September 27 – Morocco have reportedly moved into pole position to take over from Kenya as hosts of the 2018 African Nations Championship (CHAN), the regional tournament for domestically based players.
By Andrew Warshaw
September 27 – FIFA’s two former ethics chiefs, sacked last May during a purge of senior governance watchdogs, have made a strong appeal before the Council of Europe for the organisation’s supervisory bodies to be “totally independent” of its executive.
September 27 – The Premier League has sold more than 2.2 million tickets in the first six rounds of the season. Just 124,360 seats have gone unfilled, the majority of them due to stadium capacity restrictions.
By Mark Baber
September 27 – Football is due to return to Uruguay this weekend after an incident at a youth match involving the beating of two referees led to the suspension of all games on Sunday.
September 27 – A special European parliamentary group set up to look into tax evasion in football has been given a worrying overview of the scale of the problem.
By Samindra Kunti
September 27 – India has made a formal bid to host the 2019 U-20 World Cup, confirmed All India Football Federation (AIFF) president Praful Patel (pictured). Early next month India and the USA will kick off the U-17 World Cup, the first major international football tournament to be staged on Indian soil.
By Mark Baber
September 26 – The draw for the 2017 Gulf Cup in Qatar was held in Doha yesterday, but without the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain who boycotted the ceremony. The three nations are attempting to isolate Qatar politically and commercially, a strategy that has spilled over into football.
By Andrew Warshaw
September 26 – Having only recently been elected as head of the European Club Association, the reputation of Andrea Agnelli has taken an immediate and somewhat embarrassing turn for the worse with the Juventus boss banned for a year by Italy’s soccer federation (FIGC) for his alleged role in the sale of match tickets to the club’s ultras fans.
By Ben Pilbrow and Annemaree McDonough
Football has often been described as the beautiful game, but never the beautiful business. Regularly tainted by allegations of corruption and shady-dealing, the importance of regulation in the sport increases in line with the flow of money into it. Between 1 October 2015 and 1 February 2016, intermediaries and agents received an estimated £46,582,843 from Premier League clubs alone.
September 26 – Possession stats have become a staple of the TV presentation package and an indication of how games are progressing – generally winning teams have the majority of possession. Celtic top a ranking of European clubs this season, with a thumping 70.8% of ball possession.
September 26 – Shanghai SIPG coach Andre Villas-Boas has been fined for his outburst following the recent Asian Champions League quarterfinal tie against Guangzhou Evergrande.
September 26 – Championship club Nottingham Forest have signed a one-year partnership with vitamins and supplements manufacturer Healthspan.
September 26 – CONCACAF has set up a Disaster Evaluation Taskforce to assess the impact of the natural disasters that have devastated the region in recent weeks.
September 26 – American second tier league the USL has named SCG Fields as the Official Field Builder. SCG will be an official supplier for the United Soccer League, USL’s Division III, the Premier Development League (PDL) and the Super Y League.
September 21 – Not before time, FIFA is set to back down and lift its ban on British national teams displaying the poppy symbols on shirts and armbands to honour the war dead of World War 1 and all conflicts since.