By Andrew Warshaw
November 5 – European football has been rocked by fresh revelations of a proposed breakaway super league to start in 2021 while FIFA president Gianni Infantino has separately been accused of secretly helping two of Europe’s most affluent elite clubs gain more lenient sanctions for breaching financial fair play rules.
November 5 – Club football is wide open to criminal ownership, money launderers, third party ownership groups and sports betting fraudsters, according to a report published last week.
November 2 – British sports minister Tracey Crouch resigned from the government on Thursday over what she claimed was an unjustifiable delay in reducing the maximum wager on gambling slot machines.
November 1 – Former Ghana Football Association president Kwesi Nyantakyi is to appeal against his life ban at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
November 1 – An Italian court has sentenced former international World Cup star Vincenzo Iaquinta to two years in jail for firearm offences and his father, Giuseppe, to 19 years at the end of a trial of almost 150 people.
October 31 – Spanish FA vice president Andreu Subies has been arrested as part of the same police operation that also saw the federation’s former president and FIFA powerbroker Angel Maria Villar resign on corruption charges.
October 25 – During their 2026 World Cup campaign, Moroccan officials were at pains to stress how human rights were not an issue – just as Turkey did for the 2024 Euros.
October 25 – Former Guinea international Ismael Bangoura has been handed a six-month suspended jail sentence and fined more than €130,000 after being convicted of fraud by a court in France.
October 24 – Police have arrested Lokeren coach Peter Macs (pictured) in the latest move linked to the wide-ranging investigation into the damaging match-fixing and money laundering scandal hitting Belgian football.
October 24 – The geo-political financial partnership between Saudi Arabia and Japanese financiers SoftBank, rumoured to be the operators of the financial vehicle behind the $25 billion FIFA international calendar sell off, looks like it might have run into difficulties over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
October 23 – Cristiano Ronaldo has broken his silence over the rape allegations against him saying his “lawyers are confident” and that the truth will come out.
By Andrew Warshaw
October 19 – Having failed with two attempts to land the FIFA presidency, Jordan’s Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein had decided he has had enough of being involved at the top end of football’s often bitter and divisive political bureaucracy in order to concentrate on trying to use the game as a tool for social development to help deprived communities.
October 19 – The US has the opportunity to install a “best in class” integrity framework around betting regulation and match-fixing following the PASPA ruling that opened up the online gambling market across the country.
October 18 – Spanish prosecutors are reported to have set a February trial date for former Barcelona strongman Sandro Rosell who is accused of money laundering related to television rights and sponsorship of the Brazilian national football team.
October 18 – A SIGA Special Session in New York highlighted the increasing importance of good governance to world sport’s major sponsors who sent a clear message that if they are to spend big dollars they should be seen by rights holders as stakeholders and not just cash cows.