January 29 – ‘Clinical’ is a word often used by commentators about teams that make the most of their goal chances to win games. The CIES Football Observatory have translated that basic observation into a data model that measures team efficiency.
January 21 – A ranking of teams by the number of fouls committed per game see Liverpool leading the way as the team with the least fouls per match so far this season (8.1).
January 17 – England and Tottenham Hotspur have been dealt a potentially massive blow after a leading orthopaedic surgeon predicted Harry Kane will miss not just the rest of the season but also Euro 2020 in the summer.
January 15 – Liverpool players dominate a fan vote on UEFA.com for the website’s team of the year 2019. While the club are the new face of European football dominance, two old faces, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, both made the final XI.
January 14 – Heightened speculation that former Tottenham Hotspur manager Mauricio Pochettino could take over at Barcelona have been well and truly quashed with the appointment of Quique Setien to replace the sacked Ernesto Valverde.
January 13 – FC Barcelona’s search for a new manager to succeed Ernesto Valverde continues after Xavi turned down his former club.
January 10 – England captain Harry Kane’s perennial injury jinx has struck again, this time for far longer, leaving his club Tottenham Hotspur reportedly scouring the transfer market for cover.
January 10 – Amid all the criticism over human rights abuses and accusations of sports washing at the address of Saudi Arabia and its hosting of the Spanish Super Cup, Atletico Madrid tore up the script on Thursday in Jeddah by defeating FC Barcelona 2-3 to set up a Spanish Super Cup final against city rivals Real Madrid.
January 6 – Ali Al Habsi, the Omani goalkeeping legend who made a name for himself as the first Arab player from the GCC countries to play in the Premier League, has announced his retirement from international football, aged 38.
January 3 – English football may at last have adopted a partial winter break but that hasn’t stopped the traditional festive fixture pile-up from resulting in an unprecedented spate of injuries.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 31 – Football’s law-makers have hit back at criticism of VAR by English football experts, saying the problem lies directly at the feet of the Premier League for not applying the rule correctly.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 30 – Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola declared the VAR system a “big mess” on Sunday after a weekend that witnessed a plethora of ever more baffling rulings being judged on a series of screens often hundreds of miles away from the action.
By Andrew Warshaw
December 30 – Four English top-flight teams go into 2020 with new men at the helm after the managerial merry-go-round moved into full swing over Christmas.
December 30 – A Moroccan referee has been banned for life for awarding four highly questionable penalties, three of them for the same team, in a domestic league match.
December 21 – Belgium will finish 2019 as the world’s top ranked team, ahead of France and Brazil – the same positions they held in December 2018 in the FIFA/Coca-Cola men’s World Rankings.