By Mark Baber
January 5 – Herbert Hainer has excited world-wide attention after the Adidas boss criticised the playing style of Manchester United – the club with whom he signed a world record £75m a year kit deal in 2014.
By Paul Nicholson
January 5 – The daily fantasy sports (DFS) business that has taken the US fantasy gaming market by storm and is preparing for entries into the European football market, is facing a defining moment this week in the New York courts as to whether it will be allowed to continue.
By Andrew Warshaw
January 5 – Once again, a hugely experienced and knowledgable coach has been unable to make it at Real Madrid where demands are possibly higher than anywhere else.
By Andrew Warshaw
January 5 – He is regarded as an outsider and has been accused of being verbose and too close to his former boss, the currently banned Sepp Blatter. But Jerome Champagne has lost none of his passion or approachability and believes that if football, and FIFA, wants meaningful change and an inclusive future, he is the only presidential candidate who can bring it about.
By Paul Nicholson
January 5 – Lionel Messi is worth €100 million more than Neymar and he is worth €66 million more than Luis Suarez who is the eighth most valuable player in Europe, according to a CIES Football Observatory ranking of the 100 most valuable players in the Big 5 European Leagues in England, Spain, Germany, France and Italy.
January 5 – China’s Super Sports is now 30 days into its 38-day English Premier League ‘carnival’. The Chinese broadcast rights holder has been promoting the league and its clubs with events focussed in the Aegean Shopping Mall based in Tianjin.
January 4 – Paris St-Germain partner Ooredoo has announced a recent digital promotion generated more than 13 million Youtube views. The promotion, a fan competition, culminated with the sending of 15 winners to Qatar to meet the players and watch a friendly match between Inter Milan and Paris Saint-Germain on December 30 at Qatar’s Al Sadd Stadium.
By Mark Baber
January 4 – The January transfer window opened on Saturday for clubs in England, Scotland, Germany and France with expectations of a high spending round dependent on early sales to set the merry-go-round in motion.
By Samindra Kunti
January 4 – India have won the South Asian Football Federation Cup (SAFF Cup) for the seventh time defeating Afghanistan 2-1 in the final to kick off 2016 on a high.
January 4 – The tragic unexplained death of Steve Gohouri, the former Ivory Coast World Cup defender, has caused shock throughout his country and in Europe where he played most of his club football.
By Paul Nicholson
January 4 – The Premier League’s Christmas and New Year extravaganza of three matches in 10 days saw more than 1.16 million fans attend matches with just 37,444 seats unfilled across the 30 home games, of which more than 10,000 of the unfilled seats were at Sunderland’s Stadium of Light.
By many yardsticks, 2015 must go down as a pretty rotten year for sport. The crises at FIFA and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) have put doping and governance issues squarely at the top of the movement’s agenda, highlighting how it has struggled to cope with the full consequences of the financial windfall which the digital media era has delivered.
January 3 – Liberia Football Association chairman Musa Bility (pictured) has failed to overturn his exclusion from February’s FIFA presidential election. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has dismissed Bility’s attempt to throw out the ruling imposed by FIFA’s Ad hoc Electoral Committee.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 31 – Switzerland’s federal justice authorities have handed over the first batch of bank documents to their US counterparts in relation to the corruption scandal that has engulfed FIFA’s north, south and central federations.
By David Owen
December 30 – Wilfried Bony and Ben Davies ensured that Swansea City stayed in the black in 2014-15, in spite of a pronounced increase in costs. Transfer fees agreed on their departures for Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur respectively were enough to convert an operating loss into a pre-tax profit of £1.7 million compared with £1.3 million in 2013-14.