponements January 26, 2022 Premier League clubs must have at least four Covid-19 cases in their squad in order to request postponement of a fixture under stricter rules agreed today. It follows concerns that teams were able to game the previous system, which has seen more than 20 games being called off in the competition this season. The new [...]
English football’s postponement rules are broken. It needs to fix them January 17, 2022 To say the postponement of yesterday’s north London derby divided opinion would be an understatement. Tottenham Hotspur and, going by social media, the overwhelming majority of their fans were outraged that Arsenal’s request to defer the game for an unspecified number of Covid-19 cases had been accepted by the Premier League. Arsenal supporters, meanwhile, seemed [...]
Will Mikel Arteta’s real Arsenal stand up? January 13, 2022 When tonight’s Carabao Cup semi-final first leg between Liverpool and Arsenal was due to take place last week, there was a spring in the step of Mikel Arteta and those at the London club. Seven days later, they go into the contest attempting to recover from a costly stumble that has revived questions about the [...]