Every Christmas, a typical family in the UK will get caught up in the same yearly merry go round. They may have all the intention of budgeting for their Christmas presents. Going to do the shopping nice and early in November so it’s out the way so they can sit back and enjoy the special day. Then when it comes to wrapping the presents, panic, ‘we haven’t bought enough’. If they don’t get more new shiny presents, Christmas will be ruined and to avoid this scenario the credit card gets …

  It is now no secret about the cripling debt that Manchester United has accumulated since the takeover of the Glazer family.  While the debt has been front page headlines across the world, it has barely caused a ripple here in the United States.  Even a home owned newspaper makes light of the debt and passes it off as minor hysteria. http://www2.tbo.com/content/2010/jan/21/glazers-run-silent-amid-reports-money-troubles/  The article does make two valid points:  1) Manchester United is indeed more valuable than The Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the NFL  2) There is a good chance that …

Football. If ever there was a sport that has been dramatically altered by money, it’s this one. More and more clubs are being taken over by billionaires, with the seemingly important ‘must love football’ often not being part of the criteria. Television companies are scrapping over broadcasting rights and manipulating fixtures as they please. And the players themselves are earning a ridiculous wage every week considering firstly, they don’t save lives or help the needy, they kick ’an inflated pig’s bladder’ around a field, and secondly, they get their paycheck whether they put in a world-class performance, …

We’re often told “anything can happen in football – it’s the beautiful game, blink and you’ll miss something”. Well! Perhaps everything beautiful has already happened. Maybe all the good stuff took place in the previous century and now the last 10 years are part of a cycle that will circulate till the end of time.

Can Nottingham Forest ever win back to back European Cups again? Or can Celtic ever lift Europe’s highest accolade with a team from within 30 miles of Glasgow? Can any of these possibilities be achieved …

As Manchester City fork out a suspected 25 million pounds to buy Emanuel Adebayor after spending £25 million on Carlos Tevez, many “normal” citizens of every country in the world are losing money and finding life hard. However this is not such a big problem in the world of football as only the richest of people are involved. Of course, there has been incidents like at West Ham when the owners have been hit hard by the crisis but usually there is a way out of it. Here is my …

Throughout the late eighties and nineties, Italy had undoubtedly the most competitive football league in the world. Alongside the status came the financial clout. In between Diego Maradona’s switch from Barcelona to Napoli in 1984 and Alan Shearer’s move to Newcastle in 1997, every world record transfer involved Italian clubs purchasing one of the world’s great superstars.
Big bucks continued to fly into the new millennium as transfers involving Christian Vieri, Hernan Crespo and Gianlugi Buffon all exceeded 30 million pounds. As the first decade of the new millennium draws to …

In essence, the game of football is a splendidly simple prospect.
Tracing its roots back to China, England and even Greenland, the very first players of the game used pig’s bladders or skins of possums, and it was even outlawed by King Edward III in the 1300s.
In the hundreds of years since, however, the beautiful game has become increasingly tarnished by the influx of money pumped into it. Indeed, football has evolved so rapidly that its disputes have even entered the law courts as clubs become increasingly dependent on the financial …

And so it’s happened. Cristiano Ronaldo has finally flown off into the Madrid sunset, his departure leaving Manchester United fans, North West based hair gel companies and women everywhere disappointed and more than a little angry. His new club, Real Madrid, parted with nearly £80 000 000 for his services, and thus it’s only natural that in wake of his leaving, a familiar topic in the world of football has once again found itself being discussed, notably is there to much money in football?

I think most people would pay £80 …

It has now become a current occurrence, every week almost, that matches are investigated thoroughly. Match reports are assessed, eagle-eyed bookmaking staff check for irregular betting patterns. This isn’t done as a priority to preserve bookmakers’ money, but to preserve football from being dragged into the innocuous world of rogues.

In a world crisis-hit by the economic recession, even professional footballers are finding it hard to pay for the luxurious lifestyle that everybody wants to lead. The desire to make a little bit of ‘easy money’ can be, to say …

Thirty years ago, Trevor Francis became the first player in England to be sold for one million pounds. Back in 1979, this fee was a huge milestone in football. So large in fact that Brian Clough actually paid £999,999 up front to ensure that the proposition of holding this record didn’t go to Francis’ head.  Fast forward to 2009 and Cristiano Ronaldo has just shatterred the world transfer record with an 80 million pounds switch to Real Madrid.
Such a groundbreaking deal had been threatening to happen for quite a while. Ten years …