By Paul Nicholson
June 12 – Pick the best 30 players in the world and play them off against each other – Europe vs Rest of the World – is something that could generally only happens in a computer game. Having football fans globally pick the top 30 players makes it slightly more unlikely. Or is it?
By Gareth Messenger
June 12 – Spanish Primera side Malaga are out of next season’s Europa League following The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) rejection of their appeal against the UEFA ban imposed last December.
By Mark Baber
June 11 – The saga over Chelsea’s search for a new stadium has taken a new turn, as Jose Mourinho returns, with the revelation that the club may be invited to bid on a 17-acre plot of land, owned by Transport for London (TfL) near Earls Court and just a mile north of current home Stamford Bridge.
By Mark Baber
June 11 – Iya Mohamed, the president of Cameroon Football Federation (Fecafoot) and CEO of the Cameroon Cotton Development Corporation (Sodecoton), a state owned company, was arrested by the police on Monday on his return home from Togo where he attended Sunday’s Cameroon’s World Cup qualifier.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 11 – Prince Ali, head of the Jordanian FA, has had an increasingly influential and vocal role as a member of the FIFA executive committee and successfully championed the lifting of the ban on the hijab in women’s football.
June 11 – Russia’s preparations for the 2018 World Cup have taken another step forward after President Vladimir Putin signed off on the so-called ‘World Cup Law’ that has caused so much debate.
By Mark Baber
June 11 – SAP, the leading business software provider, has extended its long-standing partnership with TSG Hoffenheim, becoming the new main and kit sponsor, in an initial three year deal.
Michael Emenalo is, without question, one of European football’s interesting oddities.
As the technical director of English Premiership side Chelsea, where he undoubtedly has the listening ear of billionaire owner Roman Abramovich, the Nigerian belongs to the exclusive club of Africans who’ve transcended their club careers into positions of power in the game’s corridors.
Pape Diouf, the Senegalese who started out as a journalist and player’s agent in France, eventually becoming the president of French club Olympique Marseille and Finidi George,
By Andrew Warshaw
June 11 – The match-fixing scandal that rocked Turkish football two seasons ago has been rekindled after UEFA announced it was investigating the activities of Beşiktaş and Fenerbahçe, two of the country’s biggest clubs.
By Mark Baber
June 9 – Senegalese striker Papiss Cisse’s representatives have informed Newcastle officials that his religious beliefs forbid him from representing or advertising a loans company, posing a dilemma for the club which has accepted sponsorship from pay-day loans company Wonga.
So, FIFA have had their congress which by some – mainly FIFA – was called “historic”, and by others a “whitewash”, “irrelevant” or worse.
Under the rainy skies of the African island nation of Mauritius, 209 FIFA Members met and the individual delegates cast their electronic vote. Actually, they also cast their more traditional manual vote in a secret ballot that determined which one of three women candidates would be FIFA’s first elected Executive Committee (Board) member.
June 9 – The English Football League has voted to restrict the number of overseas loans that can be used after Championship club Watford exploited the system – and came within one match of gaining promotion to the lucrative Premier League.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 9 – The Australian government has apologised to Jordan for its Iraqi national team coach, Adnan Hamad, being detained for more than four hours when the squad flew into Melbourne last week ahead of tomorrow’s (Tuesday) crunch World Cup qualifier.
By Andrew Warshaw
June 9 – UEFA have stepped in to help the Football Association of Ireland meet its debt repayments for the Aviva stadium in Dublin.
