FIFA’s general secretary Jérôme Valcke says the Sao Paulo stadium isn’t ready for the opening game so FIFA isn’t ready. But that is not the point. Brazil will be a great success because there is no other choice, he says. There is no Plan B.
March 14 – Budweiser has partnered with FOX Sports to activate its World Cup 2014 sponsorship with a series of football documentaries that will air in more than 55 countries as part of the beer company’s World Cup campaign.
By Jaroslaw Adamowski
March 13 – Romania’s Dinamo Bucharest has been put up for sale. Ionut Negoita, the football club’s owner, is currently negotiating the sale of a majority share in Dinamo, which plays in Liga 1, the top tier of the country’s professional football league.
By Andrew Warshaw
March 13 – Two days after his all-conquering club reached the last eight of the Champions League, humiliation was heaped on Bayern Munich president Uli Hoeness when he was sensationally jailed for three years and six months for tax evasion.
March 13- The scramble for World Cup tickets in Brazil shows no sign of diminishing with 203,330 of the available 360,000 snapped up within the first five hours of the second period of the second sales phase opening.
By Andrew Warshaw
March 13- They may not be staging the World Cup for another four years but Russian organizers are coming under pressure from within their own ranks to speed up stadium construction.
By Andrew Warshaw
March 13- Despite their supremacy on the field, European champions Bayern Munich are in trouble off it – and not only regarding the tax evasion trial of club president Uli Hoeness.
March 13 – CONCACAF has appointed a team of Diversity Officers who will have special responsibility for ensuring that the recently introduced ‘Protocol for Racist Incidents During Matches’ is implemented.
By David Owen
March 12 – A man who had a hand in Canada’s recent Olympic men’s ice hockey gold medal is replacing Nicola Cortese as chairman of Southampton.
By Paul Nicholson
March 13 – Egypt’s turbulent political situation has become inextricably linked to club football in the country and the political activities of the fans who have been leaders and activists in the revolution and the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak and the President Mohammed Morsi. Now a joint Ultras statement is calling for removal of the police from all football stadia.
March 12 – Newcastle United’s Alan Pardew has been handed a seven-game ban, a Premier League record for a manager, for the headbutt inflicted on Hull City midfielder David Meyler that was flashed around the world on television.
March 12 – FIFA has opened on-line sales for another 345,000 World Cup tickets. Tickets will be sold on a first come, first saved basis.
By Mark Baber
March 12 – Swedish police have confirmed that three men, charged with attempted murder after an apparently pre-meditated attack on a group returning from a Reclaim the Night International Women’s Day event in the early hours of Sunday morning, are known Nazis belonging to the Senskarnas Parti (Swedes Party).
March 12 – Police in Ghana have launched an investigation into the death of an assistant referee who was apparently attacked by spectators after a second division game.
