January 12 – Referees in African international matches are to be paid directly by the Confederation of African Football (CAF) instead of national associations in the wake of Ghanaian official Joseph Lamptey’s (pictured) life ban for match-fixing.
January 11 – Manchester United and Sevilla are locked in a bitter ticket war over their forthcoming Champions League last-16 clash with the Spanish club saying they will report United to UEFA for not offering their fans enough seats.
January 11 – The Confederation of African football CAF has sent an inspection team to Cameroon to assess the preparations for the 2019 African Cup of Nations. In the past CAF president Ahmad Ahmad has repeatedly cast doubt over Cameroon’s credentials to stage the tournament.
January 10 – Florent Malouda, who was handed a two-match ban for playing for French Guiana at last year’s CONCACAF Gold Cup, is to appeal today before the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
January 10 – A FIFA delegation is expected in Mali this week to organise the process of holding fresh elections after a normalisation committee was established last month to run the day-to-day affairs of the Malian Football Association (Femafoot).
January 9 – German prosecutors have opened an attempted murder investigation after a German-Turkish player known for his pro-Kurdish views was shot at on a motorway.
January 9 – The suspect in the attack on Borussia Dortmund’s team bus that led to last season’s Champions League quarter-final with AS Monaco being postponed for 24 hours has admitted to carrying out the attack but says he did not intend to kill or injure anyone.
January 8 – Zimbabwe’s, under the oversight of new Sports Minister Raymond Kazembe, is working to put the sport’s finances on a more solid footing, with an extraordinary general meeting of ZIFA having been arranged and a new sponsorship for key teams in the offing. Meanwhile it has emerged ZIFA President Philip Chiyangwa earned $72,000 in 2017 from renting out his offices to the association.
January 8 – The non-FIFA Confederation of International Football Associations (CONIFA) ratified the membership of Yorkshire on Saturday. Yorkshire will play its first friendly against the Isle of Man in January.
January 8 – Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger may be enduring arguably the toughest period of his Arsenal career but he has friends in a number of high places not least Liberia where newly elected George Weah, who has made the remarkable transition from world-famous footballer to president, has invited him to his inauguration later this month.
January 5 – Liverpool striker Mohamed Salah won the 2017 CAF African Football Player of the Year Award. Egypt’s Hector Cuper was named Coach of the Year and for a third time Nigeria’s Asisat Oshoala won the Women’s Player of the Year award.
January 5 – The failure of the Ivory Coast to qualify for next year’s World Cup in Russia continues to have a knock-on effect off the field with a raft of clubs calling for an extraordinary general meeting of the national federation and the removal its president Augustin Sidy Diallo.
By Paul Nicholson
January 4 – The Liberian FA (LFA) and its president Musa Bility have hit back saying that the pre-Christmas visit to their country by a FIFA team of financial investigators was in fact a compliance audit and not a forensic audit tasked with investigating financial corruption in Liberian football.
January 3 – An Egyptian court has sentenced 28 fans to jail for one year for paying tribute to those killed in the infamous Port Said disaster five years ago, accusing them of incitement.
January 2 – One of the fiercest rivalries in European club football, dubbed the “eternal derby”, has made headlines once again for all the wrong reasons.