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.
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.
By Paul Nicholson
December 30 – Shaikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al-Khalifa has launched his FIFA presidential campaign platform formally with a website outlining his election manifesto.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 30 – The US sports television network ESPN has invited all five candidates in FIFA’s presidential election to participate in a round-table debate on how they would solve the scandal-hit organisation’s problems.
By Mark Baber
December 30 – As the battle between rival factions for control of Nigeria’s Football Federation (NFF) hots up again, the country’s Minister of Youth and Sports, Barrister Solomon Dalung, has warned “that violence will amount to a breakdown of law and order which will not solve the 14 month old crisis and will not be acceptable to the government.”
December 30 – Rafael Esquivel, one of the original ‘Zurich Seven’ arrested last May in the first crackdown by the US Justice Department on FIFA-related corruption, is to remain in custody in Switzerland after losing his latest request to be allowed to be held under house arrest.
By Ben Nicholson
December 30 – Oklahoma City Energy FC is adding to its USL (United Soccer League) franchise with a PDL team (Premier Development League). The PDL is an amateur league tailored mostly for players under the age of 23 that attracts college players during their university’s off-season.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 30 – In what will be construed in some quarters as a deliberately defiant act, Michel Platini appears to have violated the terms of his eight-year FIFA ban after openly attending an awards ceremony and conference in Dubai.