By Mark Baber
May 9 – Indian sports broadcaster Ten Sports has agreed a 3-season deal with the Football Federation of Australia (FFA) to broadcast Australia’s top tier competition – the Hyundai A-League – across the Indian sub-continent, from this October.
When Italy won the 2006 World Cup they did so with their club football in turmoil. A corruption scandal engulfed the club game, grave enough for Juventus to be stripped of two league titles and others hit with relegations and points deductions.
No such obvious crisis in 2014. But severe problems are there. We’ll come to hooliganism in a moment but quality-wise Italian football IS in a bad way.
It mysteriously doesn’t seem to be affecting the national team,
May 8 – Louis van Gaal, Holland’s coach at the World Cup, has given the broadest hint yet that he will succeed David Moyes as the next full-time boss of Manchester United.
May 8 – Brazil’s attempt to win the World Cup on home soil will be handed to those who have given the country back its pride under coach Luiz Felipe Scolari. In other words, no big surprises.
By Andrew Warshaw
May 8 – Villarreal have been fined just €12,000 by the Spanish Football Federation for the already infamous racism incident when a fan threw a banana at Barcelona defender Dani Alves.
May 8 – The FIFA/CIES sports management programme has expanded its footprint into the Middle East with the announcement of an official partnership with the Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi (PSUAD). The university will be the academic partner of the International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES).
May 8 – Bloomberg Sports is rolling out its advanced match analytics products for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. The stats-based service for fans has been operating across Europe’s major leagues this season, primarily as a betting service allied with its match predictor tools.
By David Owen
May 7 – A French second division team has named a female manager in a milestone for gender equality in the sport. Helena Costa, 36, from Portugal will take over at Clermont Foot 63, currently 14th in Ligue 2, for next season.
By Andrew Warshaw
May 7 – The dangerous political tensions in Ukraine have forced a number of league fixtures as well as the domestic cup final to be relocated from the country’s pro-Russian eastern cities as well as the Russian-occupied Crimea peninsula for security reasons.
May 7 – The Italian government says it will crack down on hooliganism following the mayhem that marred last weekend’s domestic cup final in Rome.
May 7 – An English second-tier striker has been has been handed a suspended three-month ban and fined £60,000 in the latest breach of football’s betting rules to hit English football.
By David Owen
May 6 – The Football Association (FA)’s national football centre will be a hive of activity next month while Roy Hodgson’s England squad are on the other side of the Atlantic in Brazil attempting to win the country’s second FIFA World Cup and their first in nearly 50 years.
“Authority should derive from the consent of the governed. Not from the threat of force.” Barbie, Toy Story 3
When Barbie exasperatedly vents words more suited to a treatise by Friedrich Hayek than to an animated doll, the scriptwriters at Disney gave us one of the truly great lines of movie history. Because although spoken by the very embodiment of infantilism – a plastic doll played with by generations of young girls –
By Richard van Poortvliet
May 6 – Russia could be about to introduce a salary cap for its clubs, according to the Honorary President of the Russian Football Union, Vyacheslav Koloskov (pictured). The Russian State Duma took the lead in promoting the idea to the association.
By Andrew Warshaw
May 6- Manchester City and Paris St. Germain, both bankrolled by Middle East investors, appear to have broken Uefa’s financial fair play regulations and look like receiving swingeing punishments as a result of their relentless quest to become permanent members of European football’s affluent elite.