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David Owen: Whatever happens on the pitch, Spurs could soon overtake Arsenal at the head of the Premier League profits table

After a weekend in which none of the Premier League’s big three managed to win, it remains tough to predict who will emerge as the 2013-14 champions. But you don’t need too powerful a crystal ball even at this stage to foresee which club is likely to make the season’s biggest pre-tax profit.

Assuming the soap opera of Gareth Bale’s transfer to Real Madrid (or A.N.Other) reaches a consummation before the window closes,

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: Big transfer fees even bigger rights and morality issues

The transfer of Gareth Bale to Real Madrid is set to generate £83 million and more in fees. This is by any measure a staggering sum of money. Whether the world-record sum represents value for money and whether his club can justify it under UEFA’s financial fair play rules are subjective matters for Real and UEFA to consider.

But it is intriguing to wonder whether Real’s owner, Florentino Perez, considered recent legal arguments as he haggled with Tottenham Hotspur’s chairman,

Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings: Jose The Simple One

The best football managers in history are often celebrated for their personalities. Their charisma. Their humour. Their temper.

But ultimately a club stands or falls on its team sheet. The players that these managers have selected.

The thing about Ferguson or Zagallo, Shankly, Clough, even Michels is that they knew which players they needed and how to use them, it’s as simple as that. No one-liner, no piece of motivation, not even a footballing philosophy like ‘total football’

Matt Scott

Matt Scott: Why Arsenal’s cash mountain may remain just that

‘Spend, spend, spend’, read the notice brandished by a furious-looking man behind Arsène Wenger’s dugout, as Arsenal slumped to a 3-1 defeat to Aston Villa on Saturday.  His was the politest exhortation of the day. Echoes of the anger that filled the Emirates Stadium, where groups of Arsenal supporters came to blows in their seats, have been read and heard on social media and radio phone-ins long after the final whistle fell silent.

It is the expression of a profound frustration,

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: Why is Sky suddenly on the back foot?

The Premier League season is barely a week old and results for all the hoopla hardly count. But off the field we already have the makings of a fascinating duel between BT and Sky, both of whom have the rights to broadcast live matches. Now on the face of it this is the biggest mismatch ever.

Sky has the rights to most of the matches, it has built its entire broadcasting structure on the back of the Premier League and played a huge role in making the League what it is today.

Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: Can CAF function in Egypt’s political cyclone?

With Egypt taking one uncertain but dangerous turn after another, as a result of the raging political crisis, the ‘House of African football’ is unwittingly caught up in the crossfire of a domestic conflict.

That’s an inescapable consequence of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) being headquartered in Cairo, the theatre of bloody street battles between rival supporters of the military-backed transitional government and the country’s democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, forced out of office a few weeks ago,

John Yan

John Yan: 赛事直播多频时代 A multi-screen age for football in China

赛事直播多频时代

关于欧洲的顶级足球联赛，中国球迷的幸运程度，要在欧洲球迷之上——只要你有足够多时间和足够大的兴趣，你可以看到绝大部分顶级欧洲足球职业赛事。

8月18日，一个全新的免费体育赛事频道，将出现在央视的频道矩阵当中，名为”5+”，意指CCTV5之外的又一个体育频道。央视体育中心主任江和平在介绍”5+”时，用”全赛事全高清全天候全开路”进行概括，”全开路”就说明了这个频道的免费性质。

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: Watch out for the long game that Greg Dyke is playing

Greg Dyke has never been afraid to take on the big battalions. His fights with Rupert Murdoch first over the rights to televise the newly formed Premier League and then over Sky’s attempt to buy Manchester United are legendary. And, as has been well recorded, he famously took on Tony Blair, and particularly his PR guru Alistair Campbell, over the dossier about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This ultimately cost him his BBC job but the way he waged that war showed his lust for battle.

Archive

Inside Insight: ‘To Qatar or Not Qatar’, that is the (real) question

Winter or summer?

Confucius say: Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

A summer World Cup has always been the FIFA choice in the past. Ever since the first one in 1930 in Uruguay.

But then, in Switzerland for example, women were not allowed to vote until the sixties – hence women not voting “had always been the choice” until such time as they were allowed to become full-time citizens.

Archive

David Owen: A big step forward, but where do you draw the new technology line?

I don’t know if Michel Platini is a fan of Ashes cricket.

If he is, he might have allowed himself a wry smile at the way debates relating to the sport’s attempts to harness technology to improve the quality of on-pitch decisions have provided an engrossing sub-text to the live action as the series has progressed.

Platini as far as I know still opposes use of the sort of goal-line technology that the Premier League will deploy for the first time at Anfield on Saturday when Liverpool and Stoke City kick off the 2013-14 season.

Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings: Europe shouldn’t set Qatar 2022 temperature

FIFA admit it was a mistake to award two World Cups – 2018 and 2022 – at the same time.

But anyone expecting them to admit giving 2022 to Qatar was a mistake has a long wait.

As the issue is clouded with controversy and debate we get further away from a simple, important truth. That there hasn’t been a World Cup in the Middle East and that there should be a World Cup in Middle East.

Osasu Obayiuwana

Osasu Obayiuwana: World Cup worries for Africa

As many within the fraternity would remember, the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa were coined as the ‘African World Cup’, for obvious ‘feel good’ reasons – being the first (and hopefully not the last) World Cup to be hosted on the continent.

But with five of Africa’s six teams knocked out in the first round of that tournament, it was anything but a successful advertisement for the strength of its football.

John Yan

John Yan: From Belgium With Hope

在都灵的Football Avenue论坛上，我见到了意大利足球传奇人物，吉亚尼·里维拉，1969年的金球奖先生、1970年世界杯意大利的10号。这位AC米兰名宿，和同时期国际米兰马佐拉，为一时瑜亮。里维拉来演讲的话题，是关于青少年足球培训，着重于青少年业余足球培训的各种细节，从”足球父母”如何在配合孩子学业的过程中，将足球作为孩子成长的重要工具，到孩子们训练周期的安排，以及不同年龄组别孩子在接受培训后，教练和父母应该特别注意把握的一些心理培训尺度等等。

当年的”金童”，如今已是七旬长者，里维拉和巴乔一样，都是意大利足协的青少年足球推广大使，这样的”大使”，不是被安排为引发观众尖叫踩踏、临走时挥一挥衣袖的偶像，而是真正加入到青训普及工程中，用自己的专业知识和社会影响力，来着力推动青训的导师。

Lee Wellings

Lee Wellings: Hooligan threat still exists

Football Hooliganism never really was ‘the English disease’ alone. The English were just good at it and, perhaps, the best at reporting it.

But English football has had another uncomfortable reminder it still exists in a nation whose reputation for trouble at football was once ‘world infamous’.

This season was only three days old when football fans and horses were back in the news. Preston fans invaded the pitch and charged at their local rivals Blackpool in a League Cup match.

Mihir Bose

Mihir Bose: The debt we owe Luis Suarez

There may not be many people who feel kindly towards Luis Suarez at this moment, apart that is from his mum. Yet this whole unedifying Suarez transfer saga may well help us understand and, even possibly, get a workable buy out clause in future contracts. And that can only be for the good of the game.

Now transfer talk invariably involves coded language where words acquire a wholly different meaning. So the player who seeks to move –