By David Owen
April 1 – Unfashionable Burnley have quietly become one of the most profitable clubs in English football, the Leicester City of football finance. The team in claret and blue from an old East Lancashire cotton town has posted a pre-tax profit of £34.6 million for its year to 30 June 2015 – just £500,000 less than Arsenal and Manchester City managed between them.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 1 – One of the first reported cases of racism within the senior European women’s game has led UEFA to open disciplinary proceedings after claims that Frankfurt fans abused Rosengard players during their Women’s Champions League quarter-final.
By Mark Baber
April 1 – As the blame game for Nigeria’s disastrous qualification campaign for the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations begins, the Nigerian Football Federation says its legal team is looking to take the African Football Confederation (CAF) to court over their exit, claiming it was unfair.
April 1 – Last season’s beaten Europa League finalists Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk of Ukraine have been banned from European competition for one season by UEFA for breaching financial regulations.
April 1 – Already without the services of former England midfielder Adam Johnson, imprisoned for six years after his conviction on charges of sexual activity with a 15-year-old girl, struggling English Premier League team Sunderland have now had to sack one-time Arsenal fullback Emmanuel Eboué, who has been banned from football for 12 months by FIFA because of an unpaid debt owed to his former representative.
By Andrew Warshaw
March 31 – The man poised to take over the running of German football has pledged to clean up his corruption-tainted federation after Franz Beckenbauer, the country’s most iconic sporting figurehead, found himself embroiled in an official FIFA inquiry into the hosting of the 2006 World Cup.
By David Owen
March 31 – Queens Park Rangers, the west London club back playing in the second tier of English football after ending last season as the Premier League’s bottom club, have reported a substantial pre-tax loss of £45.7 million for the year to 31 May 2015.
By Paul Nicholson
March 31 – The Daily Fantasy Sports market is growing rapidly with one of its newer entrants saying that there is a big demand in the south and central American markets, not just in the already recognised European and north American regions.
By Andrew Warshaw
March 31 – Greek football’s potentially fatal collision course with FIFA and UEFA has seemingly moved a step closer after the parties failed to resolve their difference over what has been dubbed ‘Grexit’ by the Greek media.
By Mark Baber
March 31 – The efforts of Vitaly Mutko, Russian Sports Minister and President of the Russian Football Union (RFU), to put the finances of Russian football on a solid foundation have received another boost as Russia’s second biggest mobile operator MegaFon has signed an agreement with the RFU to become a general sponsor of Russian football from 2016 until 2018.
March 31 – Milan’s Serie A giant, Internazionale, has today launched the Inter Channel on smart phones and tablets into the Indonesian market. Indosat is the second biggest mobile phone operator in Indonesia with 70 million customers.
By Samindra Kunti
March 30 – Arsenal legend Gilberto Silva and the player movement Bom Senso are seeking a modernisation of the Brazilian domestic game, but Silva says much remains to be done for Brazilian football to remerge as a powerhouse.
By Mark Baber
March 30 – Tuesday’s raft of qualifiers for the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations saw Morocco become the competition’s first qualifiers, whilst Nigeria plagued by in-fighting in its Federation was knocked out of the running by Egypt in Alexandria.
March 30 – Gianni Infantino says his plan to expand the World Cup finals to 40 teams could begin in 2026.
March 30 – The world’s most famous footballer, Pelé, is suing Korean electronics giant Samsung in a Chicago federal court, claiming they improperly used his identity in The New York Times.