By Andrew Warshaw
July 25 – Disgraced former FIFA vice-president Jack Warner has agreed to pay Trinidad $375,000 (US$56,000) to a fellow Caribbean politician to end a long-running local feud unconnected with the widespread bribery allegations hanging over him.
February 19 – FIFPro have unveiled their first ever Women’s World XI. While women have award parity with the men in terms of the Ballon d’Or World Player of the Year awards, until now (and unlike the men) a World XI selected by female players worldwide had never been attempted.
By Ben Nicholson
October 28 – Sporting KC (Kansas City) has announced the formation of its new reserve team in the USL, the third tier of professional US soccer, called Swope Park Rangers.
August 21 – The Financial Integrity and Transparency in Sport (FITS) Forum being held in Geneva on 3-4 September has announced more speakers to its already heavyweight line-up.
By David Owen
June 15 – The news and business information group Dow Jones is moving to exploit the drive for better corporate governance in the sports sector by launching Dow Jones Sports Intelligence, a new offshoot of its existing due diligence business, Dow Jones Risk & Compliance.
June 8 – With the international spotlight focused on corruption and money-laundering at FIFA and doping claims in athletics, the Qatar-based International Centre for Sport Security (ICSS) is laying on a specialist session in Geneva in September to explore how sport, governments and the wider stakeholder community can tackle the issues and come up with ideas for robust reform.
June 5 – The battle against betting related match fixing is seeing a rapid uptake in stakeholders looking for ways to combine resource and intelligence to control what is probably the biggest threat to the sporting integrity of the game. The latest information sharing agreement is between the European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol, have linked up with Sportradar’s betting security division.
By Andrew Warshaw
May 8 – Ray Whelan, the British director who was arrested and detained in Brazil after being wrongly accused of selling VIP World Cup tickets at inflated prices, is back working as a consultant for Match Services, FIFA’s official marketing partner, and is planning to write a book about the entire experience.
By Andrew Warshaw
May 6 – One of the world’s leading sports security experts has warned that cyber attacks are the biggest growing threat to major football tournaments as well as other key sporting events.
By Paul Nicholson
May 6 – US sports data specialists STATS LLC has continued on the acquisition trail with the addition of UK-based Prozone, specialists in game and player performance tracking. Last September STATS acquired Bloomberg Sports. The enhanced capabilities of the group will lead to new product, and potentially real time stats for football clubs, ‘moneyball’ style.
May 4 – The Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Sportradar have the signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that is intended to beef up the co-operation and information sharing in the war on match-fixing.
April 17 – As the scourge of global match-fixing shows little sign of diminishing, fresh calls have been made for governments to introduce legislation that recognises it as a global crime.
By David Owen
March 3 – New Dutch analysis has estimated that the prevalence of doping in elite sport is “likely” to be between 14 and 39% – far above the level of adverse analytical findings turned up by anti-doping tests. But the analysis also concludes that, while the tools to obtain a far more accurate gauge of true doping levels exist, published studies on the subject are “scarce”.
January 23 – A report titled The Odds of Match Fixing – Facts & figures on the integrity risks of certain sports bets by Professor Dr Ben Van Rompuy of the ASSER International Sports Law Centre draws a number of conclusions that blow away some of the myths around conventionally held thinking on match-fixing.
January 9 – The International Sports Press Association, AIPS, has issued a damning statement condemning the terrorist attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that killed 12 people including 10 journalists.