By Paul Nicholson
October 29 – Ink has gone to paper on the most significant commercial rights deal in international football this year with the Asian Football Confederation and DDMC Fortis signing off on an eight-year partnership with a minimum guarantee reported to be around $3.4 billion.
October 29 – The world players’ union FIFPro says the huge increase in prize money announced last week by the FIFA Council for the women’s game is not enough to redress gender inequality.
By Andrew Warshaw
October 29 – Rarely, if ever, has a foreign owner of a top-flight football club anywhere in the world endeared himself to the fans as much as Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha.
By David Owen
October 29 – Tottenham Hotspur, the north London club still waiting to move into a new stadium nearing completion adjacent to its traditional White Hart Lane ground, has disclosed that net debt had reached a sizeable £366 million by the end of its latest financial year on June 30.
October 29 – Jamaica’s Reggae Girlz attracted the biggest crowd for a women’s game in Europe at the weekend with 3,914 watching the World Cup qualifiers play Nottingham Forest Ladies at The City Ground.
October 29 – The collective German football focus on cracking the Chinese market has seen Borussia Mönchengladbach, Borussia Dortmund and FC Schalke 04, from North Rhine-Westphalia sign a collaboration partnership with Jiangsu Football Association following a trade mission organised by the German regional government.
October 29 – Former England manager Glenn Hoddle is “responding well” to treatment in hospital after having suffered a heart attack on Saturday.
By Andrew Warshaw
October 26 – Gianni Infantino’s pet plan to change the landscape of world football competition was shelved for another five months today as he all but admitted that not enough consultation had taken place.
October 26 – The Spanish league says it will appeal if prevented by FIFA from breaking new ground by staging the much-publicised fixture between Girona and Barcelona overseas in Miami in January.
October 26 – The head of the European Clubs Association, Juventus President Andrea Agnelli, has voiced his opposition to Gianni Infantino’s game-changing proposals to change the face of world football.
October 26 – Belgium have edged ahead of France to take outright top spot in FIFA’s world rankings with tiny Gibraltar the biggest risers thanks to their first two competitive wins this month.
October 26 – Football’s lawmakers are considering a ban on injury-time substitutions as a way of cutting down on time-wasting according to the Times newspaper.
October 25 – FIFA president Gianni Infantino is a simple man. He hails from a simple Alpine small town and has a simplistic outlook on the big wide world. For a decade he was fighting FIFA, the arch enemy. And fighting hard. Now he is its boss. A victory that probably surprised him more than many of those who had given him little chance of winning, as the stand-in for Michel Platini that he was.
October 26 – UEFA has gone to market with a new set of sponsorship categories for its Women’s Football properties for the 2018-2021 cycle.
October 26 – He didn’t appear on the podium of either the FIFA Best or UEFA’s annual awards but data for the season so far makes Neymar the Most Valuable Player in Europe’s Big 5 leagues.