By Andrew Warshaw
June 5 – FIFA president Gianni Infantino suddenly appears to be backtracking on bringing forward plans for a 48-team World Cup to the 2022 tournament in Qatar.
June 5 – Tony Xia (pictured), Aston Villa’s Chinese owner who bought the club from American Randy Lerner for £62 million in 2016, is looking for new funding for the club after failure to win the Championship play-off against Fulham that would have returned the club to the monied land of the Premier League.
June 5 – The financial crisis that has hit Yonghong Li’s ownership of AC Milan has seen the Chinese owner reportedly in secret emergency meetings in Italy attempting to refinance the club’s debt and potentially bring in new ownership partners.
June 5 – So do we now know the real reason for one of most calamitous goalkeeping displays of recent years or is it too cynical to suggest we are just being fed convenient excuses?
June 5 – Just weeks after receiving a rapturous send-off after his final game for Manchester City, Yaya Toure has launched a remarkable broadside against title-winning coach Pep Guardiola.
June 5 – Tunisia’s World Cup players appear to have discovered an ingenious way of breaking their Ramadan fasts in the build-up to the tournament.
June 5 – Osiris Guzman, the Dominican Republic federation president who famously once used a speech to compare Sepp Blatter to Jesus Christ, Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill all rolled into one, has found himself going the same way as FIFA’s former president after being banned by FIFA’s ethics committee from all involvement in the game for 90 days pending a full inquiry.
June 5 – Manchester City’s Premier League-winning manager Pep Guardiola has been handed a two-game suspension by UEFA for his conduct during the defeat to Liverpool in the Champions League quarter-finals.
June 5 – For millions of football fans all over the world the World Cup is not the World Cup without the official sticker album, particularly in the UK where a World Cup without the player swaps merry-go-round would be like Christmas without a fat man in a red suit coming down the chimney.
June 6 – West Ham have signed Taiwanese international airline Eva Air as the club’s first official airline partner.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 6 – A bitter war of words row has broken out over Argentina’s upcoming pre-World Cup friendly against Israel with the head of the Palestine Football Association urging Arab fans to burn replica shirts of Lionel Messi if he plays and Israel’s backers countering the rhetoric by angrily protesting to FIFA.
June 4 – Eighteen months after the Swiss criminal investigation into corruption allegations over the awarding of the 2006 World Cup to Germany was broadened to include former FIFA general secretary Urs Linsi (pictured), he is now reported to be among four former leading administrators charged by German prosecutors with serious tax evasion.
June 4 – Ethiopian football has a new leader, albeit after a protracted election process, in Esayas Jira who takes over Juneidi Basha after polling 87 of 145 votes at the national federation’s General Assembly.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 2 – Publicly, they have put on a brave face and sent out a positive message. Privately, as well as being relieved, they must be mightily frustrated to put it mildly.
June 4 – Mastercard and FIFA just don’t seem to get along. No longer the official credit card of the World Cup – that right belongs to Visa – a hijack marketing campaign by Mastercard fell flat on its face at the weekend.