By Paul Nicholson
June 9 – The CIES Football Observatory have taken a step away from their number crunching analysis of the Big 5 men’s leagues in Europe to examine the composition of playing squads in the four most developed women’s league in Europe (Germany, Sweden, France and England), as well as the Women’s National Soccer League in the United States.
June 9 – Executives of Swiss bank Julius Baer have told US prosecutors that a former employee acted alone when he allegedly helped funnel kickbacks and bribery payments to a soccer official in the Americas, according to Reuters.
By Samindra Kunti
June 9 – Dick Advocaat begins his third reign as Netherlands coach with the mission of taking Oranje to the World Cup in Russia. Holland lie in fourth position in their World Cup qualification group and play Luxembourg on Friday.
June 9 – Scottish Premiership treble winners Celtic have announced that they have “smashed the 50,000 barrier for season tickets sold for the coming 2017/18 season.” The club did not lose a league game under new manager Brendan Rodgers last season.
June 9 – Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo is the highest paid athlete on earth with earnings of $93 million, according Forbes magazine’s annual ranking of sportstars’ salaries. In a top 100 list dominated by 63 US athletes (29 of them from the NBA), Ronaldo came top of the earnings pile for a second year running.
By Paul Nicholson
June 8 – With the opening of the Confederations Cup tournament in Russia just nine days away, FIFA have received a letter from a Cameroon club claiming that the African team competing in Russia is not the country’s ‘legal’ representative at the tournament, and should not be recognised by the world governing body as such.
By Samindra Kunti
June 8 – Defining a single structure for professional league football in India remains a work in progress after a meeting between officials of the AFC and stakeholders in the Indian game agreed to a road map of further research and discussion towards a long term league solution.
June 8 – New Balance has added Belgian first division side Royal Standard de Liège to its kit supply roster, taking over Kappa. The US sportswear firm will provide the team with kit, training wear and equipment starting with the 2017/18 season.
June 8 – Russian Premier League side Terek Grozny is to change its name to ‘Akhmat’ in honour of the father of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov.
By Nigel Dudley
June 8 – President Trump hailed the decision by the Gulf states to isolate Qatar as the “end of terrorism” – and indeed was keen to take much of the credit himself.
June 8 – With Confederation Cup ticket sales slow to take off, Russia’s World Cup chief Alexei Sorokin has bemoaned Germany’s decision to send a weakened squad to the traditional warmup tournament which begins on June 17.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 8 – The diplomatic rift between Qatar and a number of other Arab countries has made further incursions into football, forcing venue changes in the Asian Champions League.
June 8 – As part of a new get-tough policy, the English Football Association has for the first time handed lifetime bans from attending away games to two supporters following incidents during March’s friendly against Germany in Dortmund.
On Tuesday afternoon, June 6, Captain Horace Burrell, 67, passed away at the John Hopkins Cancer Centre in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He had been battling cancer for more than a year and succumbed to it while undergoing additional treatment.
By Samindra Kunti
June 7 – Confederations Cup host Russia has boosted security ahead of the tournament’s kick-off on June 17. Russian president Vladimir Putin has approved legislation to curb violence and hooliganism at football games after violent clashes between Russian and English fans in Marseille at Euro 2016.