By Paul Nicholson
April 28 – Football focus may be on end season results and the upcoming Copa America and European Championships, but behind the scenes the Women’s game is making its own mark breaking new ground in unusual places.
April 28 – Sepp Blatter has reportedly been requested to attend Michel Platini’s eagerly awaited Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) appeal hearing on Friday as a witness in a last-ditch attempt by the Frenchman to clear his name.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 27 – The far-reaching reform package which FIFA hopes will regain the trust of fans around the world has formally come into effect – but the soon-to-be-scrapped executive committee remains intact for a few more months.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 25 – Sepp Blatter may no longer be the centre of world attention and be banned from the sport he controlled for 18 years. But he has certainly not gone to ground and insists he is still in big demand.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 25 – Harold Mayne-Nicholls (pictured), who led the FIFA inspection team that evaluated the credentials of all 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding candidates, has had his ban from all football-related activities reduced on appeal from seven to three years – another blow to the supposed independent judgement of FIFA’s ethics chiefs.
April 25 – The lawmakers of world football, the International FA Board, have invited leagues and associations interested in running experiments with video replays to a first workshop on the ground-breaking innovation in Amsterdam next month.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 21 – Swiss authorities have enacted potentially ground-breaking new rules, dubbed by Swiss media ‘Lex FIFA’ (the FIFA Law), as part of an initiative to crack down on corruption in sport.
April 21 – FIFA should have acted quicker in raising the issue of Qatar’s treatment of migrant labourers working on 2022 World Cup sites, according to its head of corporate social responsibility.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 20 – Theo Zwanziger, the controversial former German FA boss and FIFA executive committee member, has won the legal case brought against him by the Qatar Football Association for describing the Gulf state’s right to host the 2022 World Cup as a “cancer on world football”.
April 19 – The US investigation into football corruption that rocked FIFA to its core has now apparently shifted focus away from football officials and deeper into the banks, broadcast and sponsorship markets that made the bribery and money laundering possible.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 18 – Sepp Blatter may still be banned from football for alleged ethics breaches but that doesn’t prevent the former FIFA president from speaking his mind in an unofficial capacity when invited to do so.
By Mark Baber
April 18 – FIFA are reportedly “reviewing” the circumstances in which David Beckham, Fabio Capello and others were involved in a football match held in Kuwait on December 18 in defiance of a FIFA ban on any sporting contact with the country. The game was played two months after FIFA imposed a ban on sporting contact with Kuwait under the slogan #wewillplay which was prominently displayed around the pitch and as a hashtag on Twitter.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 15 – FIFA must in future make human rights a priority when awarding countries the World Cup according to an independent report produced by a senior United Nations official commissioned four months ago by football’s world governing body as part of its reform programme.
April 11 – The English Football Association wants FIFA to investigate whether there are definitive long-term health hazards from too much heading of the ball.
When Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung received a message in spring 2015 that it would be receiving access to – as they say – some 11 million documents hacked out of Panamanian Law Firm Mossack Fonseca, the excitement was tremendous. One of Germany’s leading dailies was an odd target for whoever stole the documents from the large law firm in Panama, a solid US protectorate. The apparent logic was quickly established, considering that Mossack is a German national who chose to seek greener pastures in a land whose president had been kidnapped by the USA,