By Paul Nicholson
January 15 – Lagardère Sports have won the international sales rights to CONCACAF events including this year’s Gold Cup, taking over from last international sales reps IMG who held the contract for a year. No details were given on the deal or the size of the guarantee that Lagardère made.
January 16 – A return to Premier League football after FA Cup fixtures marked a return to sell out crowds at seven Premier League stadia. Swansea, West Ham, Man Utd and Leicester again recorded over 99% of their stadiums full.
January 14 – The antics of Nottingham Forest Football Club owner, Kuwaiti businessman Fawaz Al Hassawi, in the protracted (attempted) sale of one of England’s oldest clubs, are taking on ludicrous proportions.
By David Owen
January 13 – José Mourinho and his team look to have received payments totalling more than £8 million from Chelsea after parting company with the West London club in December 2015 following a string of poor results.
By Andrew Warshaw
January 13 – Christopher Steele, the man who it is claimed wrote the explosive raw intelligence dossier on compromising material Russia allegedly collected on US President-elect Donald Trump, worked with the FBI in investigating FIFA as well as England’s 2018 World Cup bid team, according to unconfirmed reports.
By Samindra Kunti
January 13 – Hosts Gabon and debutants Guinea-Bissau will kick off the 31st edition of the Africa Cup of Nations this weekend, the biennial men’s football championship organised by the Confederation of African Football (CAF).
By Paul Nicholson
January 13 – Major League Soccer has unveiled its 2017 regular season which for the first time will take a break during the CONCACAF Gold Cup group stages July 7-17, a significant move by the league to give the region’s premier international competition a clear window of media profile in the US.
January 13 – Is Morocco secretly planning to put a spanner in the works of a 2026 CONCACAF World Cup bid?
January 13 – UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin hosted AFC president Shaikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa at UEFA HQ in Nyon, Switzerland, with an agenda based on deepening the relationship between the tow confederations.
January 13 – Is Issa Hayatou’s long, autocratic and often controversial reign as head of African football at last about to be put to the test?
January 12 – With the English FA Cup having played its first weekend with the Premier League teams in the competition, and Spain’s Copa del Rey being marked by a comeback performance by Barcelona and Messi brilliance to get them though to the quarter finals, the question of whether Cup competitions are a distraction or an opportunity is being asked across Europe.
By Paul Nicholson
January 12 – UEFA has released its latest club benchmarking report – an impressive and exhaustive (and exhausting) analysis via a range of indicators of the health and current position of European club football.
By Andrew Warshaw
All the benefits with no negatives. So proclaimed Gianni Infantino immediately after this week’s seismic decision to expand the World Cup to 48 teams. This is not about politics, he said. This is not about money. This is purely about serving football and redressing the game’s imbalances. Does anyone in their right mind really believe that?
January 12 – Manchester City have been charged by the Football Association for failing to ensure that anti-doping officials knew where their players were for random drugs testing.
