May 30 – He is one of world football’s best-paid players, reaping the rewards of Chinese football’s import boom, yet Carlos Tevez has told a Spanish broadcaster the sport in the country of his latest employers is 50 years behind Europe.
May 25 – The CIES Football Observatory has ranked big-5 league players according to their tackling skills with players from three different championships filling the top three positions: Valentin Rongier (Nantes), Carlos Casemiro (Real Madrid) and Idrissa Gueye (pictured, Everton).
By Samindra Kunti
May 21 – Venezuela won the opening match at the FIFA U20 World Cup in South Korea with a 2-0 victory over Germany. England got their campaign underway with a 3-0 win against Argentina.
May 21 – Real Madrid have secured the Spanish league title for the first time in five years after winning 2-0 at Malaga to finish three points clear of arch-rivals Barcelona.
May 21 – Despite a late run of six wins from their final seven games, Arsenal have failed to reach the Champions League for the first time since manager Arsene Wenger took over a generation ago.
By Samindra Kunti
May 21 – India’s U17 team defeated Italy’s U17 2-0 on Friday, but in reality the ‘Indian Colts’ beat a selection of lower league Italian players.
May 16 – The CIES Football Observatory has ranked the best players of the 2016/17 season using their stats analysis and have come up with a Best XI that includes five players from the Bundesliga wth four of them – Manuel Neuer, Javi Martinez, Mats Hummels and Thiago Alcantara – from Bayern Munich.
May 15 – When Chelsea announced last April that Italian Antonio Conte would become their manager, they knew they had signed someone with a proven track record of success. But having finished 10th the previous season, getting back to winning the Premier League title straight away seemed too tall an order.
By Samindra Kunti
May 15 – After 18 years Dutch giants Feyenoord have won the Eredivisie again. A stunning hat-trick from Dirk Kuyt ensured a comfortable 3-1 against Heracles to hold off Ajax Amsterdam.
May 12 – German giants Bayern Munich are expanding their partnership in the US with Global Premier Soccer (GPS) that will see the number of Bayern coaches in the US double as they work to develop and identify talent.
May 11 – Brazil is still the country that provides most players to clubs worldwide with 1,202 Brazilians plying their trade outside of Brazil. France has the second highest number of players overseas with 781 (107 of them in England) and Argentina is the third highest with 753.
May 10 – Winning matches means scoring more goals than the opposition. That means creating more goal chances – the chances and the clearer cut those chances then the greater the possibility of winning.
By Samindra Kunti
May 10 – The Dutch FA, the KNVB, have named Dick Advocaat as the Netherlands’s new coach. Advocaat will take Oranje’s reigns for a third time, with Ruud Gullit set to become his assistant.
After a protracted search for a new coach the Dutch FA confirmed Advocaat’s appointment at a press conference at their headquarters in Zeist. In March Danny Blind was dismissed after the Netherlands had failed to qualify for Euro 2016 and after a string of disappointing results in their World Cup qualification campaign.
May 7- Manchester City, one of the richest clubs in world football courtesy of Middle East funding, have been banned from signing academy players for an initial 12 months and fined £300,000 for breaching rules governing youth transfers – colloquially known as “tapping up.”
By Samindra Kunti
May 1 – OGC Nice have all but ended Paris Saint-Germain’s title aspirations in Ligue 1, winning an ill-tempered game 3-1. Thiago Motta and Angel Di Maria were both send off. PSG trail Monaco by three points with three match days left. PSG have been Ligue 1 champions for the past four seasons.