By Jaroslaw Adamowski
August 25 – FC Aktobe has unveiled plans to build a new stadium with a seating capacity of 32,000. The Kazakh club says the construction of a new sports facility will be supported by the country’s government as parts of efforts to promote football. The side’s current stadium has a capacity of some 13,500 seats.
August 25 – Marcello Lippi, Italy’s 2006 World Cup-winning coach now in charge of China’s Guangzhou Evergrande, has been suspended for one game for confronting the referee during an AFC Champions League match.
By Andrew Warshaw
August 25 – World football has been shocked by the death of a 24-year-old Cameroon footballer struck by a missile thrown from the terraces at a league match in Algeria. Albert Ebosse Bodjongo (pictured), the Algerian league’s top scorer last season with 17 goals, was hit on the head by what appeared to be a piece of concrete.
By Andrew Warshaw
August 25 – Libya has been forced to pull out of hosting the 2017 African Cup of Nations in the latest blow to strike at the heart of African football.
Liverpool posted the biggest pre-tax loss in the Premier League in 2012-13. The previous year only Manchester City posted a bigger one. In such circumstances, you might have expected the Anfield club to be squirrelling away at least some of its Luis Suárez windfall; to be showing a modicum of restraint in this summer’s transfer market in the interests of its bottom-line. All the more so with UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) provisions hovering in the background.
By David Owen
August 22 – The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has given clearance for anti-doping bodies to resume human growth hormonr (hGH) testing after a more than year-long hiatus.
By Andrew Warshaw
August 22- What started out as an English top-flight club unexpectedly losing the manager voted the best in Premier League last season has developed into a sordid saga that has made back-page headlines and tarnished the integrity of the game.
By Andrew Warshaw
August 22- With so few-home grown players able to break into top-flight English clubs because of the foreign invasion, England manager Roy Hodgson feels more of them should chance their arm overseas as once used to be the case.
Whereas Premier League clubs import countless players from around the world, English footballers rarely any longer move the other way.
By Andrew Warshaw
August 22- FIFA plans to reform the status of agents have incurred the wrath of the UK-based Association of Football Agents who are taking their case the European Commission.
The proposals, designed to weed out rogue parties and make for a more transparent process, were approved in March and are due to come into effect on April 1 next year.
August 22 – Ghana’s investigation into their national team’s poor performance at the World Cup has uncovered discrepancies in the numbers of the supporter group that was officially sent to Brazil. Instead of the expected 612 fans, which had official seats on chartered flights, 696 found their way across.
22 August – With Russia rapidly putting in place preparations to host the world’s football community in 2018 for the FIFA World Cup, early movers can get a head start in the market at the World Football Forum that will be held at Ritz-Carlton in Moscow, November 13.
August 22 – Speaking in Saransk, Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko again repeated that there would be no change to the number of cities hosting the 2018 World Cup and that it would remain as 11, with a further 20 cities hosting national teams.
August 22 – MLS’ Philadelphia Union has renewed their deal with kit sponsor Bimbo Bakeries. The Bimbo logo will continue to appear on the front of their official shirts for the next five years, in a deal worth $11 million.
By Alexander Krassimirov
August 22 – The construction of Botev Plovdiv’s Hristo Botev stadium will restart next week after the club’s owner, Tsvetan Vasilev, decided to transfer his shares to his business partner Veselin Bushev.
By David Owen
August 21 – Coventry City, the English third-tier club, will resume playing their home games at home next month, after more than a season in residence at Northampton Town’s Sixfields Stadium, nearly 50km away.