July 4 – With just three days to go before the final of the 2025 Gold Cup in the NRG Stadium in Houston, Concacaf is reporting that there are less than 4,000 tickets left for the 72,200 capacity stadium that will host Mexico and the USA.
Germany 2 Poland 0
July 4 – With second-half goals, Germany laboured to a 2-0 victory against debutants Poland in Group C in St Gallen, but lost their captain Gulia Gwinn to injury.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 6 – In a landmark vote that has already caused huge jubilation across the country, India will stage its first major FIFA tournament after being handed the 2017 under-17 World Cup.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 6 – FIFA president Sepp Blatter has appealed to Qatar’s critics to “calm down” over questioning its suitability to stage the 2022 World Cup but insists his organisation will not shirk from its responsibilities to monitor the issue of workers’ rights in the Gulf state which has caused such widespread alarm.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 6 – Ricardo Teixeira, the disgraced former head of Brazilian football and not so long ago one of the most powerful men in world football, has apparently been forced to abandon plans to seek refuge in the tiny tax haven of Andorra.
By David Owen
December 6 – Qatar has extended its imprint into one of the backwaters of world football, with the announcement that Ooredoo, the renamed Qatar Telecom, is becoming the official partner of the Myanmar Football Federation (MFF).
By David Owen
December 6 – Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium – which was a venue for the London 2012 Olympic football tournament and may play a part in UEFA’s innovative, multi-country Euro 2020 competition – generates more than £130 million a year for the Welsh economy and sustains more than 2,500 permanent jobs, a new report has revealed.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 6 – The stadium hosting the opening match of next year’s World Cup will not be ready until a mere eight weeks before the start of the tournament. Twenty-four hours after the Brazilian government promised that the Sao Paolo venue damaged when two crane workers died in a recent accident would be finished by February, FIFA president Sepp Blatter revealed that it would in fact not be completed until “April 14th or 15th”.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 5 – In arguably his most radical idea since becoming UEFA president, Michel Platini is calling for yellow cards to be scrapped, with players instead being sent to a rugby-style sin bin.
December 4 – With Christmas fast approaching, sponsors are looking to activate their partnerships for the buying season. Rotary and EA Sports have both come out with new promotions, while footwear manufacturer Puma has launched a limited edition boot with BMW.
Sometimes the FIFA HQ in Zurich feels more familiar than my own office with the amount of stories I’ve needed to cover there in my role as Al Jazeera Sports Correspondent. The most powerful man in that building, and indeed world football, is of course Swiss, Mr Blatter. And over in Nyon we find UEFA, that powerful continental governing body. Olympic football is run in conjunction with the IOC, based in Lausanne. As football reflects life,
December 5 – When more than 12,000 school children were allowed to occupy the stands behind both goals normally used by Juventus’ infamous Ultras, who had been banned for abusive chanting, the Italian giants must have hoped they were sending out the right message.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 5 – One of football’s most infamous match-fixing scandals is back in the spotlight with the retrial in Bochum, Germany, of notorious kingpin Ante Sapina (pictured), accused of being part of an international match-fixing network that shocked the game’s authorities.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 5 – UEFA chief Michel Platini has again denied that he bowed to government pressure to vote for Qatar to stage the 2022 World Cup. Almost exactly three years since the vote in December, 2010, Platini, who has made no secret of which country he supported in the secret ballot, is still having to fend off suggestions that he did not make an independent decision.
Arsene Wenger is, clearly, not a fan of individual awards for players, such as the FIFA Ballon d’Or, for the reason that the “endorsement of an individual goes against the essence of our sport”, which is about team effort.
“I fight like a mad man against the award, which hurts football… the player is prompted to favour individual performance over that of the team,” he argued during his appearance on Telefoot, a programme on French television.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 4 – With the eyes of the world on Friday’s World Cup draw, the last thing the Brazilian local organisers need is more negative publicity about preparations for the tournament. But FIFA has said that up to three of the 12 stadiums being used will not meet the end-of-year deadline for completion. Arena Pantanal in Cuiaba, Curitiba’s Arena da Baixada and Sao Paulo’s Arena Corinthians stadium – which is hosting the opening game and where two workmen were killed in a crane accident last month –
