By Mark Baber
November 17 – FIFA may be under fire from its existing US sponsors but its properties still have attraction for marketers. Rinnai, the Japanese-headquartered tankless water heater manufacturer and distributor has signed on as an official sponsor of FIFA Club World Cup 2015, being held December 10 – 20 2015 in Japan.
November 17 – Premier League Liverpool have broken the 5 million Twitter follower barrier and are celebrating with a competition for fans to be become the club’s new number 5 for one game only.
November 17 – English Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur has expanded its push into Chinese markets with a series of grassroots initiatives that are being supported by club sponsor AIA.
By Andrew Warshaw
November 17 – FIFA president Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini, his would-be successor, face being banned for several years before Christmas whether or not they successfully appeal against their current provisional suspensions.
By Andrew Warshaw
November 17 – UEFA have confirmed that next summer’s European Championship finals will take place in France as planned despite the deadly terrorists attacks in Paris on Friday.
November 17 – Belgian authorities have called off tonight’s prestige friendly with Spain in Brussels for security reasons after the hosts became the focal point of attention in the wake of the Paris terrorist atrocity.
By Paul Nicholson in Manama, Bahrain
November 16 – If you want to know the truth go to the source and ask the questions, is the message from Asian Football Confederation president Shaikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa who is challenging for the FIFA presidency. In the first of two instalments, Salman speaks exclusively to Insideworldfootball on the accusations of human rights abuses and his candidacy for the FIFA presidency.
By Samindra Kunti
November 16 – The Belgian FA KBVB have announced increased security measures for Belgium’s friendly against Spain tomorrow in Brussels following the Paris terrorist attacks.
By Andrew Warshaw
November 16 – The crackdown on corruption by FIFA’s ethics investigators has snared another major figure with Nepal’s Ganesh Thapa banned for 10 years for bribery.
By Andrew Warshaw
November 16 – Organisers of next summer’s European Championship finals in France say they will not be deterred by the Paris terrorist onslaught and that the tournament will go ahead and not be re-allocated.
November 16 – David Nakhid, the former Trinidad and Tobago midfielder who was excluded from the FIFA presidential campaign on a technicality, has appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in a final effort to get back in the race.
November 16 – Diego Maradona, one of football’s greatest ever strikers whose career on and off the field has nevertheless been blighted by controversy, is recovering after undergoing a gastric bypass in the western Venezuelan city of Maracaibo over the weekend.
By Andrew Warshaw
November 16 – In an act of collective solidarity and defiance, all 23 players in the French squad to face England in a prestige friendly on Tuesday have agreed to travel.
By Samindra Kunti
November 16 – The president of the Brazilian Football Confederation CBF Marco Polo del Nero has submitted a Habeas Corpus request with the Superior Federal Court STF to prevent him from being imprisoned.
As regular readers may know, I am sceptical about sport’s ability to bring doping by top-level athletes under anything resembling control. Equally, the spectre of a complete pharmaceutical free-for-all is, in some respects, so disturbing that I would concede we need to be certain we have exhausted all avenues before we all, to borrow a phrase used last week by Independent Commission chair Richard Pound, “go home”.