May 3 – Arsenal and Chelsea have taken a step closer to an all-London Europa League final in Baku after encouraging results in Thursday’s first leg semi-finals. Arsenal defeated Valencia 3-1 at home and Chelsea held Frankfurt to a 1-1 draw in Germany.
May 2 – Rarely if ever has a scoreline been so misleading. But then rarely if ever has a team had a player of the calibre of Lionel Messi.
May 2 – The head of FIFA’s medical committee says the introduction of substitutions specifically in cases of concussion could be a consideration in the light of the head injury sustained by Tottenham Hotspur’s Jan Vertonghen against Ajax in this week’s Champions League semi-final.
May 2 – Spain’s World Cup-winning goalkeeper Iker Casillas is recovering in hospital after suffering a heart attack during training with his club Porto.
April 30 – Player recruitment can either define a club’s future or be a short term fix. An analysis by the CIES Football Observatory looks at the average of players recruited in 24 European top divisions, not including academy graduates.
By Samindra Kunti
April 23 – Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain and PAOK all clinched domestic titles as the Serie A, Ligue 1 and Superleague were settled this weekend. For PAOK it was the first league title in 34 years, breaking Athens’s hegemony over the Greek domestic crown.
By Andrew Warshaw
April 18 – For the second night running, the Champions League threw up the most extraordinary of stories as underdogs Tottenham Hotspur, without their injured talisman Harry Kane, went through to the semi-finals in remarkable circumstances against the might of big-spending Manchester City after one of the most stirring, nerve-wracking ties in the history of club football.
April 17 – They began their challenge back in the qualifying rounds when they were 250 to 1 outsiders. But now Ajax of Amsterdam, the pioneers of total football back in the 1970s, are just one round and two matches away from an unlikely place in this season’s Champions League final.
April 16 – An analysis of defensive aerial challenges across Europe by the CIES Football Observatory ranks Olympique Lyonnais defender Marcelo Guerdes as the continent’s leading defender winning 85.5% of aerial challenges.
April 10 – England captain Harry Kane looks like being out for the rest of the season as his Tottenham team battle to secure a top four Premier League finish.
April 9 – More than 68% of goals in the Premier league are scored by foreign players. In a ranking of European leagues the Premier League came third out of 27, behind Cyprus (86.7%) and Turkey (80.7%).
April 5 – Al Sadd and their star midfielder Xavi Hernandez have been crowned champions of Qatar after a mammoth 7-2 win over Al Ahli to take an unassailable lead in the Qatar Stars League.
April 3 – Fulham have been condemned to relegation from the Premier League with five games to play after an abject 4-1 defeat at Watford. Apart from already relegated Huddersfield, no club has been dropped down this early in the English top flight. Across Europe’s Big 5 leagues these are the first two teams to be relegated this season.
April 2 – England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford is being investigated by his club Everton over an alleged fracas in his home city of Sunderland at the weekend.
April 1 – Former UEFA president Michel Platini, who always resisted extending goalline technology to other forms of scientific aids for referees, has once again waded into the debate over the video assistant refereeing system, partly blaming the media for its implementation.