By Andrew Warshaw
October 26 – Gianni Infantino’s pet plan to change the landscape of world football competition was shelved for another five months today as he all but admitted that not enough consultation had taken place.
October 26 – The Spanish league says it will appeal if prevented by FIFA from breaking new ground by staging the much-publicised fixture between Girona and Barcelona overseas in Miami in January.
October 26 – The head of the European Clubs Association, Juventus President Andrea Agnelli, has voiced his opposition to Gianni Infantino’s game-changing proposals to change the face of world football.
October 26 – Belgium have edged ahead of France to take outright top spot in FIFA’s world rankings with tiny Gibraltar the biggest risers thanks to their first two competitive wins this month.
October 26 – Football’s lawmakers are considering a ban on injury-time substitutions as a way of cutting down on time-wasting according to the Times newspaper.
October 25 – FIFA president Gianni Infantino is a simple man. He hails from a simple Alpine small town and has a simplistic outlook on the big wide world. For a decade he was fighting FIFA, the arch enemy. And fighting hard. Now he is its boss. A victory that probably surprised him more than many of those who had given him little chance of winning, as the stand-in for Michel Platini that he was.
October 26 – UEFA has gone to market with a new set of sponsorship categories for its Women’s Football properties for the 2018-2021 cycle.
October 26 – He didn’t appear on the podium of either the FIFA Best or UEFA’s annual awards but data for the season so far makes Neymar the Most Valuable Player in Europe’s Big 5 leagues.
October 25 – Gianni Infantino’s controversial $25 billion plan for two new international tournaments has come under further attack, this time from the umbrella body representing Europe’s major leagues.
By Paul Nicholson
October 25 – The FIFA Council meeting this Friday in Rwanda will look again at the proposed revised competition structure for the international calendar – a new Club World Cup competition, and a move towards some kind of Nations League. All underpinned by the elephant in the room of $25 billion of Saudi money.
October 25 – The group that re-founded Parma after the Italian club’s bankruptcy in 2015 and started again in Serie D under the banner ‘Nuovo Inizio’ (New Beginning) have re-taken a majority shareholding, wresting control from Chinese investors Desports.
October 25 – During their 2026 World Cup campaign, Moroccan officials were at pains to stress how human rights were not an issue – just as Turkey did for the 2024 Euros.
October 25 – Former Guinea international Ismael Bangoura has been handed a six-month suspended jail sentence and fined more than €130,000 after being convicted of fraud by a court in France.
October 25 – Defending champions Nigeria were paired with South Africa, Zambia and Kenya in Group B as the eight participants in the 2018 Women’s Africa Cup of Nations learned their fate at the draw in Accra.
October 25 – New eSports league e.Football.Pro has signed Portugal’s Boavista as the fifth participating team for Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer platform.