By Andrew Warshaw
August 15 – FIFA has now officially asked 2018 World Cup hosts Russia to explain more fully its highly contentious new law banning “homosexual propaganda” that has caused such a fierce backlash from both athletes and the gay community.
By Jake Gable
August 15 – La Liga president Javier Tebas (pictured) has blasted the Spanish FA for what he believes is a failure to take the current revelations of match-fixing seriously enough. In an attack on FA President Angel Maria Villar, Tebas said: “I believe they should be getting more involved in what is being done. It is not enough to let the public investigators act. The Federation, as much as the league,
By Mark Baber
August 14 – A campaign by fans of Arsenal football club to focus attention on the land grabbing and forest destroying activities of the club’s partner in South East Asia hit the UK’s main BBC news yesterday. The club’s recent tour of Vietnam, at which club officials including Arsenal’s executive director Keith Edleman, marketing director Angus Kinnear, and manager Arsene Wenger were pictured with HAGL’s Vietnamese tycoon owner Doan Nguyen Duc,
August 14 – CONCACAF kicked off its first ever U-15 championship in the Cayman Islands yesterday with Bermuda beating the US Virgin Islands 8-0 and Belize beating St Lucia 1-0. The championships, an initiative of CONCACAF president Jeffrey Webb (pictured centre), will be played through to August 25 with 23 national teams competing for the title.
By Alex O’Loughln
August 14 – Spain manager Vicente del Bosque has criticised the financial disparities between the ‘top two’ in La Liga and the remaining 18 teams who boast Primera Division status.
By Mark Baber
August 14 – Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill July 29, unanimously passed by the State Duma, banning “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors.” Although homosexuality has been legal in Russia since 1993, the new law has attracted widespread criticism and campaigners, including Stephen Fry, have been attempting to organise a boycott of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 to protest the new law, comparing it to Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Winter or summer?
Confucius say: Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
A summer World Cup has always been the FIFA choice in the past. Ever since the first one in 1930 in Uruguay.
But then, in Switzerland for example, women were not allowed to vote until the sixties – hence women not voting “had always been the choice” until such time as they were allowed to become full-time citizens.
I don’t know if Michel Platini is a fan of Ashes cricket.
If he is, he might have allowed himself a wry smile at the way debates relating to the sport’s attempts to harness technology to improve the quality of on-pitch decisions have provided an engrossing sub-text to the live action as the series has progressed.
Platini as far as I know still opposes use of the sort of goal-line technology that the Premier League will deploy for the first time at Anfield on Saturday when Liverpool and Stoke City kick off the 2013-14 season.
FIFA admit it was a mistake to award two World Cups – 2018 and 2022 – at the same time.
But anyone expecting them to admit giving 2022 to Qatar was a mistake has a long wait.
As the issue is clouded with controversy and debate we get further away from a simple, important truth. That there hasn’t been a World Cup in the Middle East and that there should be a World Cup in Middle East.
As many within the fraternity would remember, the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa were coined as the ‘African World Cup’, for obvious ‘feel good’ reasons – being the first (and hopefully not the last) World Cup to be hosted on the continent.
But with five of Africa’s six teams knocked out in the first round of that tournament, it was anything but a successful advertisement for the strength of its football.
By Mark Baber
August 13 – The European Commission is looking into the issue of illegal state aid for Spanish clubs. A complainant, impatient over the delay in the investigation, has followed up with the European Ombudsman who has pressed the Commission for a reply. But there is no truth in the reports that Real Madrid and Barcelona would be forced by the EC to give up their privileged status as member-owned clubs and become plcs.
August 13 – A few hours before the kick-off of a new season in Ligue 1, AS Monaco announced the signing of a partnership contract with Triangle Interim, a temp agency.
August 13 – bwin.party has added another of Europe’s leading and iconic football clubs to its sponsorship roster, signing France’s Olympique de Marseille in a three-year sponsorship deal that will see the bwin brand become OM’s official online betting and gaming partner.
By Mark Baber
August 13 – Turkey’s giant mass housing administration known as TOKI has touted its sports investment programme, which includes the construction of 20 stadiums, as the most comprehensive investment in sports history.
By Paul Nicholson
August 13 – News Corp has expanded its digital rights deals into Asia having secured the rights to show online digital clips for English Premier League matches in Japan, Vietnam and Indonesia. The rights deals mark the extension of a new strategy for the traditional print publisher which has been suffering revenue attrition at its core newspaper, especially in the UK where the group, and its majority shareholder Rupert Murdoch,