Greater fool theory helps to explain Premier League’s record £3.5bn transfer window Sport Business The transfer window has left Ed Warner’s head in a spin and even the most devoted football nut must have struggled to keep up, he writes. The football transfer window closed on Tuesday night, with over £3bn splashed out by Premier League clubs for the second summer running. In the end, Everton didn’t sell their [...]
What I’ve learned about English cricket finances in seven weeks chairing Sussex Sport Business Seven weeks as chair of Sussex Cricket and no major jolts to the view of the sport that I held while my nose was pressed to the window looking in, but lots of new detail to fill out my understanding of its challenges. Some of these challenges are unique to cricket, others common to many [...]
Is £5bn now the entry ticket into Premier League football? Sport Business It may have taken 34 years but the Premier League has at last clawed its way into the financial big time. The reported £5.5bn valuation placed on Liverpool FC by a consortium of new investors that includes Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos – aka the world’s third richest man – has the whiff of an NFL [...]
Not enough bums in Brum: Why so many empty seats at European Athletics Championships? August 13, 2026 Britain loves sport yet ticket sales for the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham have been slow. Ed Warner wonders why. British sport has a capacity problem or a bandwidth one, depending on which way you want to look at it. Too many seats in too many venues with too few bums to fill them. Or [...]
Fifa crisis: Is it possible to defend Infantino’s World Cup sell-off plan? August 6, 2026 Crafting a defence of Infantino isn’t easy, but it is possible to assemble both a behavioural excuse and a commercial justification for the Fifa president’s plan to sell stakes in the World Cup. One newspaper evocatively likened Gianni Infantino to Icarus at the weekend after his proposal to sell stakes in the World Cup melted [...]
Cristiano Ronaldo on Mars: Where will sport take us in the next five years? July 30, 2026 Tech disruption, athlete power and new formats: sport has changed dramatically since Ed Warner started writing weekly about the industry in 2021. This column – based on my weekly newsletter, Sport Inc. – has just reached its fifth anniversary. The book of the same name is three years older. In this short span of time, [...]
Commonwealth Games must prove crises are thing of past July 23, 2026 There is no evidence of Commonwealth Games fever in downtown St Peter Port. Guernsey, an island of 65,000 people, is sending 22 athletes to Glasgow 2026, down from 38 to Birmingham 2022. Colleagues on the island report far less public interest than four years ago. There you have these slimmed-down Games which start today in [...]
Sport expects true fan Andy Burnham to take a leaf out of John Major’s book July 16, 2026 Andy Burnham was Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport for 16 months in Gordon Brown’s cabinet. This was a time in which shirt and tie was the required political dress code for swinging in a children’s playground in Brixton with the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Family, one Ed Balls. Burnham’s [...]
Ed Warner: Why I’m optimistic about the future for Sussex Cricket July 9, 2026 ‘What will you do about your blog?’ was one question at interview, repeated a number of times since I was announced as the chair of Sussex Cricket last week. What of my trenchant criticisms of cricket’s leadership, the sport’s confused calendar and the divide between its haves and have nots? For now, this column and [...]
Ben Stokes bombshell shows how power has swung to sport’s players and coaches July 2, 2026 Social media has allowed the likes of Ben Stokes to control their own narrative but we are no nearer to knowing the truth, says Ed Warner. Truth is a pliable concept, capable of being moulded to suit the interests of the individual, and a battleground for competing narratives. Perspective is not all; volume and reach [...]
