By Andrew Warshaw
October 22 – A new report into the extent to which professional footballers are attacked online has thrown up damning and disturbing findings, with 43% of English Premier League players surveyed having experienced “targeted racist abuse”.
October 22 – Top-flight Swiss side FC Sion have put their entire squad and medical staff into quarantine and have asked for their next two games to be postponed following the club’s latest coronavirus tests, though results were not revealed.
October 22 – The international window at last saw a return to a significant numbers of national team matches with FIFA reporting 120 games played in October, the bulk of them in the UEFA and Conmebol region. The top five nations in FIFA’s men’s national team ranking all remained the same.
October 22 – FIFA President Gianni Infantino has said he is not interested in the plotting behind the scenes in European football and the creation of a Super League, but he remains committed to the world federation’s revamped but delayed Club World Cup.
October 22 – Trials of permanent concussion substitutes could begin in January, the game’s law-makers have announced.
October 22 – UEFA have put a stop to all club and national team competitions in Armenia and Azerbaijan until further notice because of the continuing military conflict in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
October 22 – UEFA has launched the second of its national team esports competition – eEuro 2021 – which will complete with a London final in the summer next year.
By David Owen
October 21 – Manchester United today fired the first shot in what is set to be an extremely sobering Premier League financial results season, reporting a pre-tax loss of £20.8 million for the year to end-June 2020.
By Andrew Warshaw
October 21 – Yet another audacious challenge to the Champions League is reportedly being plotted behind the scenes involving Europe’s biggest clubs and altering the entire landscape of the game at elite level. It is a repeating narrative in Europe but this time round appears to have FIFA’s encouragement.
October 21 – With the uncertainty surrounding club revenues in domestic leagues, particularly around match day revenue, clubs that have qualified for the UEFA Champions League will be grateful for the relative the financial stability that competition brings.
October 21 – LaLiga has become the first European sports league to open an official account on the Twitch streaming platform.
October 21 – UEFA has cancelled its U-19 European Championship because of the coronavirus pandemic and issues around international travel.
October 21 – The ongoing row between the Spanish league and the national federation over which days domestic matches can take place in the country is back in the news after a Madrid court rejected the latest request by La Liga to play on Mondays and Fridays.
October 21 – Greece has dropped plans to allow fans back at sporting events and football matches, the country’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Tuesday. The measure forms parts of new tougher restrictions in Greece to combat and contain the coronavirus.
October 21 – Concacaf, in the throes of starting its club competitions, has had to postpone one of the first matches of its second club competition, the Concacaf League, after four players and four staff from Belize’s Verdes FC tested positive for covid.